Random News: March 15, 2024

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 15, 2024, and if you can believe it, it’s a Friday once again! I am even more glad than usual to have made it back to Friday. Feels like I will really appreciate a weekend once it arrives. Let’s do some news.

• Starting with a breaking story that makes me happy.
• The judge overseeing the Georgia election interference case against Donnie Dump and his gang ruled this morning that Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis can continue with the prosecution but only if Nathan Wade, the lead prosecutor she appointed and had a romantic relationship with, exits the case.
• Bye Nathan!
• Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee wrote that the defendants failed to meet their burden in proving that Willis’s relationship with Wade was enough of a conflict of interest to merit her removal from the case.
• To be clear, he also found an “appearance of impropriety that infects the current structure of the prosecution team” and said either Willis and her office must fully leave the case or Wade must withdraw for the case to proceed.
• Again, bye Nathan! Best of luck in your future endeavors. And now that case can get back on track where it belongs, focused on Dump’s criminal racketeering schemes.
• Moving on.
• Yesterday, vice president Kamala Harris toured a Planned Parenthood site in Minnesota along with its chief medical officer.
• So what?
• Well, it was the first time in history that a US vice president or president has ever visited a facility that provides women’s reproductive care, including abortions.
• The first woman elected vice president, Harris has made stops in key swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona in recent months as she tries to rally voters on the abortion issue.
• Harris spoke to staff at the Planned Parenthood on Thursday about how abortion restrictions in other states have affected their work in Minnesota.
• The Republican attack on women goes beyond abortion rights, and their next targets involve birth control… and despite what you may have heard, they’re still going after IVF in a big way.
• In the wake of the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos created and stored for in vitro fertilization treatments are “unborn children” — and that those who destroy them could be held liable under a wrongful death law — ardent abortion opponents at the Heritage Foundation and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, among other groups, have sought to push lawmakers and state legislatures toward regulating IVF treatments in the United States.
• You may consider those groups to be right-wing fringe weirdos, but guess what?
• They are tremendously influential to the Republican lawmakers whom they bankroll. Their endgame is simple: make the regulatory environment so burdensome that IVF clinics are forced to close.
• They will not stop until they control every aspect of women’s choices in sexuality and reproduction. Do not allow these old men to dictate what you do in life!
• Let’s move on, or rather back to another Don the Con criminal case.
• Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon rejected a bid by crime boss El Dumpo, who’d begged her to throw out his classified documents criminal case, and she appeared skeptical during hours of arguments of a separate effort to scuttle the prosecution ahead of trial.
• She issued a two-page order saying that a dismissal of charges was not merited. The case, as you likely know, involves boxes and boxes of records, some highly classified, that Dump took to his Mar-a-Lago estate when he stole them from the White House.
• Cannon, whom Dumpy himself appointed, said that a dismissal of the indictment would be “difficult to see” and that it would be “quite an extraordinary” step to strike down an Espionage Act statute that underpins the bulk of the felony counts against Trump.
• So that is very, very good news.
• If you can believe it, one of Dump’s asshole lawyers said these words in court: “He had the authority to do whatever he thought was appropriate with his records.”
• Actually, the law says the exact opposite. Presidents are allowed to remain their purely personal notes under the 1978 statute known as the Presidential Records Act.
• But the documents Dump stole were clearly presidential, not personal, and included top-secret information and documents related to nuclear programs and the military capabilities of the U.S. and foreign countries.
• He’s not going to weasel out of this.
• In other Dump news in a yet another criminal matter…
• Yesterday, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg told a judge that his office is willing to delay the upcoming trial of former President Donald Trump by a month.
• Yes, that sucks. Dump’s hush money trial was set to begin just 10 days from now.
• But why? Well, this is actually good. 
• 31,000 pages of additional records relating to Dump’s crimes were just turned over by the U.S. Attorney Office, and there are still more to come.
• So Dump's lawyers asked for a 90 day delay as a result, or a dismissal of the case. It’s the kind of thing that if not handled carefully could be the basis of a dismissal, and appeal, or an overturn of conviction.
• So Bragg giving them an additional 30 days is long-term smart.
• Dump is charged with 34 felony counts of falsification of business records in this case, related to reimbursements to his former attorney Michael Cohen for a $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
• Speaking of adult-related topics… say goodbye to online porn, Texas.
• Yesterday, the adult content platform Pornhub blocked access from Texas, citing a recent legislative enactment that came into force last fall. The legislation, which was contested by Pornhub on grounds of First Amendment violations, but an appeals court dismissed the argument.
• Texas passed HB 1181 in 2023, which required porn site operators to authenticate the age of their users and mandated the display of health advisories regarding the impact of consuming adult content.
