Sara Robinson

True confessions: I missed the health care speech. While the whole lefty blogosphere was watching and blogging and tweeting, I was sacked out in my attic bedroom high on a mountainside in Vancouver, sleeping off a narcotic haze and the exhausting aftermath of a long night spent in the emergency room at Lions Gate Hospital.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.