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• Trump campaign selects nation’s top white nationalist to serve as delegate to GOP convention

  10-05-2016 22:54 via salon.com
  
  Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump points into the crowd while accompanied by his daughter Ivanka (L) and his wife Melania (R) at his 2016 South Carolina presidential primary night victory rally in Spartanburg, South Carolina February 20, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst- RTX27V8Q (Credit: Reuters)
  One of the country’s most prominent white nationalists has just been selected as a Donald Trump delegate to the Republican National Convention from California.
  William Daniel Johnso
  
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• Gene Simmons on Prince: “How pathetic that he killed himself”

  10-05-2016 22:01 via salon.com
  
  Gene Simmons(Credit: Reuters/Alex Gallardo)
  In a new interview with Newsweek, Kiss figurehead Gene Simmons reflected on the untimely passings of music icons David Bowie and Prince, respectively, but in very different terms.
  “Bowie was the most tragic of all because it was real sickness,” Simmons said, referring to the singer’s year-long battle with terminal liver cancer.
  Prince, on the other hand, “His drugs killed him.”
  “I think Prince was heads, hands and fe
  
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• Rush Limbaugh admits Republicans have been trolled: “Trump is an internet troll”

  10-05-2016 21:46 via salon.com
  
  I’ll skip the obvious joke about a kettle calling the pot black, but come on, Rush Limbaugh remarking on Donald Trump’s trollish ways is certainly his most trollish statement of late.
  “Trump is an internet troll,” the right-wing talker said on his radio show Tuesday, explaining to his “Dittohead” listeners, as he so affectionately refers to them, that “American politics is determined by trolls on the internet today.”
  “Maybe not determine
  
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• Texas lieutenant governor freaks out over “respectful and trusting” transgender student policy

  10-05-2016 21:36 via salon.com
  
  Dan Patrick (Credit: AP/Pat Sullivan)
  Yes, bigots, we get it — the world is changing and that terrifies you. But kind of special throne in hell are you vying for that you could be so callous, so threatened, by kids and the people trying to protect them? I’m asking, Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.
  As America continues its embarrassing freakout over the rights of trans people to use public restrooms in peace, down in the Lone Star State, Dan Patrick has come out swinging this week. On
  
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• It’s Trump vs. Scarborough: He was once cozy with the billionaire, but now Joe Scarborough is slamming his “scattershot approach” in op-ed

  10-05-2016 20:41 via salon.com
  
  Joe Scarborough, Donald Trump (Credit: MSNBC/AP/Jae C. Hong)
  The Washington Post on Monday night published an op-ed by “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough titled “The art of the deal that could doom Donald Trump.”
  Scarborough, a one-time Trump crony, was surprised to find himself the target of one of the presumptive GOP nominee’s signature Twitter rants last week.
  Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski then addressed a different Trump Twitter war with Massachus
  
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• One of the dumbest things you’ll hear this year: Heidi Cruz compares husband’s failed campaign to the fight to abolish slavery

  10-05-2016 20:13 via salon.com
  
  Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, accompanied by his wife, Heidi, and their two daughters, Catherine, 4, and Caroline, 7, for a South Carolina primary night rally at the South Carolina State Fairgrounds in Columbia, S.C., Saturday, Feb. 20, 2016. () (Credit: AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
  Heidi Cruz compared her husband’s unsuccessful run to the effort to abolish slavery, which she said took “a lot longer than four years” to find success, according to The
  
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• Senate Republicans rush to investigate allegations of Facebook news bias — still refuse to hold hearings for SCOTUS nominee

  10-05-2016 19:35 via salon.com
  
  Mark Zuckerberg (Credit: Reuters/Stephen Lam)
  As if the ineptitude of Mitch McConnell’s Senate is not humiliating enough, Republicans have just performed a most brazen bit of ideological hypocrisy that rivals any of the nonsensical positions put forth by the newly minted presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump.
  The Republican Party is such a joke it would be funny if it weren’t so scary.
  Republicans on theSenate’s Commerce, Science, and Transportation Com
  
