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Month: May 2026
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Last month, Britney Spears checked herself into rehab. She’s now back in LA, and all eyes are on her.
In fact, she’s getting so much attention that an energetic dinner out on Wednesday night made headlines.
At a tavern, she reportedly carried a knife through the dining area, lit a cigarette indoors, and barked.
Now, a new report says that she stopped by a liquor store beforehand. But what did she actually get?
What did she get from the liquor store?
The Daily Mail obtained surveillance footage of Britney and a friend stopping by a Sherman Oaks liquor store on Wednesday ahead of their dinner.
The footage shows the music superstar stop by Wines of the World with her companion in the LA neighborhood.
In the video, Britney walks around the store and seems to be in a good mood — from what one can tell in a video.
Her companion selected a canned beverage. The two then went up front to pay.
Britney selected a pack of gum and added it when it was time for him to pay.
So, just to clarify, this is footage of a 44-year-old woman buying gum before going to dinner with two companions.
She didn’t buy alcohol. It’s unclear if companion actually purchased an alcoholic beverage.
(Liquor stores do generally offer other items — such as, for example, gum.)
Rather than a look at a “wild” post-rehab Britney, we’re instead facing the jarring reality that has defined her world for the past quarter of a century.
Wherever she goes, she is surveilled. Her every action is under a microscope.
So, aside from being messy (and lighting up before leaving the restaurant), she did nothing wrong, right?
Admittedly, a liquor store is probably an ill-advised place for someone to visit in general after rehab.
Many people who visit rehab facilities may be struggling with addiction rather than simply with substance abuse.
Addiction is complex, and can wear down someone’s impulse-control until they might tell themselves anything to justify indulging once again.
That doesn’t seem to be the case with Britney. In her case, the big worry might be optics.
In a sense, one might argue that this surveillance footage is doing her a favor. Yes, it’s deeply intrusive. But it also shows her buying gum — rather than a vague mention of her simply stopping at a liquor store.
Britney’s rep highlighted that the dinner was a pretty normal dinner out.
The statement specified that she was at the dog-friendly tavern with her assistant and bodyguard.
For the knife, well, she was at a restaurant and wanted to cut her burger. (Some of us don’t touch burgers with our hands, but in her case, it was just to slice one in half.)
As for the “barking,” she was telling a story about her own dog. At a restaurant that welcomes dogs on its patio.
One wonders if all of the hysteria surrounding Britney’s every move and Instagram post has primed people to imagine her actions as more dramatic and messy than they actually are.
Britney Spears Visited Liquor Store Ahead of ‘Barking’ Dinner: What Did She … was originally published on The Hollywood Gossip.
The Hollywood Gossip
Ever since U.S. commandos successfully removed Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela on Jan. 3, 2026, speculation has been growing that “Cuba could be next” on the list of the Trump administration’s targets.
“We’ll take over Cuba almost immediately,” President Donald Trump mused during a speech in Florida on May 1. “On the way back from Iran, we’ll have … the USS Abraham Lincoln come right by Cuba, stop about 100 yards offshore, and they’ll say, ‘Thank you very much, we give up.’”
It’s hard to say whether such remarks are just bluster. While the White House has been trying to coerce Cuban authorities into negotiated political and economic concessions through a de facto oil blockade since January, Trump has also reportedly grown frustrated by the Cuban government’s ability to outlast months of sustained U.S. pressure.
That has not stopped many Cubans and Cuban Americans from eagerly predicting a military operation’s success or insisting that such a U.S. action is necessary.
Their tool of choice? Not battle plans or political manifestos, but artificial intelligence. For weeks, Cuban social media feeds and WhatsApp groups have been filled with armchair fantasies of deliverance from communist rule made with tools like Midjourney, DALL-E, Runway and ChatGPT. In some clips and images, the island nation is represented as a female captive or a child being freed by an American protector. In others, magically renovated cityscapes feature statues and portraits erected in Trump’s honor, replacing revolutionary iconography.
It is easy to dismiss such animations as online trolling. But as a historian of Cuba, I noticed something troubling when my colleague Jorge Damian de la Paz sent me a selection of these digital illustrations and reels. Their visual language eerily mirrors classic U.S. political cartoons during Cuba’s final war for independence against Spain in the late 19th century. That imagery went on to justify U.S. meddling in Cuban affairs for decades.
A fraught history
In the 1890s, American illustrators at publications such as Puck, Judge and Harper’s Weekly similarly portrayed Cuba as a feminized victim: weak, vulnerable, often racialized as nonwhite and incapable of securing freedom on her own. They imagined grateful tropical citizens celebrating future American liberators for defeating their Spanish overlords and bestowing the benefits of “civilization” on Caribbean life.
