Random News: March 6, 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 6, 2024, and it’s a Wednesday. I am feeling pretty good today about most things. I also have a mouth full of new teeth, having had eight permanent new crowns installed yesterday afternoon, and I keep sliding my tongue across them with their perfectly smooth and glassy surfaces. Weird.

• Let’s talk Super Tuesday.
• Most races went exactly as predicted. One thing you might not know: Joe Biden’s performance yesterday as the incumbent candidate exceeded that of even Barack Obama in 2012.
• In some states Biden’s support level was well into the 90% range and above.
• Donnie “El Dumpo” Trump was the other big winner, but by much, much smaller margins. Dump even managed to lose a state — Vermont — to his opponent Nikki Haley. That took all the pundits by surprise; Dump was supposedly favored by about 30 points in that race.
• I just mentioned Haley. She dropped out of the race this morning. She didn’t immediately endorse Dump, but I suspect that she will eventually.
• Exit polls yesterday show about 4 out of 5 Haley voters declined to commit to backing the GOP nominee in November. She averaged 26 percent of the vote across the 15 Super Tuesday states. Fascinating.
• Anyway, we all knew the presidential race would be between Biden and Trump, and now it is. It will become official for both men in the next week or two after they accumulate enough delegate votes to get the actual nomination from their respective parties.
• Some other Super Tuesday news.
• In my state of California, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), famous for leading the two Donald Trump impeachments in the House, won the election to compete this fall for the open Senate seat left by the late Dianne Feinstein. His opponent, as planned, will be Republican baseball player Steve Garvey.
• The opponent could have been one of the other two Democratic reps who ran in the race, but that would have ended up being a costly battle, and Schiff basically promoted Garvey rather than fighting it out with Katie Porter or Barbara Lee.
• Schiff will now crush Garvey, who has no political experience and is unlikable, in the general election this fall.
• The downside: Porter and Lee now give up their House seats as a result of this gambit. But they knew it was possible going in. I predict they’ll both be back at some point.
• In other Senate news from yesterday, Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX) will be the Democratic nominee for Texas and will face Republican Ted Cruz in November. Allred has been the favorite to take on Cruz for a while for his great fundraising and media presence. Polls have consistently shown Allred and Cruz in a dead head for the Texas Senate seat.
• That would be fucking awesome to kick Cruz’s ass to the curb. Let’s go Texas! Note: Texas is NOT a red state as you likely assume. It’s very purple. Allred does indeed have a shot.
• North Carolina Republicans fucked up in a big way by nominating Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson as their candidate for governor of that state. Robinson is a huge extremist who, among other things, has attacked school shooting victims and questioned whether the Las Vegas massacre was real, suggested Black Americans should pay reparations rather than receive them, and denied the Holocaust ever happened.
• And Dump has praised him for his outlook, because of course he did.
• Another big winner yesterday wasn’t even on the ballot. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) is opting against running for reelection, avoiding a messy three-way race that would have put Democrats in a difficult position.
• Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) was already leading polling in a hypothetical three-way race before Sinema dropped out. Now he stands a much better chance of crushing weirdo Republican Keri Lake this fall.
• There’s a lot more to review about Super Tuesday but I don’t have the time or the patience to do it all here and now. Pretty soon, we’ll be pivoting our focus to the general election and do a bunch of state-by-state analysis on what needs to happen to bury the MAGA party.
• Moving on.
• Tesla CEO Elon Musk met with former president and current accused felon Donnie Dump on Sunday in Palm Beach, FL along with other wealthy Republican donors.
• Dump desperately needs their money to pay for both his legal bills and his general election campaign. if they give him the money, it’s unknown what he’s promising them in return.
• And now, The Weather: “POP POP POP” by IDLES
• From the Sports Desk… the NBA’s leaders in points per game.
• 1. Luka Doncic (DAL): 34.6. 2. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (OKC): 31.0. 3. Giannis Antetokounmpo (MIL): 30.8. 4. Donovan Mitchell (CLE): 28.0. 5. Kevin Durant (PHX): 27.9.
• Those dudes are ballers. For real for real.
• Today in history… Ferdinand Magellan arrives at Guam (1521). York, Upper Canada, is incorporated as Toronto (1834). After a thirteen-day siege by an army of 3,000 Mexican troops, the 187 Texas volunteers, including frontiersman Davy Crockett and colonel Jim Bowie, defending the Alamo are killed and the fort is captured (1836). The Supreme Court of the United States rules 7–2 in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case that the Constitution does not confer citizenship on black people (1857). Dmitri Mendeleev presents the first periodic table to the Russian Chemical Society (1869). Bayer registers "Aspirin" as a trademark (1899). Italian forces become the first to use airships in war, as two dirigibles drop bombs on Turkish troops encamped at Janzur, from an altitude of 6,000 feet (1912). President Franklin D. Roosevelt declares a "bank holiday", closing all U.S. banks and freezing all financial transactions (1933). Joseph Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva defects to the United States (1967). For the first time the Zapruder film of the assassination of John F. Kennedy is shown in motion to a national TV audience by Robert J. Groden and Dick Gregory (1975). Forbes names Jeff Bezos as the world's richest person, for the first time, at $112 billion net worth (2018).
• March 6 is the birthday of painter/sculptor Michelangelo (1475), author Cyrano de Bergerac (1619), poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806), gun designer Georg Luger (1849), journalist Ring Lardner (1885), singer-songwriter Furry Lewis (1893), bandleader Bob Wills (1905), actor Lou Costello (1906), TV announcer/co-host Ed McMahon (1923), guitarist Wes Montgomery (1923), economist Alan Greenspan (1926), MLB player Willie Stargell (1940), singer-songwriter/guitarist David Gilmour (1946), singer-songwriter Kiki Dee (1947), actor/director Rob Reiner (1947), actor D. L. Hughley (1963), NBA player Shaquille O’Neal (1972), NFL player Sage Rosenfels (1978), and fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried (1992).

Okay, that’s it for now. I have shit to do and smooth teeth to lick. Enjoy your day.