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• The November freakout begins: It’s May, so let’s all go crazy over a few good polls for Trump

  10-05-2016 19:31 via salon.com
  
  Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump (Credit: Reuters/Brendan McDermid/AP/Ted S. Warren)
  It’s been a solid week since Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and we were overdue for a generalized freak-out over whether an unlikeable and manifestly unqualified cartoon character could actually win the presidency. But that void has now been filled, thanks to a trio of swing-state polls just released by Quinnipiac.
  According to the pollster, Trump is either slightly head
  
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• Bristol Palin’s custody drama takes most unexpected turn to date: Co-parental bliss with baby daddy Dakota Meyer

  10-05-2016 19:16 via salon.com
  
  (Credit: Todd Williamson/invision/ap)
  It’s been a tumultuous journey for Bristol Palin and her baby daddy Dakota Meyer.
  The two met in 2013, became engaged at a Rascal Flatts concert in March 2015, called off said engagement in May 2015, and announced their pregnancy a month later. Palin gave birth to a girl, Sailor Grace, on Dec. 23.
  This drama lingered into the early months of Sailor’s life after Meyer pushed for child support and joint custody in January. Palin then made him
  
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• Man charged with hate crime after training his pug to make Nazi salute

  10-05-2016 18:43 via salon.com
  
  Markus Meechan posted a video titled “M8 yer dug’s a Nazi” on his YouTube account in which consists of footage revolving around training his girlfriend’s dog. The regiment involves transforming “Do you want a glass of juice” into “Do you want to gas the Jews?” in addition to watching videos of Hitler speeches and the pug even responds to the Nazi Party phrase “Sieg Heil!” (Hail victory!) by lifting a paw reminiscent of a
  
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• Twitter trolls Israeli prime minister with #AskNetanyahu — 2 days before his scheduled Q&A

  10-05-2016 18:39 via salon.com
  
  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted information on Tuesday morning about an upcoming #AskNetanyahu live Q&A session, scheduled for Thursday, May 12.
  #AskNetanyahu immediately started trending on Twitter, as users sent out thousands of mostly critical tweets — two days before the event was scheduled to take place.
  LIVE TWITTER Q&A: Prime Minister Netanyahu answers your questions.
  Tweet your questions at: #AskNetanyahu pic.twitter.com/Gz63c1uBZ8
  — PM of Israel (@I
  
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• So you want to make a sex tape hoax: Yacht’s little publicity stunt is one odd way to self-promote

  10-05-2016 18:30 via salon.com
  
  What does a mid-sized band do to get attention in media landscape that’s become more and more dominated by superstars? How can a smart, conceptual band comment on the declining revenues being made from recordings? Well, every group has its own answer to this. But the electronic duo Yacht may have come up with the most imaginative answer yet.
  It started when the group’s Jona Bechtolt wrote an earnest post on Facebook about having a sex tape made for private use leaked on the
  
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• Will they ever learn? North Carolina lawsuit shows why the religious right was downright stupid to pick on trans people

  10-05-2016 18:23 via salon.com
  
  North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory is bound and determined to go into the history books as a villain.
  After the Department of Justice sent McCrory a letter last week, warning him that North Carolina’s new law that bans transgender people from using public bathrooms that correspond with their gender, there were a lot of options, ranging from accepting that you can’t just violate federal anti-discrimination laws to begging for more time to waiting for the lawsuit and battling it out
  
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• Shock poll: Donald Trump “dead even” with Hillary Clinton in key swing states

  10-05-2016 17:55 via salon.com
  
  The general election is officially six months away (as of Sunday) and with Republicans finally settling on the their longtime frontrunner, Donald Trump, as their presumptive nominee within the last week and Hillary Clinton finally beging to own the title of her party’s presumptive nominee that was prematurely bestowed upon her before the start of a long, contentious and still continuing Democratic battle against Bernie Sanders, pollsters are rushing to survey the landscape and a shock
  