Such tropes were not innocent. They helped generate the cultural consensus that legitimized U.S. intervention in the Cuban war in 1898 – known by most Americans as the Spanish-American War. They also shaped Cuba’s postwar order: four years of U.S. military occupation, an imposed amendment to Cuba’s first constitution authorizing future American military action to preserve stability, and decades of political and economic dependence on the United States.
Taking their cue from heroes of the independence struggle such as José Martí, many Cubans grew to resent this asymmetrical relationship with the North, even as they fell in love with imported American consumer products and cultural pastimes. Especially by the 1930s and 1940s, mainstream political movements on the island all sought to, at a minimum, rebalance the extent of U.S. influence over Cuban life. Their failure to do so was part of what propelled Fidel Castro’s radical nationalist revolution to power in 1959.
Reversing course
But today, formal and informal polling suggests that significant numbers of Cubans and Cuban Americans seem willing to welcome, or at least tolerate, the explicit U.S. intervention that most of their forefathers rejected.
AI-generated expressions of these views do not appear to be coming from staunchly anti-communist exiles in South Florida alone. Comments and reposts suggest they are resonating among Cubans living on the island, many of whom are desperate for “something, anything” to put an end to the worsening blackouts, shortages and societal paralysis that have made daily life feel like purgatory.
If a U.S. military operation is the only way to escape, one friend in Havana told me, “que sea rápido” – let it be over quickly.
What’s distinct about AI is that it is providing this fatalism with a visual vocabulary rooted in imperial attitudes from the 1890s. This makes sense when you consider how the technology works: Generative AI systems have been trained on enormous, often U.S.-centric archives of historical photographs and other materials. They easily reproduce the old cultural and political prejudices seen in these digital repositories.
As a result, image and video generators appear to be spitting 19th-century American discourses back at 21st-century Cuban users. The most extreme iterations of the imagery even resurrect a long-dormant idea from more than a century ago: the outright annexation of the island as a U.S. state. In so doing, AI provides narrative fuel for the Trump administration’s efforts to rewind the clock to an era when Washington condescendingly treated Latin America as its “backyard.”
Deprivation and desperation
The depth of Cuba’s predicament today helps explain why these images are going viral.
Long before the Trump administration cut off oil supplies, Cubans were enduring their worst economic, political and social crisis in three decades. Botched internal reform efforts, repression of dissent, and mass migration profoundly eroded faith in Cuba’s Communist Party leadership and institutions in recent years. This has been particularly true since the island’s tourist-heavy economy was hit hard by COVID-19 and 2021 mass protests rocked more than 50 towns and cities.
Of course, plenty of Cubans in Cuba still blame the long-standing U.S sanctions regime, and Trump’s unprecedented additions to it, for many of their problems. Not all are willing to accept change at any cost.
But Cuban officials’ defense of national sovereignty in the face of mounting U.S. threats rings increasingly hollow. Cuba hasn’t held a truly competitive election in nearly 80 years and has been ruled by a one-party state for 65. Under those circumstances, political independence does not rest on the consent of the governed. It’s also hard for a country to claim sovereignty when its economy relies so strongly on external patrons, such as Russia, China, Venezuela (until January) and even the United States. Despite the embargo, Cuban Americans send hundreds of millions of dollars in remittances, food, medicines and other goods annually.
The seduction of rescue
Yet even if fantasies of rescue are understandable, they should be deeply concerning to anyone who cares about Cuba’s future.
The danger posed by AI images is not simply that they normalize the idea of a U.S. military intervention that could cost Cuban lives. It is that they replace deeper civic imagination with spectacle and clickbait.
AI is offering visions of liberation without requiring Cubans to grapple with the far more difficult dilemmas that any real transition would entail. Those questions include how to rebuild institutions, restore trust, confront inequality, reconstruct the economy, forge reconciliation and negotiate competing political visions after decades of polarization and authoritarianism.
Prolonged desperation, coupled with authorities’ stubborn refusal to open the island’s political and economic systems, has narrowed some Cubans’ political horizons to the point where they outsource their own salvation rather than imagine it from the bottom up.
The coming weeks may determine whether digital fantasies turn into concrete policy or remain wishful thinking. But one thing is certain: AI images of U.S. military intervention in Cuba reveal that many Cubans and Cuban Americans have given up on defining change on Cuban terms. That choice could mean the difference between a Cuba that once again becomes a U.S. client state and one where Cubans reclaim ownership of their nation’s future.
