Another Friday afternoon here in California’s Central Valley (yet you could be any-or-everywhere)  and shit still pesters the news cycle today, dump-or-no-dump, mostly due to the horror of Republicans.

Beyond being vile, and cruel, Republicans are not real smart. An example is House investigations of the Jan. 6 insurrection/riot — if they’d just okayed the independent commission last spring they wouldn’t fucked now with a really hardcore inquiry into telephones records and the such. Kevin McCarthy displayed his ignorance and fear this week crying at tech/telephone companies giving records to the committee.
And this week, too,  with the Texas abortion-law clusterfuck, which as it goes, appears to just might have a boomerang effect. The response to it has been nothing short of a gasp/choke of terror — Joe Biden called it ‘“almost un-American”‘ and didn’t mince words until he couldn’t think of any: ‘“I have been and continue to be a strong supporter of Roe v. Wade, number one,” Biden said Friday morning. “And the most pernicious thing about the Texas law, it sort of creates a vigilante system where people get rewards to go out and to — ” He did not finish the thought.‘

Yeah, the Texas bullshit law is not only one of the most restrictive in the world, but creates a ‘snitch’ environment. Thusly, the GQP might have a backlash coming — like this:

TX SB8 threatens to punish drivers for getting people where they need to go— especially women exercising their right to choose. @Lyft has created a Driver Legal Defense Fund to cover 100% of legal fees for drivers sued under SB8 while driving on our platform.

— Logan Green (@logangreen) September 3, 2021

Green is CEO and co-founder of Lyft, and now apparently Uber, second of the two big taxi-like transportation service companies, will also legally back their drivers who get caught-up in the Texas-shit scheme — from BuzzFeed:

Uber and Lyft have pledged to cover the legal fees for any of their drivers who may be sued under a new, restrictive Texas law for helping a pregnant person get to a clinic for an abortion after 6 weeks of gestation.

SB 8, which went into effect Wednesday after the Supreme Court took no action to stop it, takes aim at anyone who “aids and abets” an abortion after 6 weeks, including a doctor, a benefactor who pays for the procedure, or someone who drives the patient to a clinic.
It also creates a sort of bounty in that the ban can’t be enforced by government officials, only through lawsuits filed by members of the public. And those who do file a lawsuit are shielded if they lose; defendants will have to pay their legal bills in addition to a $10,000 penalty per abortion.

Advocates fear the law will have a chilling effect on service providers who might be afraid of getting sued.
But on Friday, Lyft’s cofounder and CEO, Logan Green, tweeted that the company would cover “100-percent of legal fees for drivers sued under SB8 while driving for [the] platform.”
He also pledged to donate $1 million to Planned Parenthood and decried the law as an attack on women’s rights.
“This is an attack on women’s access to healthcare and on their right to choose,” Green wrote.
“We encourage other companies to join us.”

Less than two hours after Green’s announcement, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi pledged that his company would also protect its drivers from the financial costs of any legal action they face under the abortion ban.
“Team @Uber is in it too and will cover legal fees in the same way,” he tweeted.
“Thanks for the push.”

After Green’s tweet, a company blog post clarified the ugly reality:

“We want to be clear: Drivers are never responsible for monitoring where their riders go or why,” the post reads.
“Imagine being a driver and not knowing if you are breaking the law by giving someone a ride. Similarly, riders never have to justify, or even share, where they are going and why. Imagine being a pregnant woman trying to get a healthcare appointment and not knowing if your driver will cancel on you for fear of breaking a law. Both are completely unacceptable.”

Just the latest — yesterday two Texas-based online dating thingies, Bumble and Match, announced relief funds.
Match CEO Shar Dubey added: (CNBC): ‘“Surely everyone should see the danger of this highly punitive and unfair law that doesn’t even make an exception for victims of rape or incest. I would hate for our state to take this big step back in women’s rights,” Dubey wrote in a memo to employees this week.‘

We’ll have to wait and see how other companies play this shit out, maybe protect their people in such a way it looks terrible for GQPers overall.
And for women.

One tense scene recapping women in the past — with my all-time most-favorite actress, Natalie Wood, “Love With The Proper Stranger” (the ‘Stranger,’ all-time my-most-favorite actor, Steve McQueen), and the black-and-white emotional horror of pre-Roe vs Wade:

Frightful and terrible.

Yet once again, here we are…

(Image out front by illustrator and portrait painter, Tim O’Brien, and can be found here).