As Nicole already noted here, Richard Engel and his crew were captured and kidnapped in Syria and thankfully released earlier this week after five days in captivity, before they were eventually rescued. Engel joined Rachel Maddow on her show this Friday and relayed the details of their ordeal.

Engel and his crew are very, very lucky to be alive. We don't have too many reporters who are willing to go into the middle of war zones as Engel does on a regular basis and risk their lives. I'm just glad they made it out of there alive.

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Looks like Rand Paul headed for some friendly territory to respond to the GQ article that John told us about here.

Rand Paul kidnaps female student at Baylor and forces her to worship the 'AQUA BUDDHA' as part of a secret society:

Rand Paul's controversial and insane beliefs have now transmitted into his life experience as a new profile that was published by GQ reveals. Smoking weed in college is no big deal but when that's added to kidnapping and forcing a female student to worship an 'Aqua Buddha," you've now entered the twilight zone, not to mention physically abusing a woman.

Paul denied the kidnapping accusation but when it came to the "prank" of forcing the woman to worship the Aqua Buddha, his memory got a bit fuzzy. Think Progress has more where they were kind enough to transcribe part of the interview.

In his first national interview since the story came out, Paul went on Neil Cavuto’s Fox News show this afternoon, where he was questioned about the incident. Paul repeatedly denied “kidnapping” anyone (even though the GQ article never actually uses that word) and said he was “never involved with forcibly drugging people.” However, when Cavuto asked him about making someone bow down to Aqua Buddha, Paul became visibly uncomfortable and avoided answering the question:

CAVUTO: What do you make of this story? [...]

PAUL: No, I never was involved in kidnapping. No, I was never involved with forcibly drugging people. [...]

CAVUTO: So, they’re characterizing it as a kidnapping type of deal. It might have just been just playful fun? Is that what you’re saying? You might have had incidents like this, but it wasn’t deliberate kidnapping?

PAUL: Well, I — I think I would remember if I kidnapped something — kidnapped someone — and I don’t remember, and I absolutely deny kidnapping anyone ever.

CAVUTO: Apparently she said, they blindfolded me and made me bow down to Aqua Buddha. That might have been just a college prank, but you don’t even remember that, right?

PAUL: Well, I’m not really going to try to go back 27 years and remember everything that happened in college.

I was watching John King's show tonight and they had a Republican "strategist" on there and after they ran part of this clip he was literally horrified. He said Paul's campaign manager needs to put some duct tape on his mouth and shut him up. Paul also seemed to be wanting to distance himself from being labeled a Libertarian.

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