Michael J. Bustamante does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Politics + Society – The Conversation
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Maren will guest star on CBS’ ‘Sheriff Country’ and debut an original song called “Parachute” in the episode. Continue reading…The Boot – Country Music News, Music Videos and Songs
Every week political cartoonists throughout the country and across the political spectrum apply their ink-stained skills to capture the foibles, memes, hypocrisies and other head-slapping events in the world of politics. The fruits of these labors are hundreds of cartoons that entertain and enrage readers of all political stripes. Here’s an offering of the best of this week’s crop, picked fresh off the Toonosphere. Edited by Matt Wuerker.Politics
Georgia Democrats are worried their front-runner will fumble a “once in a generation” chance to win the governor’s mansion this year.
Keisha Lance Bottoms has what should be an enviable résumé: former judge, city council member, mayor of Atlanta and senior White House adviser. She’s dominating public polling in the primary, bolstered by high name recognition in the Atlanta metro area.
But a third of the Democratic electorate remains undecided, and her most high-profile endorsement is from former President Joe Biden, who left office deeply unpopular among Americans.
The wariness from Georgia Democrats stems from a simmering concern about Bottoms’ ability to win a general election, conversations with more than a half-dozen strategists and officials revealed. They warn that the crown jewel of Bottoms’ work experience — leading the state’s biggest city — will be a major drag to her campaign. Her tenure was marked by turmoil as Atlanta, like other major cities at the time, grappled with the onset of the pandemic, social unrest and spikes in crime.
Now, they worry, Bottoms could upend their best opportunity to flip the governorship for the first time in two decades.
“Keisha, because she’s so strongly identified with the city of Atlanta, obviously faces a very high hurdle,” said Howard Franklin, a Georgia-based Democratic strategist who is backing one of Bottoms’ competitors, former state Sen. Jason Esteves, and whose firm has performed contract work for his campaign. “I don’t think there’s anybody who’s paying attention to this race who thinks that Republicans are anything less than prepared to criticize and to pile on to the criticism of the four years that she was in office.”
The Democrats interviewed, some of whom were granted anonymity to speak openly about the primary, fear her record will be easily caricatured by Republicans in the general election, leaving her vulnerable to attacks on issues like public safety.
“The Republicans will eat her for lunch. The Republicans are begging us to nominate her,” said one longtime Democratic strategist unaffiliated in the race. “If she’s at the top of the ticket, the whole ticket loses. If she’s not … we can sweep it. The stakes are that high.”
TaNisha Cameron, a spokesperson for Bottoms’ campaign, dismissed the concerns as political hand-wringing and said the Democrat is focused on “standing up to Donald Trump’s candidate for governor.”
“Political insiders have underestimated Keisha Lance Bottoms her entire career, and she has constantly proven them wrong by winning elections and beating their hand-picked candidates. Keisha is leading in the polls in both the primary and general election because voters like her vision for Georgia’s future and her record of delivering for the people of Atlanta,” Cameron said in a statement, going on to highlight how Bottoms attracted nine Fortune 500 companies to Atlanta while in office and left the city with a $180 million budget surplus.
Central to Bottoms’ pitch to voters is a pledge to expand Medicaid in Georgia and guarantee universal pre-K statewide. In mid-May, just a few weeks after the Supreme Court significantly limited the power of the Voting Rights Act, Bottoms released a comprehensive plan to protect access to the ballot in Georgia.
This could be the Democratic Party’s last shot in a generation to grasp all the levers of political power in Georgia. Republican Gov. Brian Kemp is set to redraw the state’s congressional and state legislative districts ahead of 2028. And as President Donald Trump revives personal grievances about the 2020 election, the leading GOP gubernatorial candidates are vocal election deniers who continue to sow doubt about Georgia’s voting systems in a state that will be central to the 2028 presidential race.
Each of Bottoms’ Democratic primary opponents is running in their own loosely defined lanes: former DeKalb County executive Michael Thurmond as the steady hand with experience in statewide office, former state Sen. Jason Esteves as the progressive next-generation leader, and Republican-turned-Democrat Geoff Duncan as a moderate trying to appeal to voters in the center.
But those three contenders for runner-up have found themselves in a near statistical tie for second place for months. So far, they’re collectively holding Bottoms below the 50 percent threshold that she would need to win the race outright and advance to the general election.
“It’s unfortunate right now, but in the state of Georgia versus what we saw in 2018 with Stacey Abrams, or what we saw with Warnock — we’re missing the light,” said Cobb County Democratic Chair Essence Johnson, who’s staying neutral in the primary. “We don’t have a true, strong light, because there’s so many differences. It’s great, because that shows what democracy is. But again, there’s a lot of candidates.”
Some Democrats don’t see a major issue with Bottoms’ potential nomination — especially with the GOP in a tougher position, staring down Trump’s cratering approval ratings and struggling to message on voters’ cost of living concerns and an unpopular war in Iran.
