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On Thursday night and Friday morning, NBC News tried their best to go after Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson by attempting to make a mountain out of a molehill of his relationship with a man who was convicted nearly a decade ago of insurance fraud while ignoring the ongoing investigation of Hillary Clinton over her private e-mail server. Even though competitors ABC and CBS didn’t cover this story, NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt hyped on Thursday that “Republican frontrunner Ben Carson is facing new questions about his friendship with a convicted felon. NBC Tries (and Fails) to Make...

Wednesday on the “Simon Conway Show,” Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson said the United States should establish a no-fly zone at the Turkish-Syrian border and shoot down any Russian plane that enters it. Carson said, “If they do come into that area—after you have given them adequate warning, after we’ve talked to Putin—you shoot them down. Absolutely.” he added, “Whatever happens next, we deal with it. But we can’t continue backing down because in the long run, that will hurt us.”

Ben Carson's woe-is-me whining about media scrutiny is more than just a sorry spectacle. It shows the extent to which a culture of victimization has infected the conservative movement. "There's no question I'm getting special scrutiny, because there are lot of people who are very threatened,” Carson said in a "Face the Nation" interview Sunday. "The whole point is to distract, distract the populace, distract me." That’s rich, given how Carson’s own mouth has proved to be such a powerful weapon of mass distraction. His "personal theory" that the pyramids of Egypt were built by the biblical patriarch Joseph as...

Another nice catch by Andrew Kaczynski and BuzzFeed to go with the old clipping of Carson’s mother telling a newspaper in 1997 that the stabbing incident most certainly happened. Nothing’s going to prove that definitively, but knowing for a fact that Carson was telling this story before he had any reason to (when he had every professional reason not to) is the next best thing. And every time one of Carson’s biographical anecdotes is tested and checks out upon close scrutiny, the impulse to believe him among those who are already well disposed to him and see him as...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: The latest on the Ben Carson story, in no particular order. I'm gonna go back to November 6th here. This is last Friday at the end of the day, which was a barn-burner of a day here on the EIB Network. "Where Politico's Ben Carson Scoop Went Wrong." Now, to refresh your memory, Politico runs a story on Friday claiming... Well, they didn't "claim" anything. They wanted the reader to believe that Ben Carson, in his book and on the campaign trail, has been telling people that he applied for admission to West Point and was accepted...

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson is challenging media accusations that he exaggerated his tough childhood by sharing a magazine clipping from a 1997 article in which his mother verified the claim that he tried to stab a friend in ninth grade.

The Fix has said this before and will say it again. This time with emphasis. The race for the White House is really a long, very expensive and highly consequential ad campaign. What else are candidates doing than trying to convince voters that they have the best ideas, the most ambitiously pragmatic solutions for the country's ills and, of course, the right combination of character, experience and other attributes to do the job well? And when it comes to advertising, social programming (or, if you prefer, stereotypes) and the human id are major parts of what makes consumers believe firmly...

http://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbrown/2015/10/23/why-cant-two-gay-brothers-marry-n2070299/page/full One of the strongest arguments against consensual adult incest is that incestuous unions could result in children with genetic defects, but since that concern wouldn’t apply to same-sex couples, an Irish political leader has argued that gay cousins should be allowed to “marry.” And that only begs the next obvious question: Why not gay brothers or gay sisters? As reported in the Irish Times, Independent Senator David Norris, himself gay, “has said that gay cousins should be allowed to marry each other following the same-sex marriage referendum.” “It would not take a feather out of me if two cousins...

The idea for the conference was sparked when Cheok and Levy, two academics interested in robotics, met several years ago and realized they had goals in common. Levy, author of Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships, focuses on the brain, the software side, and the algorithms of humanoid robots. Cheok researches the hardware side from an engineering view, looking at multi-modal interfaces including communication by touch, taste, and smell. These areas of study, Cheok said, will be important in the future of robots. "A lot of the technology that's incubating in my lab will be integrated...

NBC has landed a huge name to replace Donald Trump as host of Celebrity Apprentice. Former California governor and international movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger will take over the reality franchise, NBC announced Monday.

