Reuters — Carson accepts Trump's offer to head Housing and Urban Development: WSJ

Reuters
Carson accepts Trump's offer to head Housing and Urban Development: WSJ

Diane Bartz

Carson talks with Trump team, says he can make 'inner cities great'

Dylan Matthews — Ben Carson is helping Donald Trump pick a VP. He's also a devoted conspiracy theorist.

Donald Trump has announced that a familiar face will assist in his hunt for a running mate: Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon turned conservative heartthrob turned failed 2016 candidate. Given Carson's newfound influence on the campaign of the Republican nominee, it's worth looking back and remembering some of what we learned about him during the primaries.…

Vox
Ben Carson is helping Donald Trump pick a VP. He's also a devoted conspiracy theorist.

Dylan Matthews

Jesse Hamilton — Trump Says He Would Return to Waterboarding for Interrogations

Donald Trump, the leading Republican contender for U.S. president, says he would return to strong interrogation techniques such as waterboarding if he were elected because their severity pales against Islamic State practices.

“You know, they don’t use waterboarding over there; they use chopping off people’s heads,” Trump said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” Waterboarding, a method of torture in which water is poured over the face of an immobilized prisoner to simulate drowning, is “peanuts” compared with that, Trump said. He said he “would absolutely bring back interrogation and strong interrogation.”
Ben Carson, running 4 percentage points behind Trump in the latest Bloomberg Politics national poll, taken Nov. 15-17, declined to say whether he’d favor waterboarding, during an appearance on the same program.

“I’m not one who is real big on telling the enemy what we’re going to do and what we’re not going to do,” Carson said.…

Bloomberg
Trump Says He Would Return to Waterboarding for Interrogations

Jesse Hamilton

On Sunday morning, Fox News host Ed Henry asked Trump about the incident: "of an African-American protester from Black Lives Matter who appears to have gotten roughed up." At first, Trump appeared to be ambivalent about the term "roughed up," but then he warmed up to it:"Maybe he should have been roughed up."

Here's a transcript of the relevant part of Trump's response, via Media Matters….

Vox
Protester gets punched at Trump rally. Trump: “Maybe he deserved to get roughed up”

Dara Lind

Also 

Mark Deen, Hollande Popularity Jumps After Terrorist Attacks, Poll Shows

David Francis — Former CIA Chief: Carson’s Instincts the Foreign-Policy Class of the GOP Presidential Field

Is former CIA director Michael Hayden feeding Ben Carson?

Foreign Policy
Former CIA Chief: Carson’s Instincts the Foreign-Policy Class of the GOP Presidential Field

David Francis

ht Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism

Sandwichman — What Makes Ben Lie?

No, not Bermanke.

I am not sure that Ben Carson is actually "lying" even though he is not telling the truth. He doesn't seem to be able to distinguish truth from truthiness, which is a reason he is so popular with his constituency. They can't either. Some are just stupid people, but a lot of them suffer from a severe case of cognitive dissonance in which ideology trumps fact.

Econospeak
What Makes Ben Lie?
Sandwichman

Mike Lofgren — GOP and the Rise of Anti-Knowledge

A bit of a rant, but interesting because Mike Lofgren wrote it. It conveys a sense of the deep disgust among traditional Republicans at what their party has become. Paul Craig Roberts is another on the warpath against both the crazy and the Establishment run amok.

Consortiums News
GOP and the Rise of Anti-Knowledge
Mike Lofgren, former congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate budget committees

Ginger Gibson — Ben Carson pulls ahead of Donald Trump in national poll

The field seems to be firming up. More candidates will likely drop off fairly soon as money dries up for them.

Reuters
Ben Carson pulls ahead of Donald Trump in national poll

Ginger Gibson

Look at this...Ben Carson's totally clueless response to a question on the debt ceiling. He makes Obama look like an monetary genius!!

WHAT KIND OF FUCKING CLOWN CLASS DO WE HAVE WANTING TO LEAD THIS COUNTRY????

