Doomscrolling truly in surfing the news this late-afternoon Wednesday here in California’s Central Valley — shit, I could be anywhere and would still come across story after fucking story of shit happening, most sorry to say, preventable to some degree.
Even a high school shooting tossed in for good measure, just to break the horrid, tedious repetition and routine.

Beyond Hurricane Ida’s aftermath — most awful single-story I’ve seen yet involves a missing man, his wife and an alligator attack — the continuing Afghan situation, coupled with the neverending COVID meltdown in red states, the assholes in control of Texas tops the news cycle today.
Not only is asshat Abbott pro-virus, but he and his cohorts have created a coathanger environment of the worse kind — a law via a draconian-1984, way-anti-utopian mentality of heartless cruelty (a mouthful, but reality accurate):

"The same people who think wearing a mask impedes their freedom want to control what happens in women’s uteruses because this was never about life in the first place, but about control." – @MollyJongFast https://t.co/B8bejdUDoV

— Maria Cuomo Cole (@MariaCuomoCole) September 1, 2021

A good recap of the clusterfuck from Molly Jong-Fast at The Daily Beast this morning — some snips:

As of today, SB8, which Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law, bans abortions at six weeks, with no exception for rape or incest, while targeting anyone who “aids or abets” another person’s abortion.
The idea is to make anyone who helps a woman get an abortion a legal target, even her Uber driver, with any citizen able to collect a bounty on abortion providers.

The six-week gestation period comes from the crazy far-right “heartbeat bills,” which originated in Ohio with a fringe group called faith2action and have since been all the rage among Republican lawmakers.
I would like to point out that a six-week-old fetus looks like a tadpole and is one-eighth to a quarter of an inch long, but this bill isn’t about saving the “life” of someone the size of a quarter; this bill is about changing the standards of viability to effectively make it impossible for a woman to end a pregnancy.

“About 90 percent of women who come to Whole Woman’s Health clinics are more than six weeks into their pregnancy,” Amy Hagstrom Miller, the head of Whole Woman’s Health, an abortion provider with four clinics in Texas, told the Texas Tribune.
Most people don’t even know they’re pregnant after six weeks; that’s one missed menstrual period.

And the dangers:

“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck,” said Imani Gandy, the senior editor of law and policy at the Rewire News group who tweets as AngryBlackLady, when I circled back with her Wednesday morning, after the court chose not to act.
..
“It’s a really outrageous law and it is set to go into effect on Wednesday. Whether SB8 goes into effect depends on what the Supreme Court decides to do today. If it does nothing and the law goes into effect, then that ends abortion in Texas. The court will have effectively overruled Casey and Roe on the court’s ‘shadow docket,’ meaning there will have been no argument or hearing at the Supreme Court. It would be a huge deal. And it’s not out of the realm of possibility.”
…
“It’s a really outrageous law and it is set to go into effect on Wednesday. Whether SB8 goes into effect depends on what the Supreme Court decides to do today. If it does nothing and the law goes into effect, then that ends abortion in Texas. The court will have effectively overruled Casey and Roe on the court’s ‘shadow docket,’ meaning there will have been no argument or hearing at the Supreme Court. It would be a huge deal. And it’s not out of the realm of possibility.”

Indeed, that’s exactly what happened. On Wednesday, having seen that, she said “the only thing people should be asking themselves right now is what they are willing to do when abortion gets banned in their state. Are they willing to break the law? Because that’s what it’s going to take. It’s gonna to take a nation of lawbreakers to make sure pregnant people don’t die from unsafe abortion care.”

As ugly and awful as the court’s silence was on Tuesday, things will surely get much worse when it speaks following its hearing in October on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case that there’s every indication they agreed to hear to chip away at Roe, if not do away with it altogether, while kicking the abortion question back to the states.

If that happens, poor women in red states will have to drive hundreds of miles and miss work to get legal abortions in towns they don’t know with doctors they’ve never met, or they’ll get illegal abortions and start dying the way they did before Roe.
…
Gov. Abbott is so “pro-life” he’s suing San Antonio to try to prevent its mask mandate.
The same people who think wearing a mask impedes their freedom want to control what happens in women’s uteruses because this was never about life in the first place, but about control.

In a statement, Joe Biden again straight-talked to Texas: “Today, Texas law SB8 went into effect. This extreme Texas law blatantly violates the constitutional right established under Roe v. Wade and upheld as precedent for nearly half a century … The Texas law will significantly impair women’s access to the health care they need, particularly for communities of color and individuals with low incomes. And, outrageously, it deputizes private citizens to bring lawsuits against anyone who they believe has helped another person get an abortion, which might even include family members, health care workers, front desk staff at a health care clinic, or strangers with no connection to the individual.”

And Biden stays sharp in the midst of a shit-storm of shit — Jen Psaki rocks:

Reporter: “Do you think those who called [President Biden] ’Sleepy Joe’ should apologize to him?”

WH Press Sec. Jen Psaki: “I don’t think we’re looking for an apology. I think we’re looking for allowing the president to continue to address multiple crises at a time.” pic.twitter.com/NIWXzl3BO9

— The Recount (@therecount) September 1, 2021

No ‘sleepy Joe’ at the wheel, though, with all kinds of shit breaking loose, Biden has to contend with the sheltered idiots of America — polling from Pew Research, released yesterday:

With the U.S. military evacuation of Afghanistan completed — bringing America’s longest war to an end — 54-percent of U.S. adults say the decision to withdraw troops from the country was the right one, while 42-percent say it was wrong, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted Aug. 23-29.

The survey, conducted before the U.S. military pullout was completed, also finds that 69-percent of the public says the United States mostly failed in achieving its goals in Afghanistan.

The public is also broadly critical of the Biden administration’s handling of the situation in Afghanistan: Only about a quarter (26-percent) say the administration has done an excellent or good job; 29-percent say the administration has done an only fair job and 42-percent say it has done a poor job.

Despite the real, bottom-line being any kind of exit from Afghanistan would be horrible, Biden’s effort in getting some 120,000 out of the country in just a bit more than a month is a job well done, considering the history and backstory.
However, Joe will carry the full burden of the failure for some time, mainly due to the asshole MSM, lying Republicans, and just a shitload of bullshit.

As Joe could be likely to say: ‘Fuck ’em’

And here we are, once again…

(Illustration out front: Pablo Picasso’s ‘The Weeping Woman [La Femme qui pleure],’ found here)