Random News: March 9, 2023

DISCLAIMER: Zak's Random News is very random and doesn't cover many things, and not everything may be accurate, because I'm just some guy. Go find a real news source.

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Good morning. It’s March 9, 2023, and it’s a Thursday for some reason. What follows are tidbit of information that happened to have caught my eye, and now maybe they’ll catch yours as well…

• Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been hospitalized after a fall at a hotel in Washington, DC.
• The 81-year-old McConnell is the Senate’s longest-serving GOP leader.
• I dislike Mitch as much as any sane human, but I wish him a full recovery. And not to sound like a conspiracist, because I’m not, but weird that this happened immediately after he and other GOP leaders criticized Tucker Carlson’s bullshit account of the failed coup on January 6, 2021.
• Speaking of Fox News and the fish stick heir, Tucker has had a very bad, not good week as a whole. After spending weeks combing through more than 44,000 hours of Capitol security footage from the Jan. 6 riots, Carlson’s lies about the tape were too sloppy for even Republican leadership to defend.
• Tucky tried to recast Jan. 6 as an unjust persecution of “meek and orderly” tourists, who treated the Capitol with “reverence.” Those MAGA people smeared their own shit on the walls of our nation’s capital.
• On Tuesday night a new set of evidentiary documents related to the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox dropped, catching Carlson in the crosshairs. 
• Then text messages with colleagues also revealed Carlson admitting that he “passionately” hates former President Trump, and expressing relief at his impending ousting from office. The host concedes that there’s no truth to Trump’s claims of fraud and election theft.
• Despite my cynicism, I actually think Dominion is going to win this suit and Tucker will have ended up costing Rupert Murdoch more than he ever made him. Wouldn’t that be a peach?
• Moving on…
• Lawmakers in Michigan have passed a bill to expand civil rights protections to the LGBTQ community, with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer expected to sign the measure into law when it reaches her desk.
• The vote in the Democratic-led state House passed the bill with a 64-45 margin. It will codify protections from discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment, housing and other areas.
• Well done, Michigan.
• Here’s a less happy story with a happy ending.
• Aasylei Loggervale and her two teenage daughters had been driving all night on a nine-hour trip for Loggervale’s older daughter to take a college statistics exam the next day.
• They pulled into a Starbucks in Castro Valley, CA. Then a deputy from the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office knocked on her window. He asked to see Loggervale’s identification. She said she hadn’t done anything wrong and asked why she was being questioned.
• The deputy ordered all three family members out of the car. Officers handcuffed them for no reason and held them in a patrol car without citing them for a crime.
• Yesterday, a jury awarded the Loggervales $8.25 million in damages. The sum was increased by a California law, the Bane Act, that allows juries to quadruple damages awarded in cases involving a violation of constitutional rights.
• This kind of thing is, perhaps, good training for other law enforcement officers who don’t have a firm grasp on constitutional rights of citizens.
• The Arkansas state Senate voted to pass a bill that would criminalize transgender people from using public changing facilities that coincides with their gender identity, introducing a restriction critics say would be the most extreme in the country.
• Under Senate Bill 270, a transgender person would be charged with misdemeanor sexual indecency with a child if they use a public changing facility that doesn't match their assigned sex at birth. 
• I want to show these people what transgender people look like and then make them stand behind this decision. Trans men, in particular, being forced to use women’s restrooms will create issue that these fucking Arkansans can’t even imagine.
• And now, The Weather: “Tux (Your Body Fills Me, Boo)” by U.S. Girls
• Speaking of weather, there are still all kinds of wacky things going on, from heavy snow in the Upper Midwest to string winds and rains coming in to California.
• Stay safe.
• Wanna talk about Daylight Saving Time?
• It changes this weekend in the USA. Spring forward. That means we lose an hour.
• Most of you like the springtime change to DST. I do not.
• I get up early in the morning. Right now, it’s pleasantly light, with my local sunrise happening at 6:12am not long after I get up.
• On Monday, like many Americans, I’ll be waking up and spending my first hour of the day in pitch black darkness.
• Here in California, in 2018 our voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 7, a ballot initiative that opened the door to permanently adopting daylight saving time.
• While Prop. 7 gave state lawmakers the power to pass legislation making daylight saving time permanent. the Legislature never passed it. Even if it had, the federal government would still need to OK the change.
• Fun fact: the U.S. Department of Transportation oversees the nation's time zones and the uniform observance of daylight saving time. So yes, Pete Buttigieg controls your clock.
• More on this tomorrow.
• From the Sports Desk… the New York Jets are becoming more confident in their chances of landing quarterback Aaron Rodgers.
• The Jets' increasing optimism follows their meeting this week with the Green Bay Packers quarterback. A contingent of Jets team officials, including owner Woody Johnson, general manager Joe Douglas, coach Robert Saleh and offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett, flew to California on Tuesday to meet in person with Rodgers.
• I don’t think this will end well for the Jets, but then, most things don’t.
• Today in history… Napoléon Bonaparte marries his first wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais (1796). Francis Ronalds describes the first battery-operated clock in the Philosophical Magazine (1815). The U.S. Supreme Court rules in the United States v. The Amistad case that captive Africans who had seized control of the ship carrying them had been taken into slavery illegally (1841). Giuseppe Verdi's third opera, ‘Nabucco’, receives its premiere performance in Milan (1842). The first documented discovery of gold in California occurs at Rancho San Francisco, six years before the California Gold Rush (1842). Pancho Villa leads nearly 500 Mexican raiders in an attack against the border town of Columbus, NM (1916). President Franklin D. Roosevelt submits the Emergency Banking Act to Congress, the first of his New Deal policies (1933). Allied forces carry out firebombing over Tokyo, destroying most of the capital and killing over 100,000 civilians (1945). The Barbie doll makes its debut at the American International Toy Fair in New York (1959). Dr. Belding Hibbard Scribner implants for the first time a shunt he invented into a patient, which allows the patient to receive hemodialysis on a regular basis (1960). Chrysler announces its acquisition of American Motors Corporation (1987). The Notorious B.I.G. is murdered in Los Angeles after attending the Soul Train Music Awards (1997).
• March 9 is the birthday of explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1451), politician/SCOTUS justice David Davis (1815), businessman/politician Amasa Leland Stanford (1824), politician/diplomat Vyacheslav Molotov (1890), actor/activist Will Geer (1902), engineer Paul Wilbur Klipsch (1904), composer Samuel Barber (1910), novelist Mickey Spillane (1918), saxophonist/composer Ornette Coleman (1930), actor Raul Julia (1940), chess player Bobby Fischer (1943), guitarist Robin Trower (1945), and actor Emmanuel Lewis (1970).

This is my shitty busy time of year, getting my clients ready for trade shows and product rollouts and all that happy crappy. I don’t mind working hard on a general basis, but I really don’t enjoy spending 12-13 hours every day hammering out marketing shit. At the same time, there are people in my role who would be thrilled to be as in-demand as I am on a professional basis, and I do like money. So, double-edged sword. I’ll live. Enjoy your day.