In their frustration at last night's sweep of the House by the Tea Party-fueled G.O.P., progressives are assessing just how this happened.

"We should have been more bold," Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Lynn Woolsey told Pacifica Radio's Mitch Jeserich last night. Woolsey suggested that if the Democrats had started out of...

Given the way things have gone for progressives since the election of Barack Obama, perhaps we shouldn't be blamed for looking warily, as some do, at the spectacle that promises to fill the national Mall at the Rally to Restore Sanity hosted by Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and...

Kicking off AlterNet's collaborative coverage of the Tea Party movement with the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute is my piece on the big-money forces behind this ostensibly grassroots movement. Highlights include reporting on the close relationship enjoyed by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation -- parent company of Fox News and...

Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, as a new job, running a think tank she founded to appeal to Tea Party supporters. Liberty Central, according to Kenneth P. Vogel, writing in Politico, "appears to be positioning itself as a hybrid think tank/advocacy group/campaign arm...

There's a debate shaping up in progressive circles about what the Tea Party movement means for the future of the nation. Are they just a bunch of disgruntled, disorganized kooks who are best dealt with by ignoring them? Or does the rise of this movement pose a threat to recent...

In a speech peppered with the jargon of Alcoholics Anonymous, Glenn Beck brought thousands of right-wingers attending the annual Conservative Political Action Conference to their feet by promising them that economic hardship was good for them, and that the progressive movement was "a cancer" that is "designed to eat the...

Friday's headlines were triumphant: President Barack Obama won a "showdown" with Republican leaders, convincing them to release the holds they had placed on the confirmation of 27 nominees to federal agencies. But Craig Becker, Obama's nominee to the National Labor Relations Board, was not part of that deal. Mr. Becker's...

Establishment Republicans, take notice. The Tea Party is about to steal your thunder.

According to a poll by Rasmussen Reports, likely voters in the 2010 congressional elections would rather cast a ballot for a candidate bearing the Tea Party brand than one on the Republican line.

In...

If you needed evidence that the community of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people is not monolithic in its politics, reaction to President Obama's speech to the annual Human Rights Campaign dinner offers plenty. But in their criticism of the president's remarks as "been there, done that," LGBT critics...

At this weekend's Values Voter summit, religious right leaders, who have long played to racial resentment, seem alarmed at how the overt racism of some of the Tea Partiers could harm their own movement -- decades in the making -- of politicized Christian evangelicals and conservative Catholics.

It was a...

The men behind the religious right make a comeback with the Tea Party movement.

Glenn Beck will tell you that this weekend's march of right-wing activists on Washington was six months in the making.

Don't believe a word of it. Try 40 years.

As disgruntled white taxpayers joined conspiracy...

If you thought the targeting of Van Jones for vilification by the Right was about his race, his youthful flirtation with socialism, or a petition he signed about the 9/11 attacks, you'd only be a little bit right. And if you think it was about the Color of Change...

Color of Change has done a remarkable thing: it has moved a host of major advertisers on the Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck show to withdraw their advertising from the program.

The catalyst was Beck's diatribes against President Obama -- calling him racist, and claiming that the president...

By now, you're likely familiar with the parade of racists, sexists, conspiracy theorists and hatemongers on the payrolls of mainstream media: CNN's Lou Dobbs advances the claims of unhinged birthers; FOX's Glenn Beck calls the president a racist; MSNBC pays as an analyst Pat Buchanan, who says...

At Wednesday's press conference, President Obama called on only three women out of the 10 reporters from whom he took questions. The answer to every question asked by a woman made news, with Lynn Sweet's end-with-a-bang query on the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., winning the night...

UPDATE: Jenn Pozner has a great analysis of the media's treatment of Palin at NPR.

UPDATE:At Writes Like She Talks, Jill Miller Zimon is on the #PalinSexism watch.

The ascent of Sarah Palin to the national political stage has yielded no shortage of material for legitimate criticism --...

There's nothing surprising in Sarah Palin's decision not to run for re-election as governor of Alaska. After all, if you've got a shot to become leader of the free world, it helps to have nothing but time to give the people of Iowa and New Hampshire in the year leading...

From the opening frames of Chérie, the viewer is drawn into an opulent, decadent world, at once foreign and familiar to those who have mixed with the denizens of high society in our own time. But the depiction of that world in director Stephen Frears' tour de force is no...

The killing of Dr. George Tiller, who provided abortion services to women with the hardest cases, will likely be attributed to some lone and deranged individual, acting on his own. Indeed, Operation Rescue, the hold-no-prisoners anti-abortion group, issued an immediate statement from Operation Rescue President Troy Newman, decrying...

President Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court is stunning on many levels: She's the third woman to serve on the high court, the first of Latino descent and the first to grow up in public housing.

On her own merits, Sotomayor is a deserving nominee. Yet...