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• This is Colbert’s high-wire act now: Dan Savage comes on “The Late Show” to demolish GOP transphobia

  10-05-2016 17:35 via salon.com
  
  Last night on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” after a long interview with Kaley Cuoco of “The Big Bang Theory” and a cold open with Senator Bernie Sanders, host Stephen Colbert invited on sex columnist and activist Dan Savage. Ostensibly, Savage was on the show to discuss 25 years of his column “Savage Love.” But in the current climate of “The Late Show,” Savage’s presence appeared to be there to say some things that Colbert couldn&rsqu
  
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• Big drama ahead on “Orange Is the New Black”: New trailer teases a tense season 4

  10-05-2016 17:04 via salon.com
  
  Netflix dropped the trailer today for the fourth season of “Orange is the New Black,” ahead of its June 17 release date. The series — based on Piper Kerman’s memoir of the same name — dramatizes the experiences of a white collar criminal in an all-female minimum security prison.
  In the trailer, Litchfield continues its transition to a for-profit institution, overflowing the facility with 100 new inmates; Piper has “started to feel unsafe la
  
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• The Republican Party ruined conservatism long before Trump: Why they still don’t get it

  10-05-2016 16:57 via salon.com
  
  The Republican Party has experienced a good deal of success in the last three decades or so. They’ve won elections, they’ve raised ungodly sums of money, they’ve subverted democracy via redistricting, and they’ve expertly dictated the political and cultural narratives. What they haven’t done is govern effectively or, more importantly, conservatively.
  This is true at both the national and state levels. Modern conservative mythology begins with Reagan, a man who tripl
  
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• David Brooks will never get it: After getting Trump and GOP wrong, now he has a new crusade

  10-05-2016 16:52 via salon.com
  
  In his 1936 essay “The Crack Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the ‘impossible,’ come true. Life was somethin
  
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• Meghan Trainor fights back against toxic body standards: “They photoshopped the crap out of me and I’m so sick of it”

  10-05-2016 16:50 via salon.com
  
  The work of bringing booty back never ends, and it doesn’t just stop with booty, either. If anyone should know that, it’s Meghan Trainor. Keep fighting the good fight, lady.
  The 22 year-old Grammy winner first rose to fame two years ago with her omnipresent, song of the summer anthem to curves, “All About That Bass.” So when a woman who gave us the lyrics, “I ain’t no size 2″ released the video for “Me Too,” the new single from her forthcomin
  
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• “Obama out”: 14 times the Obamas were the absolute coolest first family

  10-05-2016 16:42 via salon.com
  
  This montage of some of the coolest Obama family moments in the White House will make you laugh and feel all the feels.
  
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• The Christian right’s Trump-ageddon: How Donald Trump is tearing religious conservatives apart

  10-05-2016 16:30 via salon.com
  
  One of the fascinating ongoing sideshows of the Conservative Crack-up is the deep schism Trump has revealed within the Christian Right. It’s just one of many sub-stories in this outrageous campaign, but since so-called conservative “values voters” have been such major players in GOP politics and American political life in general for decades now, it’s an important one.
  Although there have been rumblings of discontent over the past few years, as younger evangelic
  
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• Check out the woman-centric artwork Hillary Clinton has in her private collection

  10-05-2016 16:30 via salon.com
  
  Carole Feuerman, a hyper-realistic artist who came of age during the early years of the Feminist movement, is best known for her lifelike sculptures of women, primarily clad in swimwear.The artist has sold her works to clients such as Henry Kissinger, The Emperor of Japan and the Clintons, according to Feuerman’s Curriculum vitae.We caught up with Feuerman to talk about her artwork and she revealed which pieces she sold to the Clintons. Watch our video to find out.
  
