Things got heated outside a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing about social media today when conspiracy theorist Alex Jones touched the person of Sen. Marco Rubio in a successful attempt to get him into a deranged discussion about social media.
When Jones reached out to touch Rubio's shoulder, the senator glared at Jones, warning him not to touch him again in front of a gaggle of reporters with cameras and notebooks.
"You're not gonna get arrested man," Rubio said after Jones said he had only "padded you nicely." "I'll handle it myself."
Jones then accused Rubio of threatening to beat him up.
“Marco Rubio just threatened to beat me up,” Jones told a camera trailing him around on Capitol Hill.
“I didn't say that,” Rubio said.
After being booted from most social media sites over his barely fig-leaved calls for political violence, Jones' fortunes have fallen fast. Expect more and bigger stunts like this.
Do not miss Jones' impression of Rubio, as captured by Vice News's Jesse Seidman.
UPDATE: I have made this into a looping GIF. You're welcome.
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Two new laws that allow California residents to officially change their gender identification went into effect this past Labor Day weekend. Read the rest
Defense Secretary James N. Mattis denies the words attributed to him in Bob Woodward's new book, 'FEAR: Trump in the White House.' Read the rest
Nike hired Kap for an ad campaign: a satisfying yet bathetic result of his de facto expulsion from professional football for protesting police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem. Conservatives are mad, obviously, and are expressing it by destroying the Nike-branded gear that they have already paid for.
Life is but a dream. Read the rest
In-N-Out, the popular California burger chain, just dropped $25,000 on the California GOP under Donald Trump. Read the rest
Evan Vucci's incredible photo from last night's Trump rally in Evansville, Indiana, shows the moment one of his volunteers "blocks the lens of a photographer trying to take a photo of a demonstrator."
Evan is the AP's chief photographer in Washington, and you can follow him at @evanvucci. Here's the Instagram embed:
View this post on Instagram
A volunteer member of the advance team for #president #donaldtrump blocks the lens of a photographer trying to take a photo of a demonstrator during a #campaign rally in #evansville #indiana
A post shared by Evan Vucci (@evanvucci) on Aug 30, 2018 at 6:02pm PDT
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“I view it as an illegal investigation,” President Donald Trump said today, referring to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. Read the rest
“America is at stage two Islamic Cancer,” says the founder of ACT for America. Why exactly is Thomas Homan, former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), speaking at their upcoming event in Washington, D.C.? And he only retired in June. Read the rest
Hey, a lot can happen in 8 weeks.
Donald Trump, President of the United States, said today he's keeping Attorney General Jeff Sessions around until after the midterm elections in November. Read the rest
The primary debate between Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Cynthia Nixon got pretty intense. Read the rest
ICYMI: Today, Pretend President Donald Trump feuded with an algorithm after Googling his own name.
Today the Trump administration threatened to regulate Google and internet search results, based on an early morning vanity search by Donald Trump. Democrats and Republicans said that would be a violation of free speech protections. So, Trump's "re-election campaign" [aka slush fund for whatever he wants] went and fundraised off the whole thing. Read the rest
Roger Stone's Instagram sure is weird.
In an Instagram video he posted today, longtime Trump consigliere Roger Stone said that a Ronan Farrow story soon to be published in The New Yorker reports that Stone explicitly told Donald Trump in October 2016 that WikiLeaks had obtained and was preparing to dump John Podesta's emails. Read the rest
Heading to Fox News for a softball interview about the alleged misuse of campaign funds on vacations, video games and other personal expenses, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Northrup Grumman) blamed his wife.
The dizzying kettle logic and suddenly obvious lies are not just a Trump thing. It's some kind of bizarre shedding process the GOP is undergoing as it metamorphoses into a nakedly amoral totalitarian nightmare moth. Read the rest
“There's information about political advertising—including the choices about how to target ads to you instead of someone else—that's not in Facebook's Ad Archive,” says ProPublica's Jeremy Merrill. “It can only be exposed if you participate in this project with ProPublica, ABC and our other awesome partners.” Read the rest
“We went there to protect a monument,” he said. Read the rest
Former Air Force language specialist and intelligence contractor Reality Winner has been sentenced to 63 months in prison. Read the rest
The latest read from Alex Stamos bears an appropriately grim title. Read the rest
