Britney Spears news

• They should all be tried: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and America’s overlooked war crimes

  30-04-2016 23:00 via salon.com
  
  The allegations against the man were serious indeed.
  * Donald Rumsfeld said he was “if not the number two, very close to the number two person” in al-Qaeda.
  * The Central Intelligence Agency informed Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee that he “served as Usama Bin Laden’s senior lieutenant. In that capacity, he has managed a network of training camps… He also acted as al-Qaeda’s coordinator of external contacts and foreign communications.”
  * CIA Direct
  
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• Clintonism screwed the Democrats: How Bill, Hillary and the Democratic Leadership Council gutted progressivism

  30-04-2016 21:30 via salon.com
  
  Hillary Clinton today promotes herself as a “reformer with results,” and she’s relied on a widespread impression that she and Bernie Sanders aren’t really that far apart on major issues. After the last round of primaries in the Northeast, she expressed it again:“Because whether you support Senator Sanders or you support me, there’s much more that unites us than divides us. We all agree that wages are too low and inequality is too high, that Wall Street can nev
  
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• Our gun myths are all wrong: The real history behind the Second Amendment clichés that have sustained our lethal gun culture

  30-04-2016 20:00 via salon.com
  
  An abridged history of the American gun culture, told from legend and popular memory, might go like this: We were born a gun culture. Americans have an exceptional, unique, and timeless relationship to guns, starting with the militias of the Revolutionary War, and it developed on its own from there. Some celebrate and some condemn this relationship, but it is in either case unique. Guns have long been a commonplace part of American life, which is why guns pretty much sell themselves. The Second
  
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• Stop calling them conservatives! The new GOP of Trump & Cruz is the party of nihilism

  30-04-2016 18:00 via salon.com
  
  In a candid and often funny interview currently making the rounds, the recently retired Speaker of the House John Boehner let’s everyone know how he truly feels about the state of his own party, and what he thinks about some of the more extreme characters that exist within it. Not surprisingly, Boehner’s amusing assessment of Ted Cruz, whom he called a “miserable son of a bitch” and “Lucifer in the flesh,” made all of the media headlines.
  B
  
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• Larry Wilmore’s big night: Late night’s elder statesman steps up in tonight’s career-defining role

  30-04-2016 17:59 via salon.com
  
  This evening, comedian and late-night host Larry Wilmore will be delivering the featured remarks at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It’s an event marked by uncomfortable professional encounters and awkward journalists in formalwear; the schmoozing is secondary to the drinking, and the drinking is secondary to what has become the dinner’s primary purpose: a good old-fashioned comedy roast. Tonight, Wilmore is leading the charge, at what is also President Barack Obama&rsq
  
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• “You can all tell your gardeners they can come out now”: Bill Maher celebrates “comic book rodent” Donald Trump’s exit from California

  30-04-2016 17:00 via salon.com
  
  “Real Time” host Bill Maher last night gave his take on Donald Trump’s brief but riotous visit to Costa Mesa, California, Thursday night.
  “Trump has left California,” Maher rejoiced at the top of the show. “You can all tell your gardeners they can come out now.”
  Donald Trump on Thursday night campaigned in Orange County, which, Maher said, is “like Chris Christie being in Fat City.”
  Orange County is, of course, home to Disneyla
  
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• Donald Trump thinks he’s a god. Even worse, his supporters agree

  30-04-2016 16:45 via salon.com
  
  When Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president on June 16, 2015, almost no one predicted that he would become the leading Republican candidate, let alone the party’s nominee. As the statistics guru Nate Silver told Anderson Cooper in September, Trump’s chances of becoming the Republican nominee were about 5 percent. And two months later, Silver “explained that Trump’s national following was about as negligible as the share of Americans who believe the Apollo moon
  
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• Trump like Bernie? Don’t be fooled by lazy comparisons — Sanders stands for all that Trump hates

  30-04-2016 16:44 via salon.com
  
  Early on, facile, pro-Donald pundits eagerly linked the Trump and Sanders candidacies. Leftists rushed in, mesmerized by any conspicuous insurgency against entrenchment. This fable is so rife with distortion it’s amazing there aren’t weekly corrective eruptions. What core agendas overlap? Quite the opposite, as tone, values and policy disparities swamp superficial linkages. Obscured by staggering, mind-bending campaign lying, defamation, and chicanery, high time to confront a lightwe
  
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• Death, carnage and chaos: How NATO became one of the most destructive forces on the planet

  30-04-2016 16:00 via salon.com
  
  In May 2012, in the warm Chicago sunshine, I sat with journalist Jim Foley who had just returned from Syria. Jim and I had come for a large demonstration against a meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). War reporting in Afghanistan, Libya and Syria had not been easy on Jim, who was an easy-going man. “You can’t get what the Afghan people really think,” he said, when you travel with US troops and rely upon a US-military translator. Nearby sat a group of Afgha
  
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• Carly Fiorina, bullsh*t artist: Ted Cruz and the D.C. media love a female business leader who was bad at business and hates women

  30-04-2016 15:30 via salon.com
  
  Ted Cruz naming Carly Fiorina as his running mate is the perfect move—for illustrating once again just how clueless America’s political elite and their media truly are. The move makes perfect sense in the context of elite politics, but it has a mountain of facts stacked against it, and if this cycle has been about anything, it’s been about how political elites have lost control over what ordinary voters know, think and see.
  First, let’s run down why it makes sense ac
  
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• We must shame dumb Trump fans: The white working class are not victims

