Author: Sara Robinson

As of today, Glenn Beck has lost 62 advertisers and counting due to Color of Change’s campaign. And FOX is still asserting that this doesn’t really hurt the network as a whole, because the advertisers are simply re-directing their ad buys to other shows. A lot of progressives have taken this dismissal at face value […]

There’s emerging evidence to suggest that, as the legitimate advertisers disappear, Glenn Beck’s TV show may be relying more and more on financial life support from rich right-wingers — with plenty of extra help from us taxpayers — to stay on the air. Media Matters is keeping daily track of the show’s remaining advertisers. For […]

Over on the right wing, the conservatives are all a-Twitter because someone dug up a YouTube video from last February in which White House environmental staffer Van Jones calls Republicans “assholes.” And then yesterday, Glenn Beck breathlessly revealed that back in 2004, Jones signed a petition calling for further inquiry into 9/11. Let’s not let […]

August, die she must. The town hall freak show is winding down, the media circus is packing the cameras and satellite dishes and hairspray back into the vans, and Congress is soon heading back to the relative safety of DC. Yet, after all the fuss and bother, they’re probably no more or less resolved to […]

Sara Robinson liveblogs Howard Dean’s talk at Netroots Nation, starting at 9am ET Friday morning. Come on by and join the chat! 8:55 There are a lot of people here, considering we were all up drinking past 1 am at vodka reception given at the nearby Andy Warhol museum by an associated gaggle of gay […]

Writing about fascism for an American audience is always a fraught business. Invariably, a third of the readers will dismiss the topic (and your faithful blogger’s basic sanity) out of hand. Either they’ve got their own definition of fascism and whatever’s going on doesn’t seem to fit it; or else they’re firm believers in a […]

All through the dark years of the Bush Administration, progressives watched in horror as Constitutional protections vanished, nativist rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself powers only demanded by history’s worst dictators. With each new outrage, the small handful of us who’d […]

Amid the huge media pile-on that’s gradually taking down the Birther fantasy, nobody’s actually bothered to point out that almost every element of their argument is based on a near-total ignorance about how U.S. citizenship works. There’s nothing like moving abroad (which I did five years ago) to make you acutely aware of exactly what […]

One of the big differences between the 1993 Hillarycare debate and our current conversation is that we’re hearing a lot more fact and lot less fiction about how other countries’ systems actually work. Thank the Internet. Back in 1993, the “Harry and Louise” ads succeeded because most Americans didn’t have access to any other sources […]