• Pornhub put out a statement to its user that read, in part, “While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, providing identification every time you want to visit an adult platform is not an effective solution for protecting users online, and in fact, will put minors and your privacy at risk.”
• I tend to agree.
• Pornhub boasts a substantial global presence. IN the past three months alone, between December 2023 and February 2024, the platform garnered 6.7 billion visits, with 27.7 percent originating from within the United States.
• And Texas has long been a large consumer of porn. Oh well, I’m sure no one will ever make a connection between the ID you now have to show with the viewing history of midget BDSM content you use to get off, right?
• Moving on.
• Peter Navarro is going to jail. Ha ha.
• Yesterday, a federal appeals court denied the ex-Dump adviser’s bid to avoid reporting to a federal prison next week to begin serving a four-month sentence for his contempt of Congress conviction.
• The unanimous decision from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals means Navarro will have to report to a federal prison in Miami by March 19.
• Wait, we have more piece-of-shit news.
• Yesterday, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) was served a subpoena to sit for a deposition in a civil lawsuit that involves allegations he had sex with a 17-year old-girl.
• Gaetz was issued the subpoena by attorneys representing the woman who is now in her 20s and was at the center of a years-long investigation by the Justice Department into allegations that the Florida congressman had sex with her when she was a minor.
• There’s a name for someone who has sex with a child. That name is “rapist.”
• In world news, Russians are heading to the polls for a presidential election that is already decided.
• They will hand Vladimir Putin a fifth term in power. His “opponents” in the so-called election were carefully curated by the Kremlin, and pose no real threat to his dictatorship.
• Putin’s actual opposition candidates are all either dead, jailed, exiled, or barred from running. His reelection would extend his rule until at least 2030. Putin will remain in power until his death, and he’ll likely surpass Joseph Stalin in his rule over the country.
• It’s very important we look at Putin as an example of why we never want to allow a dictator to get into office in this USA.
• And now, The Weather: “the REAL” by KÁRYYN
• In some real weather news, at least two people have died in a possible tornado that hit an Ohio mobile home park, and significant injuries and flattened buildings were reported in an Indiana town as severe weather struck several states yesterday.
• Severe weather events will continue around the world due to global climate change that is accelerated by mankind’s overuse of fossil fuels.
• It will only get worse. We’re long past the point of reversing course. We can only hope to slow it down.
• From the Sports Desk… another big NFL free agency story from last night, this time for the Chicago Bears, who got Pro Bowl wide receiver Keenan Allen from the Chargers. He’ll bolster the Bears' offense opposite wideout DJ Moore.
• From the sorta-Sports Desk… apparent third-party VP candidate Aaron Rodgers has gotten hurt before the game even started.
• It’s been reported that Rodgers shared his beliefs with multiple people — including a journalist — that the shooting at Sandy Hook in Newtown, CT, which claimed the lives of 26 people (including 20 victims who were children between six and seven years old) wasn't real.
• After the story broke, Rodgers denied the report and stated in a social post that he has “never been of the opinion that the events did not take place.”
• But a few years ago, Rodgers had multiple conversations where he brought up demented conspiracy theories about the event, referring to “men in black in the woods by the school”, falsely claiming those men were actually government operatives. Multiple sources have said that Rodgers claimed, “Sandy Hook never happened… All those children never existed. They were all actors.”
• When asked about the grieving parents, the source recalled Rodgers saying, “They’re all making it up. They’re all actors.”
• What a sick fucking piece of shit. I hope his Achilles falls out.
• Today in history… The assassination of Julius Caesar takes place (44 BC). King Charles II of England issues the Royal Declaration of Indulgence, granting limited religious freedom to all Christians (1672). Maine is admitted as the twenty-third U.S. state (1820). Tsar Nicholas II of Russia abdicates the Russian throne, ending the 304-year Romanov dynasty (1917). Germany occupies Czechoslovakia (1939). President Lyndon B. Johnson, responding to the Selma crisis, tells U.S. Congress "We shall overcome" while advocating the Voting Rights Act (1965). Mikhail Gorbachev is elected as the first President of the Soviet Union (1990). Approximately 1.4 million young people in 123 countries go on strike to protest climate change (2019).
• March 15 is the birthday of US president Andrew Jackson (1767), physician/epidemiologist John Snow (1813), physician Emil von Behring (1854), mathematician Grace Chisholm Young (1868), singer-songwriter Lightnin' Hopkins (1912), actor Lawrence Tierney (1919), NFL player Norm Van Brocklin (1926), music producer Arif Mardin (1932), SCOTUS justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933), actor Judd Hirsch (1935), songwriter/bass player Phil Lesh (1940), director David Cronenberg (1943), singer-songwriter Sly Stone (1943), guitarist Ry Cooder (1947), singer-songwriter Dee Snider (1955), singer Bret Michaels (1963), singer Mark McGrath (1968), actress Eva Longoria (1975), rapper will.i.am (1975), MLB player Kevin Youkilis (1979), and NFL player Taylor Heinicke (1993).

It is indeed the “ides of March” today. I’m not scared of superstitious dates. I did get laid off from a job 24 years ago today, but that turned out to be a very good thing. I’m going to have a happy Friday and so should you. Enjoy your day.