(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what’s goin’ down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin’ gets done and where the captain waits above the celebration.

We begin in Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton looked at the awful events in Austin over the past two weeks and thought, “How can I make a bad situation even worse?” And he came up with the obvious answer. “Sean Hannity!” From Texas Monthly:

By 9:49 p.m., Paxton told KVUE that the devices were not connected and that he merely had repeated bad information. “I was on the show, one of my law enforcement guys called, because I was just sitting in the chair and they were coming to me periodically, and he was giving me information. He said, ‘I have no reason to believe this isn’t the same person.’ So that’s what I gave to Sean Hannity. When I got off the show, I called the Austin PD chief and talked to him. He gave me a different version, saying they were pretty sure it was unrelated, that it was an incendiary device that somebody threw in the Goodwill, so the early report was different from what the chief gave me, so I just give the information I get as I go along.”

This, of course, is perfectly correct procedure if you happen to be some gossiping jamoke at the end of the bar of your local. If you’re the attorney general of your state, however, you probably shouldn’t be doing imaginary play-by-play in Sean Hannity’s House of Paranoid Shut-Ins. People might make the mistake of taking you seriously.

Meanwhile, reproductive freedom is under frontal assault again. In Mississippi Goddamn, Governor Phil Bryant signed a blatantly unconstitutional law banning any procedure after 15 weeks. It took less than a day for a court to choke on that one. From CNN:

District Judge Carlton Reeves issued a temporary restraining order Tuesday, blocking the law from taking effect for 10 days while the court considers further action. "The law threatens immediate, irreparable harm to Mississippians' abilities to control their 'destiny and ... body,' " Reeves wrote, citing another ruling. "A brief delay in enforcing a law of dubious constitutionality does not outweigh that harm, and in fact serves the public's interest in preserving the freedom guaranteed by the United States Constitution."

Not to be outdone by Mississippi Goddamn, up in Idaho, Governor Butch Otter signed a bill requiring that women undergoing medication-induced procedures must be informed that such procedures can be “reversed” in midstream. Medication-induced procedures, of course, made abortion truly a private matter in that they do not require the woman to go to a clinic which could be blockaded, vandalized, blown up, or shot to ribbons. Naturally, the anti-choice organizations needed some sort of a-scientific response to this threat to their primary revenue streams.

So, they found this one study that claimed to show that some women were able to continue their pregnancies after starting the medication-induced procedure. From ThinkProgress:

The law is based on an unscientific research study in which six women took mifepristone, a medication which induces abortion, and were then given various levels of progesterone. Four were able to continue their pregnancies. But, according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), the “study was not supervised by an institutional review board (IRB) or an ethical review committee, required to protect human research subjects, raising serious questions regarding the ethics and scientific validity of the results.”

Nevertheless, thanks to Governor Butch Otter, Idaho has joined Utah, Arizona, South Dakota, and Arkansas in enshrining this moonshine into law. It’s sometimes amazing how protean they are. Of course, it’s easy to shape-shift if you’re unencumbered by an excess of honesty.

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Wire Untangler Friedman of the Plains brings us the bright side of an oil bust. From The Frontier:

When crude oil prices crashed between 2014 and 2016, many Oklahoma energy companies booked sizable losses that can be used to reduce or completely eliminate state income tax liability for up to 20 years. This common corporate income tax deduction is called a net operating loss carryforward. Other large corporations in the state were also able to reduce their income tax liability with the help of a combination state tax credits and net operating loss carryforwards that will allow the companies to pay very little or no corporate income taxes for many years. By the end of 2017, Continental Resources had amassed tax deductions from net operating loss carryforwards in Oklahoma worth $2.17 billion that won’t begin to expire until 2027, according to regulatory filings.

We can all rest more easily now.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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