Morning Reading - What Republican War On Women?!

More chicanery from the Old White Man's Republican Party, this time on what should have been a non-controversial, bipartisan human trafficking bill:

An overwhelmingly bipartisan Senate bill to combat human trafficking hit a wall last week after Democrats said they discovered a provision to impose new limits on abortion rights, and threatened to filibuster the bill unless the provision is removed. 

Senate Republican leaders now find themselves caught between wanting to show they can pass even the most noncontroversial legislation and the passions of the pro-life base they roped into the battle by making it a high-stakes proxy war over abortion. 

The provision expands the restrictions on government funding of abortions beyond those contained in the decades-old Hyde Amendment... [snip]

That the Democrats didn't notice the provision for nearly two months reflects an extraordinary failure on their own side to read and understand the bill before voting unanimously to approve it in committee and allowing it to come before the full Senate. Republicans didn't inform them of the provision, Democrats say, arguing that they made a mistake by "trusting" the GOP. 

That Republicans are for the most part lying, untrustworthy ideologues should not have come as a surprise to Democrats;  perhaps they'll make sure they curry-comb any bills in committee from now on to avoid this happening in the future.  Shame on them.

At the same time, there was a gathering of right-wing interest groups in Washington to try to dispel the notion that the Old White Man's Republican Party is engaged in a War on Women.  Dana Milbank covered the event and saw a few (=cough= huge =cough=) problems :

Alas for the GOP, the gender gap preceded Senate candidate Todd Akin, and the comments have continued since then: the Idaho legislator who asked last month whether a gynecological exam on a woman could be conducted by having her swallow a camera; the New Hampshire legislator who said a Democratic congresswoman would lose because she’s “ugly as sin”; another New Hampshire legislator who argued that men make more than women because “they don’t mind working nights and weekends” or “overtime or outdoors”; the Arizona GOP official who said women on Medicaid should be sterilized; and the New Mexico congressman who endorsed this biblical view: “The wife is to voluntarily submit, just as the husband is to lovingly lead and sacrifice.” 

At the same time, Republicans have taken up hundreds of bills in state legislatures restricting abortion, and Democrats have sought to highlight Republican opposition in Congress to the Violence Against Women Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act and other bills.

So women, who are you going to believe:  Republicans or your lying eyes?