PERTH — Western Australia is one of Oceania’s best sources of grotesquerie. In the same way the Southern States serve America, Western Australia provides an endless supply of serial killing tales, small-town hatred and supernatural horror. Melbourne might be the place to visit if you want to see Victorian Gothic buildings and spooky thickets of pale, twisted eucalypts. Northern Queensland is fine for gigantic nettle trees, box jellyfish and coastal taipans. But West Australian grotesquerie is far more depressing and resilient, probably because WA (Western Australia) is larger than Greenland and every administrative region in Siberia excepting Yakutia. There aren’t enough yuppies in the world to gentrify an area that size. (more…)

This article was first published on TruthDig.com

If tea party candidates were serious about stopping runaway spending and bringing fiscal responsibility to Washington, they would have to address one of the most egregious wastes of taxpayer dollars: federal farm subsidies. These handouts have become little more than taxpayer robbery, sending billions of dollars every year to wealthy “farmers,” even some who do not farm at all. It is not an opportunity the tea party is willing to take.

“Washington paid out a quarter of a trillion dollars in federal farm subsidies between 1995 and 2009, but to characterize the programs as either a ‘big government’ bailout or another form of welfare would be manifestly unfair—to bailouts and welfare,” says Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, a watchdog that tracks federal farm subsidies. “After all, with bailouts taxpayers usually get their money back (often with interest), while welfare recipients are subjected to harsh means-testing, time-limited benefits, and a work requirement. …”

Not so with farm subsidies. Forget about helping struggling farmers—this taxpayer-funded gravy train is skewed primarily toward the rich, paying out billions to “McRanches” and to businesses like Fidelity National Financial, a Fortune 500 company, which got $6.5 million over four years to not farm its land. (more…)

Will Wilkinson: Libertard With Sadditude

Ever since Yasha and I first broke the story about the Koch brothers financing the Tea Party Campaign in February of 2009–a scoop that the New Yorker plagiarized from us a mere 18 months later, waytago fellas!–ever since then, I’ve been wondering: Have all those billions that the Brothers Koch invested into their libertarian brain-washing project paid off?

The answer: You betcha.

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Just when you thought you knew who not to trust, along comes another wave of bombshell revelations that make even seasoned skeptics and cranks seem like trusting pollyanas: you can never be too skeptical of the official version of events, …

Reader John M. sent us one of The eXile’s fabled “lost basement tapes”: our 1998 post-crisis Christmas charity song, “Send Them Crack” by “Bandit-Aid”: a giant fuck-you from all of us in Russia to the IMF, World Bank and all …

After a summer like the one we’ve just had, you’d be justified in asking, once again, “Why are movies such a pile of crap lately?”

According to Peter Greenaway, British filmmaker, it’s because, as he puts it, “Cinema is …

Exiled editor Mark Ames appeared on the Dylan Ratigan Show this week to talk about the 2nd anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse, the Tea Party electoral victories, and the decline of the American empire.

If you’re like us, you’re sick and tired of having to wait around for some loathsome celebrity to die just to read their obituary. Who says we can’t read the obituary before they die, on our own time? …

“C’mon cancer, I dare you to knock this sneer off my face.”

Since writing my last piece on Hitchens (“How Christopher Hitchens Robbed Hunter S. Thompson’s Grave”), I’ve finally found a …

This article was first published by AlterNet

Good news from the trenches of California’s water war: The cabal of billionaire farmers and real estate developers that has been engineering a stealth privatization of …

No two ways about it, the famous editor was fried. Doing too much phone had finally done in his brain. No big thing normally, but his reader was sick this week, and his famous author had to have an answer, …

Ancient Gonzo Wisdom should be a perfect book: a collection of all the interviews Hunter S. Thompson ever gave. It begins with a talk Thompson gave on ABC News in 1967, shortly after Hell’s Angels was released. It ends with …

The full version of this article is published on the New York Observer Online.

So far, the debate over the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero has unfolded along predictable lines, with the man at the center …

There’s this woman making the rounds of the talk shows with her new book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On the Record. She’s an earnest, homely progressive named Leslie Kean with a tan semi-afro, wire-rimmed glasses, and the …

When Amazon started printing readers’ book reviews on the net, a window opened briefly on the mental worlds of ordinary people — or, as Harry Dean Stanton so memorably called them, “ordinary fuckin’ people.”

Everyone should have a look at …