Housing and Urban Affairs Secretary Ben Carson has asked for Congress's approval to hike rents on people living in federally subsidized housing, with a planned increase of more than 300%; he claims the rent hikes will incentivize public housing tenants to seek work. Read the rest

Nothing like a husband who throws his own wife under the bus. And that's just what "The Honorable Ben Carson" (yes, take a look, his desk placard actually says that!) did when he explained to a House committee hearing today that his wife, Candy, was the one who bought the $31,000 mahogany dining set for his office without his knowledge.

“If it were up to me my office would probably look like a hospital waiting room, but at any rate, I invited my wife to come along and help me," the good doctor says, referring to redecorating his office.

He then says that the old dining set was dangerous, with nails sticking out of it, and needed to be replaced, so he was given a catalog to look at. "The prices were beyond what I wanted to pay, I made it clear that that just didn't seem right to me, and I left it with my wife."

And then it was the wifey who purchased the outrageously priced dining set, which he knew nothing about, because, well, he had so many other more important things to do. Wow, with husbands like that, who needs husbands?

.@secretarycarson on $31,000 table: "I said, 'what the heck is that all about?'"

Full video here: https://t.co/F1yQX0ZobK pic.twitter.com/gLkcovdF8z

— CSPAN (@cspan) March 20, 2018

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Helen Foster was chief administrative officer for the Department of Housing and Urban Development until she was demoted; she says she was punished for refusing to violate rules limiting how much money Secretary Carson could spend redecorating his office and fixing up his home. Read the rest

There are two Trumps, says Carson, one more cerebral than the other.

Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who recently ended his campaign, said he and Trump have “buried the hatchet” after trading nasty words during the primary. He also said there are “two different” Trumps: the one the public sees and a more “cerebral” Trump in private.

Speaking at his posh Mar-a-Lago Club, Trump praised Carson and said he would play a “big role” in the campaign, in both political and policy capacities. But he declined to offer specific descriptions.

Don't you get the feeling that Republicans (and the #NeverTrump right-wing pundits) will ultimately support Trump? The only conservative principle that seems to matter now is fear. Or they could end up with Ted Cruz, who is even worse, because he means what he says and Trump has always looked vaguely like his stalking horse.

To take your mind off all this horror, here is a photograph from the future from Boing Boing's broken ansible, in which lovers Trudeau and Obama ("Trubama" as the holotabloids have it) take the Presidential Hoverbikes for a spin.

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Presidential candidate Ben Carson, famous for insisting that he really did try to gut stab a classmate when he was 14, closed the Republican debate on Saturday with a fake quote from Joseph Stalin. “Joseph Stalin said if you want to bring America down you have to undermine three things -- our spiritual life, our patriotism, and our morality,” said Carson.

Stalin never said it. From Gideon Resnick of The Daily Beast:

Any quick Google search of the quote’s origins would lead Carson to discover that the line comes from an image that was passed around on Facebook and in the chain emails grandparents send around to family members.

"America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within,” the fake quote goes.

When it comes to fake quotes about patriotism and religion, I prefer the one Sinclair Lewis didn't say: "When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." Read the rest

Wanna see what a total clusterfuck the beginning of last night's presidential debate was? Watch this video. Read the rest

U.S. Presidential candidate Ben Carson sure is one wacky guy. Read the rest

According to this 1998 commencement address Ben Carson gave at Andrews University, the "flagship educational institution of the Seventh-day Adventist Church," he says that the "scientists" who claim that extraterrestrials who built the pyramids are mistaken. And they weren't burial chambers for the Pharoas either. Rather, the pyramids were brilliantly engineered to store grain. From CNN:

"My own personal theory is that Joseph built the pyramids to store grain," Carson said in taped remarks first reported by Buzzfeed on Wednesday. "Now all the archeologists think that they were made for the pharaohs' graves. But, you know, it would have to be something awfully big if you stop and think about it."

On Wednesday, asked about his belief after a book-signing in Florida, Carson stood by his theory and explained it.

"The pyramids were made in a way that they had hermetically sealed compartments," he said. "You would need that if you were trying to preserve grain for a long period of time."

Donald Trump commented on Carson's theory about the pyramids on Thursday during an appearance on MSNBC, saying, "I'll have to put that into my repertoire when I talk about Ben...That was a strange deal."

According to the Book of Genesis, Joseph stored large amounts of grain to feed the people of Egypt during a famine.

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"We Need Brain" is a quotation from Donald Trump at last night's GOP presidential primary debate, and it's the title of the songified version by the Gregory Brothers. Worth watching just for the GIF-able clips like these: Read the rest