Here's what supposedly "brilliant," Ben Carson, said when asked about the debt ceiling.

"Let me put it this way: if I were the president, I would not sign an increased budget. Absolutely would not do it. They would have to find a place to cut," Carson insisted in a Wednesday segment with Kai Ryssdal of the American Public Media radio program "Marketplace."

The interviewer persisted...

Ryssdal pressed: "To be clear, it's increasing the debt limit, not the budget, but I want to make sure I understand you. You'd let the United States default rather than raise the debt limit."

"No, I would provide the kind of leadership that says, 'Get on the stick guys, and stop messing around, and cut where you need to cut, because we're not raising any spending limits, period,'" Carson asserted.

Absolute idiot.

People...we will NOT avoid a default. I am telling you. NOT.

Heather Digby Parton — The GOP’s Scientology strategy: How Charles Murray’s perverse anti-government agenda has won over the American right

The man most famous for the deeply racist "The Bell Curve" has found a solution to Big Government: Sue it to death. 

It’s important to note here that the right’s loathing of the federal government is actually quite narrowly focused on certain areas of interest. They are fully behind the neoconservatives’ imperial project — flag waving and martial strutting are fundamental to American conservatism. (Small government is a very imprecise term; they have no problem with a big military and police apparatus. In fact, those bureaucracies have a blank check.) But within that narrow anti-government focus of low taxes is their extreme hostility to government regulations....

Murray has a new book coming out that is poised to take the conservative and libertarian world by storm. It’s called “By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission,” and in it Murray proclaims, “the government cannot enforce its mountain of laws and regulations without voluntary compliance.” His book proposes to create “a private-sector counterweight that pulls back the curtain and exposes the Wizard’s weakness.” The private sector counterweight, in this case, will be a billionaire-funded institution that will bankroll thousands of lawsuits against the government, which Murray fatuously names “The Madison Institute.”

If conservatives follow the Scientology strategy to the letter, they will file lawsuits against individual federal employees as well, making their lives miserable and putting them into personal financial jeopardy....

Of course, if a Republican becomes president, the whole idea becomes moot. The billionaires would withdraw to their counting rooms to add up their profits while the GOP executive makes their job unnecessary. The fact that they are contemplating this assault through the legal system is an admission that they don’t really believe they’ll have the political power to do this any time soon.

Salon
The GOP’s Scientology strategy: How Charles Murray’s perverse anti-government agenda has won over the American right

Heather Digby Parton, Hullabaloo

Peregrin Wood — Who Is The Secret Group Called “The Family” That Created Ben Carson’s Presidential Campaign?

You may recall "The Family" from Jeff Sharlet's exposé.

The more I learned about the Family, the more difficulty I had in clarifying their theology ... But at Ivanwald, or in a prayer cell at the Cedars, or in a conversation with world leaders, the Family's beliefs appear closer to the more marginal set of theologies sometimes gathered under the umbrella term of dominionism, characterized for me by William Martin, a religious historian at Rice University and Billy Graham's official biographer, as the "intellectual heart of the Christian Right." Dominionist theologies hold the Bible to be the guide to every decision, high and low, from whom God wants you to marry to whether God thinks you should buy a new lawn mower. Unlike neo-evangelicals, who concern themselves chiefly with getting good with Jesus, dominionists want to reconstruct early Christian society, which they believe was ruled by God alone. They view themselves as the new chosen and claim a Christian doctrine of conventionalism, meaning covenants not only between God and humanity but at every level of society, replacing the rule of law and its secular contract. Since those covenants are signed, as it were, in the Blood of the Lamb, they are written in ink invisible to nonbelievers. — Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, quoted in Random Book Blogging: Dominionism and "The Family" at Right Wing Watch 

Irregular Times
Who Is The Secret Group Called “The Family” That Created Ben Carson’s Presidential Campaign?
Peregrin Wood