More Manure

• Mike Huckabee (The Republic of T) is a dose of ipecac.

  Huckabee’s ideas about women aren’t quite medieval, but they’re at least Victorian. Last January, at the Republican party’s annual winter meeting, Huckabee said that the Democratic party told women, “they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government.” Huckabee then went on to argue that Republicans aren’t waging war on women, but “they have a war for women, to empower them to be something other than victims of their gender.”
  
  Right. Women who use birth control are “victims of their gender.”

• Paul Ryan (I don't think he's running, but who knows these days?) doesn't understand poverty.  Or statistics, apparently.

  And Republicans have been throwing this accusation around for a couple of years now: that the War on Poverty has been a $12 trillion (or $18 trillion or $22 trillion, depending on who is telling the lie) waste of money that hasn't helped anyone in America.
  
  That's just an out and out lie.

  There is a graph.  (Zandar Versus The Stupid.)
• Via Wonkette, Maine governor supports a law that forbids welfare recipients from spending on an interesting array of foods:

  This bill, S.P. 195, introduced by state Senator Roger Katz (R-No Shit), seeks to run around that exemption and ban the poors from using their EBT riches for even those items. They are specifically asking the USDA for special permission to ban poor people from buying “food items that are otherwise subject to the state sales tax and for bulk purchases of grocery staples that, if purchased in smaller quantities, would be considered prepared food and therefore would be subject to the state sales tax.” Get it? If you buy one slice of gourmet baloney, you’d have to pay the higher tax, but if you buy a whole package, it’s considered a “staple.” UNLESS YOU ARE POOR. Then, according to this bill, you can’t buy any of it with your EBT card, because that would be … wasteful? Not nutritious? Just a fun new rule to show how gross you think poor people are?

  I'm surprised none of that bunch have tried reintroducing sumptuary laws yet.
  
• News too weird for words.  [ETA:  Story at sfgate.com.  Still weird.]