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• Donald Trump is more unpopular than lice, Nickelback: Watch Rachel Maddow read a hilarious list of things more popular than Trump

  10-05-2016 16:20 via salon.com
  
  On the Monday night edition of MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow got her hands on a newly released national poll that found the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee significantly more unpopular than some of the most despised things in American life.
  Donald Trump is less popular than lice, a new Public Policy Poll found. 
  “Not to nitpick, but this new national polling also finds that Mr. Trump is viewed less favorably than not just
  
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• “A mutant from a carrot juicing accident”: Trevor Noah burns Donald Trump

  10-05-2016 14:29 via salon.com
  
  “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah last night examined all the ways in which Donald Trump is “disrupting” the Republican party, of which he is the presumptive nominee.
  “Now the race is over,” Noah said. “And the Republican voters have chosen a mutant from a carrot juicing accident.”
  And now, though Trump is such a divisive figure within his own party, Republicans are forced to rally around this mutant if they want to keep a Democrat out of the Oval
  
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• Bernie Sanders dazzles Stephen Colbert: “I don’t take money from billionaires, but I do check every vending machine change slot”

  10-05-2016 14:07 via salon.com
  
  Out of nowhere, Bernie Sanders appeared on Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” cold-open sketch last night.
  After Colbert has his arm caught in a vending machine trying to retrieve a Kit Kat bar, the Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate arrived to teach him a lesson in perseverance.
  “I don’t take money from billionaires, but I do check every vending machine change slot,” Sanders said, though he found no change and promptly walked away.
  He returned t
  
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• An open letter to Donald Trump supporters: Please, for the love of all that is good, reconsider this insanity!

  10-05-2016 14:00 via salon.com
  
  A strange old hermit once asked, “Who’s the bigger fool — the fool, or the fool who follows him?” Regarding the ascendancy of Donald Trump to the station of presumptive Republican nominee, it’s extraordinarily clear who the fool is, and while Trump is, himself, an unqualified and horrendously undignified would-be president, his supporters have been suckered into supporting him anyway — for all of the wrong reasons.
  This article is as much about them as it is a
  
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• Beyoncé wins again: She faces protests for her politics, but like the Dixie Chicks and Sinead O’Connor, the right’s proven wrong again

  10-05-2016 13:59 via salon.com
  
  Ever since Beyoncé released her single “Formation” and promoted it during her Super Bowl half-time performance back in February, there’s been ham-fisted and frankly pathetic efforts from police organizations across the country to claim that Beyoncé’s anti-brutality/anti-racism message is somehow an anti-police message. The latest effort in this pointless tantrum came to us on Saturday night, as members of an organization called Coalition for P
  
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• David Brooks jumps to conclusions about raising children that, just this once, can’t be complained about

  10-05-2016 13:55 via salon.com
  
  In his Tuesday New York Times column, David Brooks spins out some ideas about our grade-point-average-obsessed culture based on his reading of Angela Duckworth’s “Grit,” and for once it’s difficult to complain about the conclusions he’s jumping to.
  “Success is about being passionately good at one or two things, but students who want to get close to that 4.0 have to be prudentially balanced about every subject,” he wrote. “Creative people are good a
  
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• Samantha Bee’s devastating Ted Cruz kiss-off: “Godspeed, you terrifying, fundamentalist swamp Reagan”

  10-05-2016 13:45 via salon.com
  
  “Full Frontal” host Samantha Bee mourned Ted Cruz’s departure from the GOP primary.
  After a thorough loss to Donald Trump in the “must-win” state of Indiana last week, Cruz finally decided to put a fork in his campaign.
  “We were all blindsided by Ted Cruz suspending his campaign,” Bee said. “No one more than me. I think you know what that man meant to ‘Full Frontal.'”
  She then rolled a montage of descriptors for Cruz she&rsquo
  
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• That’s totally it: Seth Meyers just figured out how Donald Trump forms his opinions