“The Republican Party is very underwater. I think the Republican Party is more underwater than Keisha Lance Bottoms is,” said John Jackson, the former DeKalb County Democratic Chair. “At the end of the day, she’s a competitive general election candidate.”
One early general election poll shows Bottoms leading the three top Republicans running for governor, but all within the survey’s margin of error.
A Bottoms win would be historic: She would be the first Black woman elected governor in the history of the country — and the first Black governor of the Peach State.
The increased attention toward Bottoms’ performance with public safety did not happen in a vacuum, as several Black women — including former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and D.C.’s Muriel Bowser — faced extra scrutiny from critics as they guided major American cities through the depths of the pandemic and nationwide protests.
Bottoms’ defenders are confident in her standing with voters.
“I have seen the kind of hand-wringing, and it is predominantly coming from very, very, insider politico Atlanta circles,” said Kristen Kiefer, Democratic chair in Houston County, which is located in central Georgia. Because of her party role, she cannot endorse a candidate.
“What we saw from here, far from Atlanta, was somebody that was willing to stand up to the governor over mask mandates,” she said. “What we saw during social unrest was the city of Atlanta was making space for peaceful protests, but then, too, we all remember the night that Keisha was on TV with Killer Mike and T.I. telling everyone to go home and being ready to shut it down when it got out of hand.”
Still, others remain worried that Bottoms could hurt their chances, even in a midterm year that favors their party.
“Most Democrats who are being honest are nervous about the campaign of Mayor Bottoms, who, to be clear, brings a lot of strengths to the race,” said Andrew Heaton, a Georgia-based Democratic strategist who is unaffiliated in the primary. “[Republicans] are going to have to find messages against the other candidates. They’ve already got the attack ads on Mayor Bottoms written.”
Bottoms touts her wins in city hall on the campaign trail. In interviews, she has highlighted her administration’s success in building more affordable housing in Atlanta and authorizing pay raises for the city’s law enforcement. Still, her abrupt decision not to seek a second term in 2021, following a period of unrest in Atlanta, continues to haunt her.
“She’s got to answer some questions. She’s got to be able to answer these questions well: Why didn’t you run for reelection as mayor of Atlanta? There’s a perception that she ran away from that job,” said Jackson, whose tenure as DeKalb County Democratic Chair overlapped with Bottoms’ time as mayor. (Atlanta extends from Fulton County into DeKalb.)
At the time, Bottoms said in a press conference that it was “time to pass the baton on to someone else,” but did not detail her reasons for giving up the opportunity for another four years in office.
Pressed about her decision in a recent interview with Atlanta News First, Bottoms emphasized that she completed her term and didn’t skip out early.
“I served the entirety of my first term as mayor,” she said. “I was asked to go to the Biden White House three times, and decided not to do it because I wanted to complete the term that I had been elected to serve.”
The decision had followed a pounding four years in office that was dominated by the pandemic, a sharp rise in violent crime and protests over the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta. Bottoms’ response to the city’s social unrest drew bipartisan praise — particularly her impassioned remarks at a press conference with law enforcement telling protesters to “go home.”
But Democrats and Republicans alike have already seized on her perceived biggest vulnerabilities ahead of Election Day: that a reminder of her tenure in office will evoke flashbacks of burning buildings and unrest.
Esteves, the former state senator, attacked Bottoms on the debate stage last month over the death of 8-year-old Secoriea Turner, who was shot and killed while riding in a car near protests at the site where Atlanta police fatally shot Rayshard Brooks.
“I did not allow gangs to take over blocks. We lived through 2020 together. It was the most trying time in recent history in our country,” Bottoms responded. “I made every decision that I thought was the best decision at that time. But you cannot have the death of a child — of any child — and not wonder what, if anything, you could have done differently.”
Republicans, who have otherwise been mired in their own competitive and rancorous primary, have found time to preview their general election attacks against Bottoms. In an April ad, billionaire health care executive Rick Jackson said the former mayor “abandoned” her city in a crucial moment.
“When the city needed her, she let Atlanta burn,” Jackson says over footage of protests in downtown Atlanta.
That early Republican effort to attack Bottoms’ record is exactly what has some Democrats worried about her strength in a general election.
“This is a strategic choice. Sometimes when we make these choices in voting, some of the choices can be emotional, some of them can be related to personal ties,” said state Rep. Michelle Au, who is backing Duncan in the gubernatorial primary.
“But really the most important thing — or even the only important thing — is: Can this Democrat win? Because we can get a Democrat out of the primary, and that’s all fine, but if they can’t win in November, it does not achieve my goal.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article misstated Howard Franklin’s position on the Georgia governor’s race. He is backing former state Sen. Jason Esteves for the Democratic nomination.Politics