  30-04-2016 15:29 via salon.com
  
  A few weeks ago, I was a guest on the political radio show “Beyond the Beltway.” To no one’s surprise, the conversation turned to Donald Trump, and I referred to the overwhelming evidence proving his supporters are ignorant and bigoted. The first caller, voice rising to the level of a shriek, badgered me for my “arrogance” and “smugness.” Then, he concluded his tantrum with predictable sophistication. He called me a “Zionist hack.” For the re
  
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• Health care has a cavity: There’s no good reason our teeth aren’t covered

  30-04-2016 15:00 via salon.com
  
  When we talk about the successes and shortcomings of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – and health care in the U.S. in general – little attention is given to dental care.
  While the ACA defines dental coverage as an essential benefit for those under 18, insurers aren’t required to offer dental coverage for adults. Medicare, the nation’s largest insurer, doesn’t cover routine dental work. And coverage for adults through Medicaid varies from state to state.
  It is estimate
  
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• Inside the right-wing lie factory: Secrets of a Koch-funded propaganda machine more insidious than Fox News

  30-04-2016 14:00 via salon.com
  
  Medora is a small, seasonal tourist town in the Badlands of western North Dakota, about 25 miles from the Montana border. It has a population of less than one hundred. It went for John McCain for president by a three-to-one margin in 2008. A handful of small stores are in the center of the town—some gift shops, a bookstore, an ice cream shop, two restaurants, a museum, and a hotel that’s full during tourist season.
  Around the corner from downtown is the Rushmore Mountain Taffy and Gi
  
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• Sam Brownback gutted Kansas: How America’s worst governor and an ultra-conservative ideology wrecked an entire state

  30-04-2016 12:30 via salon.com
  
  It’s safe to say that if Kansas’s Gov. Sam Brownback or any of the state’s ultraconservative legislators had been in fictional astronaut Mark Watney’s place (“The Martian“), they would have never survived the 543 sols that Watney spent stranded on Mars before being rescued. It’s doubtful they would have even made it back to the Hab in the first place after inadvertently being left for dead in the middle of the fateful sandstorm that drove the crew to aba
  
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• David Brooks has driven me mad: His wacky New York Times mea culpa is a master troll’s finest moment yet

  30-04-2016 12:29 via salon.com
  
  Sometimes, I’ve been close to deciding that New York Times columnist and all-around pundit-for-hire David Brooks writes solely to make those of us who read him crazy. Now I’m convinced of it.
  One of the things that has bugged me most in his columns has been his over-the-top smugness, the sense of entitlement Brooks exudes. Now, to make matters worse for me and the rest of his readers, he admits it:
  I’ve slipped into a bad pattern, spending large chunks of my life in the bourgeo
  
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• Donald Trump’s bankruptcy dodge: This is how lawyers and regulators helped him fudge solvency and avoid collapse

  30-04-2016 12:28 via salon.com
  
  Americans wouldn’t be imagining today what a Trump presidency might be like were it not for a crucial moment more than 25 years ago when government saved Donald Trump from his own profligate spending. In fact, it was one carefully calculated response by one of his attorneys that saved Trump from financial collapse—just two years after Trump had proposed himself as a vice-presidential running mate for George H. W. Bush.
  That moment, when New Jersey’s Casino Control Commissi
  
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• “Grief sedated by orgasm, orgasm heightened by grief”: Beyoncé, “Lemonade” and the new reality of infidelity

  30-04-2016 01:00 via salon.com
  
  “Are you cheating on me?” Beyoncé asks in her visual album “Lemonade,” which premiered last weekend on HBO. She throws open a door, and water gushes forth—an apt metaphor for the flood of emotions that her question, and its implied answer, unleashes.
  As a couples therapist, I’ve sat with hundreds of women, and men, in the turbulent aftermath of infidelity. For the past decade, I’ve been traveling the globe listening to tales of betrayal from every
  
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• Moms deserve better than this: The shameless pandering of “Mother’s Day” is an argument for the death of “hyperlink” films

  30-04-2016 00:59 via salon.com
  
  From a marketing perspective, “Love Actually” was such an ingenious idea that it’s a wonder film executives didn’t think of it sooner.The 2003 film brought the ’70s disaster movie model—in which films like “The Towering Inferno” and “The Poseidon Adventure” amassed a litany of notable celebrities to narrowly avoid death—to the romantic comedy. Instead of Faye Dunaway, Steve McQueen and Paul Newman fleeing a burning building, direc
  
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• From “sob sister” to badass: Lois Lane’s long, amazing journey out of Superman’s shadow

  30-04-2016 00:58 via salon.com
  
  Lois Lane has been around as long as Superman, but she hasn’t had as easy a time. While the Man of Steel has had his difficulties—including his current ridiculous portrayal in Zack Snyder’s movies—ol’ Kal-El hasn’t been defined by ludicrous love stories, treated like an annoying pest who should be spanked, and killed repeatedly just to make another character sad. As recounted in Tim Hanley’s excellent recent book “Investigating Lois Lane: The Turbu
  
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• E.U. forcing refugees into “concentration camps” as economic crisis fuels far-right, warns Greek ex-finance minister

  30-04-2016 00:27 via salon.com
  
  Greece’s outspoken former finance minister says the European Union is putting refugees in what are essentially “concentration camps,” and warns the festering economic crisis is exacerbating the xenophobia, fueling the rise of far-right movements.
  In the past two years, hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants have landed in Greece, hoping to find asylum in Europe.
  Yanis Varoufakis, the ex-minister and longtime economics professor, said in an interview on Democracy No
  
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