At the end of next week, TPM will celebrate its 15th year online. Three more than twelve, a third of my life. Wow.
We’re going to put together some fun stuff for next week. And we’ve got something I think core readers will be really excited about which we’re announcing tomorrow.
The initial numbers for pot legalization in Ohio don’t look good.
Ed Kilgore explains why Ben Carson is not going away – and why that’s pretty scary.
If you remember the plot of Mel Brooks’ classic movie, The Producers, the idea was that the scammers set out to produce the worst possible play imaginable to be certain it would close after one night. Yet, they made it so bad it broke through the membrane of awful into the sublime. And they were screwed. Which brings us to the Ben Carson campaign. There is a lot of evidence, coming from a variety of angles, that Carson for President is actually a direct mail scam. Or at least that it started that way.
First, let me explain a bit about what I mean.
Conservatives warn of creeping Gayism at conservative darling Chick-Fil-A.
I recently spoke to someone who knows Ben Carson professionally. And this person confirmed that however weird he may be and however cloudy his affect, Carson’s a really smart guy – which is what you’d expect from a top of his field brain surgeon. But I’m really wondering if it’s possible that it’s just Carson’s hands that are really smart. Because man, this latest thing, even I’m flabbergasted. Carson says he’s really not convinced by the archeological elite about the pyramids being built as tombs. He thinks Joseph built them to store grain.
Now … biblical literalism aside, I’m pretty certain that with the exception of the burial chambers, the pyramids are solid. They’re definitely not hollow. Does Carson think they’re hollow?
Ben Carson is doubling down on his theory that the Egyptian pyramids were not built as funerary monuments but in fact were built by the biblical Joseph, when serving as Pharoah’s Prime Minister, to store grain. “It’s still my belief, yes,” Carson told CBS News today in Naples, Florida.
But after this story went live on the site today a number of you wrote in to say that we’d buried the lede. And when I looked again at the story I discovered you were definitely right.
Just as Jeb was bottoming out in his psycho-political identity crisis along comes Jon Meacham’s new bio of George H.W. Bush featuring the elder Bush personally critiquing George W. for letting the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis run roughshod over him. This should open up a delightful new line of questioning for Jeb on the campaign trail.
Whatever the logic of Ben Carson’s comments, TPM Readers clearly think that the time was right for Pyramids to move to the center of the 2016 election debate.
We start with TPM Reader JO …
I remember those books and the spate of movies that were associated with them — not just Chariots of the Gods “documentary” but cash-in follow-ups and copies like Beyond and Back(about the experiences of allegedly briefly-dead people) and In Search of Noah’s Ark (no explanation necessary).