  10-05-2016 13:12 via salon.com
  
  “Late Night” host Seth Meyers last night took a “Closer Look” at Donald Trump’s alleged flip-flopping on “some of the biggest economic issues of the 2016 campaign.”
  Trump has faced scrutiny for recent claims he made regarding proposed tax hikes for the wealthy, seemingly at odds with earlier campaign trail promises of indiscriminate tax cuts. The presumptive GOP nominee has since walked back his contradictory new platform, saying, “If I i
  
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• Donald Trump’s tax miasma: When talking tax cuts, Trump leaves a confusing trail of nonsense

  10-05-2016 12:00 via salon.com
  
  Does Donald Trump want to raise taxes on rich people? The answer to this question is shifting and variable, and made all the more confusing by the fact that the Republicans’ presumptive presidential nominee gives deceptive answers while insisting at the same time that his tax plan – one of the few specific policy proposals he’s put forth – will not survive contact with Congress.
  It’s damn near impossible to keep track of where Trump stands, given that most of what h
  
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• The women who accused Bill Clinton: A primer on the sex scandals that Donald Trump won’t stop taunting Hillary about

  10-05-2016 11:59 via salon.com
  
  After a primary campaign that saw him insult Carly Fiorina’s looks, threaten to expose (something) about Ted Cruz’s wife, and boast about the size of his penis, Donald Trump promised voters that once he won the Republican nomination, he would tone things down. Weeks before his last remaining rivals dropped out of the race, Trump declared that when the time is right, “I will be so presidential you will be so bored.”
  But now that
  
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• Donald Trump is just this dumb: He doesn’t even know what he doesn’t know — but his latest ignorance is breathtaking

  10-05-2016 11:58 via salon.com
  
  Donald Trump is an ignorant fool. He doesn’t know anything about anything, and worse yet he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know anything about anything. (In psychology, this is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect). The sum total of his talents consists of having the foresight to be born to an immensely wealthy father, and possessing a Rain Man-style idiot-savant capacity for self-promotion. That’s it.
  A couple of days ago he provided a frighteningly clear illustration of the
  
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• Donald Trump still isn’t the future of the Republican Party: Why Ted Cruz could still leave his slimy imprint on the GOP of tomorrow

  10-05-2016 11:57 via salon.com
  
  You had to know Ted Cruz’s ego would not allow him to just go back to his day job in the Senate like a normal person after suspending his presidential campaign last week. Though to be fair, it is not as if being a senator is a full-time job these days, and all his co-workers hate him and probably don’t want to sit with him at lunch anyway.
  News broke on Monday that while the campaign for the presidency may be over, the Texan’s supporters still plan to try and influence policy b
  
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• The Obama administration’s Panama Papers misfire: Why new rules to curtail global tax avoidance could actually make things worse

  10-05-2016 11:56 via salon.com
  
  The Obama Administration didn’t wait for yesterday’s release of over 200,000 offshore companies implicated in the Panama Papers investigation to respond to ongoing revelations of routine tax avoidance by wealthy individuals. Last week, they announced a suite of new rules to combat tax evasion and money laundering through anonymous shell corporations, and pressured Congress to go even further.
  In theory, more disclosure and transparency makes sense. But experts who have urged action o
  
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• There are no Reagan Democrats: The GOP has become the party of rich, white Southerners

  10-05-2016 11:45 via salon.com
  
  Now that Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, we are likely to get all sorts of mainstream media analysis about how his narrow pathway to Election Day victory runs through white working-class America, the way Ronald Reagan’s did, while the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, must corral young people, minorities and the well-educated.
  In case you haven’t noticed, there is an unmistakable media bias in this – one that was framed perfectly
  
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• Noam Chomksy: America is an empire in decline

