Produced by Timbaland's protégé Danja,

"Gimme More" has been well received by the pop press,

while over in the US, where it was released yesterday,

it is already doing well in the airplay charts

Great for Britney - but it's all a bit disorientating

   more »

Keywords: britney, culture, pop, music

I am increasingly certain that when the history of the Bush Administration is written, this systematic violation of statutory and treaty-based law concerning fundamental war crimes and other horrific offenses will be seen as the blackest mark in our nation's recent history.

Not only because of what was done, but because the programs were routinely sanctioned, on an ongoing basis, by numerous esteemed professionals -- lawyers, doctors, psychologists and government officers -- without whose approval such a systematized torture regime could not be sustained.

The way in which conservative lawyers, and conservative intellectuals, and conservative journalists aided and abetted these war crimes.

The way in which the president of the United States revealed so much contempt for the law that he put a candidate to run the Office of Legal Counsel on probation before he appointed him in order to keep the torture regime in place.   more »

She'll work the crowds as the consummate professional that she is, but it'll always be to a script; she might get love, but it will be the love a party gives to winners rather than the swooning sort of unconditional adoration Bill could inspire in his audience members.

No, this event was interesting not because of the quality of the oratory but because a candidate as unapologetically middle-of-the-road as Hillary Clinton, a politician who has made a career "triangulating," is now tacking to the left.

She is recreating herself as a no-nonsense populist, ready to ride into the halls of power as a saviour for the ordinary-Joes who've been hammered not just by seven years of Bush but by the un-nuanced version of globalization (job exportation, downward pressures on the wages of low-skilled labour) championed by a certain Bill back in the 1990s.

Hillary's new-found radicalism might be because the country as a whole is so down on business-as-usual politics.   more »

We get some context for understanding Obama’s willingness to parrot dominant reactionary claims on American social mobility when we look at his campaign finance profile.

The junior Senator from Illinois loves to wax eloquent and self-righteous about the dangers to American democracy posed by the private funding of elections and the disproportionate influence big money corporate donors hold over the nation’s politicians and policymakers.

At the same time, “Obama, Inc.” proceeds to set campaign fundraising records with considerable help from gigantic corporations and investment capital behemoths like Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase and Co., and Exelon.

These and other stupendous concentrations of wealth exercise quiet but powerful control over Obama’s campaign rhetoric and policy proposals.   more »

Giuliani stands to the right of George Bush - rejecting even the idea of a Palestinian state.

His foreign affairs adviser is Norman Podhoretz who, as editor of "Commentary", has called critics of the war "domestic insurgents" and thinks the invasion and all its dead "an amazing success."

Such conduct and such a chief councillor constitute the CV of a President Giuliani determining US policy toward Iran.

That policy would be to bomb them. If Iran should approach nuclear competence, he says, "we will prevent that or set them back five or 10 years. That is not said as a threat. That should be said as a promise."   more »