T. PETERSBURG, FL (WFLA) — St. Petersburg Police Department supervisors will be trained, for the first time, on how to interact with transgender people during arrests or exchanges on Friday. Chief Anthony Holloway outlined a policy on appropriate interactions with transgender individuals. “It is the policy of the St. Petersburg Police Department to treat all people with dignity, respect, and professionalism,” the department states. The training is part of a broader trend across the country. About a year ago the Department of Justice started training agencies on interacting with people in the transgender community. Several recent issues have pushed the...

ISIS is reportedly using “flirting squads” to single out gay men for trial and execution in the Caliphate.

Top White House officials have reportedly been holding private meetings with lawmakers this week to boost support for the president’s foreign policy strategy, although the outreach effort appears to have left some lawmakers confused and upset. Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) described a meeting with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and National Security Adviser Susan Rice earlier this week as “one of the most bizarre I've attended on Foreign Relations on foreign policy in our country.” “I know several of us were involved in a very bizarre discussion last night. This continues a very bizarre discussion,” Corker added, according...

British action-adventure Kingsman: The Secret Service features Colin Firth as a dapper, tailored super spy, Samuel L. Jackson as an evil billionaire with a Russell Simmons lisp, and slick shenanigans that’d make James Bond jealous. It also boasts a controversial moment that rivals the explosive, hacker-baiting money shot that earned Sony’s The Interview the ire of North Korea. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.) In a sequence that should get tongues wagging at distributor 20th Century Fox’s sister network Fox News (also owned by Rupert Murdoch), the cheeky comic book movie from Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn makes history—not for reinventing the spy genre,...

PHOENIX — The New England Patriots owner and Seattle Seahawks cornerback were trading insults while the NFL was reportedly reviewing video of a Patriots employee going into the bathroom with a bag of footballs. Just when you thought Super Bowl Media Day couldn’t get any more bizarre... Thanks to DeflateGate, though, there seems to be no limit to this theater of the absurd, which took yet another twist as the Patriots and Seahawks met a mass of reporters at the U.S. Airways Center on Tuesday. The backdrop was a report that the NFL had video of a Patriots locker room...

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt on Thursday predicted the end of the Internet as we know it. At the end of a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland where his comments were webcast, he was asked for his prediction on the future of the Web. “I will answer very simply that the Internet will disappear,” Schmidt said.

Troops based at the Kadena Air Base in Japan know how to party. On Saturday, six gay and straight service members applied some of their finest makeup and lip synced to "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" in what is believed to be first drag queen and king show on an American military base. The show was thrown in support for the base's recently formed OutServe-SLDN chapter, a nonprofit advocacy group for the army's LGBT community.

With a body covered in horns, resembling some prehistoric creature- and the demon-like ability to squirt blood from his eyes, the mere sight of the Texas horned lizard is enough to send most screaming and running in the opposite direction should they encounter him. But most older Texans know his fierce appearance is all for show just to scare off predators. As children they used to catch and play with the lizards, for he is a gentle little creature who never bites and will go to sleep in your hand if you roll him over and rub his tummy. This...

A NASA probe has captured an amazing video of the huge and mysterious six-sided vortex spinning around Saturn's north pole. Scientists created the new video of Saturn's vortex from 128 images snapped by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in December 2012. It's the highest-resolution movie yet obtained of the giant hexagon, which is about 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers) wide and has been swirling for at least 30 years, researchers said. "The hexagon is just a current of air, and weather features out there that share similarities to this are notoriously turbulent and unstable," Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the...

The trial of the Fort Hood gunman, who is acting as his own attorney, took a surreal turn as the former Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 in the November 2009 attack grilled witnesses -- including his former boss in the military and a fellow Muslim who spoke to him the day of the shooting.. After a short opening statement in which ex-Army Maj. Nidal Hasan called himself a "mujahedeen," admitted to the rampage and said "the dead bodies will show that war is an ugly thing," Hassan cross-examined prosecution witnesses, including retired Lt. Col Ben Kirk Phillips, his former...