  10-05-2016 11:30 via salon.com
  
  [This piece, the first of two parts, is excerpted from Noam Chomsky’s new book, Who Rules the World? (Metropolitan Books).  Part 2 will be posted on Tuesday morning.]
  When we ask “Who rules the world?” we commonly adopt the standard convention that the actors in world affairs are states, primarily the great powers, and we consider their decisions and the relations among them. That is not wrong. But we would do well to keep in mind that this level of abstraction can also be
  
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• Delusional, prudish, selfish, violent: This is how Americans compare to the rest of the world

  10-05-2016 11:15 via salon.com
  
  Cultural differences exist across borders, and because monoliths are mostly fantasies, often within them, too. That said, America, in particular, is culturally perplexing, and even confounding to a lot of the rest of the world. I am not, as Americans are wont to do, laboring under the delusion that people in other places spend all that much time thinking about us. We are all, as a species, just trying to get through this thing called life. The conservative American notion that people with far b
  
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• Hillary runs away from Bernie: The presumptive Democratic nominee pays lip service to Sanders supporters and nothing more

  10-05-2016 11:00 via salon.com
  
  Donald Trump has made it clear that he’s paying attention to Bernie Sanders’ sharpest critiques of Hillary Clinton and plans to use them if she’s the nominee—just as he has mimicked other Sanders stances. So why isn’t Hillary embracing Bernie’s best ideas?
  That question came into sharper relief in this past week, after Trump secured the GOP nomination after Indiana’s primary and Sanders upset Clinton and pledged to keep running despite her large lead in
  
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• Wheeee! https://t.co/OWCW8n8FzS

  10-05-2016 06:15 via twitter.com
  
  Wheeee! https://t.co/OWCW8n8FzS
  
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• The rape of Lyanna Stark: “Game of Thrones”’ biggest mystery revolves around a woman’s consent

  10-05-2016 01:00 via salon.com
  
  As I wrote in my recap this morning, last night’s episode of “Game Of Thrones,” “Oathbreaker,” was particularly exciting for Westerosi history buffs:
  For a book-reading fan like myself, the most thrilling resolution was in Bran’s vision of a battle between a dozen or so knights in the dusty desert at the base of a nondescript tower. That tower is the Tower of Joy, and one of the knights fighting for entrance is Bran’s father Eddard Stark as a young man (
  
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• Meet the Ayn Rand enthusiast whose private college empire reaps a fortune from the government

  10-05-2016 01:00 via salon.com
  
  Ayn Rand enthusiast Carl Barney says he ethically objects to government-backed loans because they interfere with unbridled free market capitalism. But that has not stopped the private college tycoon from ruthlessly building his fortune on students who take out such loans, only to face horrific debt, high drop-out rates and an educational environment fraught with abuse.
  Yet, according to a New York Times profile by Patricia Cohen, Barney sees himself as a principled ideologue, contributing milli
  
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• Embrace “The Good Wife”’s final slap: A happily-ever-after ending would have been the show’s biggest betrayal

  10-05-2016 00:59 via salon.com
  
  For many viewers, “The Good Wife” finale was a literal slap in the face. In recent weeks, the acclaimed CBS procedural teased the resolution of its core love triangle: Would Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) wind up with Jason (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the sexy investigator with whom she is having an affair, or Peter (Chris Noth), her unfaithful husband? Her marriage is, at this point, one of convenience; Alicia and Peter need each other for political gain. Peter recently mounted a f
  
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• What it means to be brown: Cheap labor, scapegoated Muslims and exploited immigrants, from Canada to Qatar

  10-05-2016 00:58 via salon.com
  
  Toronto-based writer Kamal Al-Solaylee’s first book, “Intolerable” (2012), recounted his harrowing youth as a gay Yemeni coming of age in the Middle East. In the book, the author — once a theatre critic for the Globe and Mail and now a journalism professor at Ryerson University — artfully melded the personal and political into a powerful memoir.
  Al-Solaylee takes this approach even further in his follow-up, “Brown: What Being Brown Mea
  
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