The shooting in Roseburg, Oregon, is turning into a David Lynch movie. First, there's the sheriff who's a Sandy Hook "truther," now there's the shooter's mother who was stockpiling weapons and taking her troubled son to remote shooting ranges. She believed the government was about to confiscate guns, so she kept buying them. But here's the truth: it is now far easier to buy weapons, and much harder to trace who owns them, than at ANY TIME IN US HISTORY. So where do so many people get the idea that the 'guvmint' is coming to take their weapons -- when the 'guvmint' can't even pass a single law regulating gun sales, and when there has NEVER been a single 'guvmint' proposal to "confiscate" guns? These hysterical lies stem directly from the rightwing echo chamber: Murdoch, Limbaugh, the NRA...

"Lone nut" gunmen: natural fruit of the system. Hypercapitalism destroys social, family, community and economic bonds; it sews division, isolation, competition, greed; lauds force and violence and war as supreme values; turns rape and murder into nightly entertainment; dehumanizes and commodifies human beings at every turn ... and then we wonder why our society produces so many troubled, isolated, violent souls out there. A system set up on dehumanization and moral insanity is bound to produce the kind of damaged psyches we see falling prey to the hate that fills the nightmind of the internet -- and the broad daylight of Establishment violence and brutality -- and who then go walking into schools and churches and workplaces to act out the destructive chaos they hear in their heads ... and ...

The Daily Telegraph is an odd duck. Loathsome in almost every respect — from its nutball, feudal lord owners to its repulsive politics — from time to time it will suddenly print a piece of reportage that undercuts the prevailing propaganda narratives of the Anglosphere’s oh-so-very-free press.

Looks like the Times is giving the Guardian a run for their money in the "most ludicrously trivial slanting of Corbyn coverage" contest. First the Guardian noted the lèse majesté of Corbyn's lip movements (or lack thereof) during the national anthem; now the Times damns his bicycle for its associations with far-left mass murder. (The kind Corbyn is obviously plotting for all those who resist his evil plans to create a howling, hellish Britain with less war and fewer poor).

I’m very sorry Joe Biden’s son died recently. I truly am. I know it’s a deep, genuine pain, “overwhelming,” as he told Stephen Colbert, and he will carry it the rest of his life. But when I see all our earnest media progressives gushing over Joe’s “authenticity” in sharing that pain on national TV, I also think of the hundreds of thousands of people who lost children and other kith and kin in a pointless war that Joe not only voted for, but also actively encouraged with heated Senate hearings that whipped up war fever.

In September 2000, an advocacy group called "Project for New American Century," led by Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and others -- published a "blueprint" for "transforming" America's future. PNAC acknowledged that the "revolutionary" changes it envisaged could take decades to bring about -- unless, they said, the United States was struck by "some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor." One year later, after the disputed election of George W. Bush, came the "catalyzing" event of the 9/11 attacks -- which indeed "transformed" America's future in many "revolutionary" ways.

Our bold Saudi allies, using US weapons and guidance, struck another blow for freedom in Yemen this weekend, slaughtering 44 civilians including mourners at a funeral for people killed by the Saudis' enemies. The US is currently helping the extremist, misogynist, anti-Semitic, terrorist-supporting, head-chopping Saudi tyrants "restore" a former Yemen leader who took power in a single-candidate election. Because, as we all know, spreading freedom and democracy is the only reason we are involved in the Middle East. That's why we're working with the Saudi tyrants to overthrow the Syrian tyrant with the help of the religious tyrants of ISIS and al Qaeda whom we are also fighting when we are not working with them to overthrow the Syrian tyrant with whom we used to work closely in torturing s...

(UPDATED BELOW.) The Kim Davis gay marriage license case is a completely manufactured scandal, designed precisely to produce the current result: a “martyr” jailed for her beliefs, exciting media frenzy and fueling profitable fundraising and grassroots recruitment for ideological agitators. The actual issue is quite simple, and doesn’t involve “religious freedom” at all. But there is something more sinister going on behind these Kentucky conniptions.

In the Atlantic, Matt Ford probes the works of William Bradford, the controversial (and now dismissed) West Point professor whose berserker visions of unhinged state terror, at home and abroad, in the “war against Islamism” give General Buck Turgidison (“I’m saying no more than 10 or 20 million killed, tops!”) a run for his money. After a thorough examination of the views Bradford has been teaching the nation’s future military leaders, Ford ends in puzzlement at how this situation arose in the first place. But surely there is no mystery to that.

SEE LINK: Prouding America Great Again Now and in the Future ... For Our Children!

So Bernie Sanders wants a "kinder, gentler" program of extrajudicial drone killings. Well, isn't that nice? Isn't that "progressive"? He'll "try" to "limit" the number of children blown into pieces by joystick commandos 10,000 miles away watching a computer screen. What hope, what change! Oh well, he's just doing what anybody has to do to climb that big ole greasy pole of power. As long as he sticks with the Terror War program, the elite will be glad to let him pursue domestic "reforms" that they can easily block, dilute or co-opt -- just as they've done with the eagerly complicit Obama (who is now off to Alaska on a "bold" push to combat climate change ... just after giving Shell Oil the OK to drill in pristine waters there). In the immortal words of Elvis Costello: "Clowntime is over/...

As the old joke goes, “the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” Or another variant: “America will never forgive blacks for slavery.” Oppressors and abusers (and the beneficiaries of past abuses) often project their own guilt, self-loathing and dehumanization onto their victims, then hate them for being evidence – the living (or dead) proof – of the abusers’ moral rot. So it is with the rich and the poor, as a new story at Alternet demonstrates.