Most people who have heard about the Rev. Pat Robertson’s assertion on the 700 Club that Haiti’s earthquake represents some sort of divine retribution for a “pact” made between Haitian freedom fighters and Satan back in 1803 probably shook their heads and chuckled at another sign the old goat is getting up there in years.
But let’s don’t forget this is part of a longstanding Robertson habit that goes back a long way to the days when he was an undoubted major power broker in the Christian Right, the conservative movement, and the Republican Party.
Don’t take my word for it; here’s a good analysis from Peter Wehner at National Review‘s The Corner:

There is another important issue involved here, which is a warped and confused theology Robertson has employed before. For example, Robertson agreed with Jerry Falwell that on 9/11 God lifted the “curtain” and allowed the enemies of America to give us “probably what we deserve”; and in 1998 he warned after Orlando city officials voted to fly rainbow flags from city lampposts during an annual Gay Day event at Disney World, “I don’t think I’d be waving those flags in God’s face if I were you. . . . [A] condition like this will bring about the destruction of your nation. It’ll bring about terrorist bombs, it’ll bring earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor.”
Pat Robertson’s argument is as neat and clean as a mathematical equation: God grants blessings and curses on nations and people based on their allegiance and obedience to Him. If things are going well, you’re living right; if things are going badly, you’re living wrong. And it is Robertson himself who can divine the hierarchy of sins that most trouble God.
But this view simply does not correspond with any serious understanding of Christianity.

Couldn’t agree more, but Wehner does not observe that Robertson’s arrogant presumption that he knows God’s Will on every occasion is exceptionally common within the Christian Right, and conservative fundamentalist circles generally. Ol’ Pat’s confident belief that God hates Haiti is no stranger than the equally confident belief of his many Christian Right colleagues over the years that God opposed the Panama Canal Treaty, supports high-end tax cuts and the Iraq War, wants Israel to touch off Armageddon, and dislikes health care reform. If you happen to be a fundamentalist, there’s at least a bit of scriptural evidence to support the Christian Right’s argument against gay rights (though there’s a lot less scriptural basis for their passionate anti-abortion crusade), but it’s hardly the sort of proposition that is self-evident. Robertson’s breezy I-speak-for-God assertions about Haiti don’t really stand out in the Christian Right tradition.
So let’s not marginalize Robertson as a long-in-the-tooth nut who has lost his wits. He’s arguably made his own pact with the Devil to subordinate the Christian Gospel to a single-minded devotion to conservative culture and right-wing politics. And he’s hardly alone.

This item is crossposted from ProgressiveFix.com.
A recent report from a “Democratic Change Commission” authorized by the last national convention to look at the presidential nominating system mainly got attention for its predictable recommendation that “superdelegates” lose their independent voting power. The “supers” will still get convention seats and votes, but said votes will be allocated according to primary or caucus results in their home states (which could make the DC primary of greater-than-usual interest).
A second Change Commission recommendation got a bit of attention: another in a long series of efforts to reduce “front-loading” of the nominating process by pushing the “windows” for allowable primaries and caucuses forward a month (the Commission did not, however, tamper with the two-tiered process by which four states—IA, NV, NH and SC—get their own early “window”).
But virtually no one was aware of a third recommendation, until yesterday, when 538.com’s Tom Schaller interviewed Change Commission member (and 2008 “delegate guru” for the Obama campaign) Jeff Berman. According to Berman, the commission is encouraging the party to award bonus convention delegates to states that agree to cooperate in regional primary/caucus “clusters.” Regional primaries, long a favorite idea of critics of the current system, are relatively efficient ways of enabling candidates to compete for significant delegate counts, particularly when contrasted with the high costs and sheer madness of big, scattered national “clusters” like Super Tuesday, or the inefficiency of dozens of individual contests.
The big questions, of course, are (1) whether the party chooses to make the “bonuses” large enough to actually encourage states to participate in regional primaries, and (2) whether there’s a parallel movement by Republicans, since many states require both parties to hold nominating events on the same day. On this latter point, it’s probably an ideal time for Democrats to make changes in the nominating system, as nobody much expects a challenge to President Obama in 2012. But with Republicans anticipating a wide-open nomination contest, any changes in the system will be scrutinized minutely for their possible impact on particular candidates.
I would argue that a direct assault on the “right” of states to control the presidential nominating process is the only way to ensure major reforms. But barring that, the carrots-and-sticks approach of the Change Commission is perhaps the best available avenue for reform. And there’s no time like the present to undertake it.

Tennessee was one of America’s original frontier states, full of turbulent Scotch-Irish who did not easily plant roots. The state continued to contribute heavily to the westward migration of Americans, symbolized, of course, by the event that gave the Volunteer State its name: the presence of a large Tennessee element at the Alamo.
After a long history of Tennesseans moving west, all the way to California (many “Okies” had roots in Tennessee), in the mid-to-late twentieth century the state contributed heavily to the biracial migration of southerners to the auto plants and other high-wage opportunities of the Midwest. Bobby Bare’s great country song “Detroit City” is an enduring testament to this migration.
Today Tennessee likes to think of itself as a major magnet for the relocation of Yankees, particularly those who don’t like paying income taxes. But as we saw just yesterday, the restless Volunteer tradition lives on.
The young, smack-talking head coach of the University of Tennessee Volunteers football team, Lane Kiffin, abruptly split for the (west) coast and the glamor program at the University of Southern California, after just one year of making many southern enemies, taking with him his highly paid coaching staff and probably a few Tennessee recruits.
The very same day, former Tennessee Congressman (and 2006 Democratic Senate candidate) Harold Ford, Jr., was making big waves in New York as a putative primary challenger to U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.
Now I don’t want to push the analogy too far. Kiffin’s departure, timed to wreak maximum damage on Big Orange football prospects, sparked an actual riot in Knoxville. I don’t think any mattresses were burned when Harold Ford quietly decamped from Memphis to New York a while back. Moreover, Ford is an authentic Tennessee native, while Kiffin spent a year there between extended stints in California. And without a doubt, college football is a much bigger deal than politics in Tennessee, as in other southern states.
Still, you have to consider both developments a contribution to Tennessee’s longstanding tradition of itchy feet. And that’s a tough legacy to enjoy.

The possibility of Democrats losing their 60th Senate seat in Massachusetts next week, slim as it is, should concentrate minds once again on the travesty of the 60-vote threshold for enacting legislation in the Senate. The Senate being what it is, of course, prospects for a major change in rules governing filibusters are not that good, unless some new dynamic is introduced.
At The American Prospect, Mark Schmitt may have identified an avenue for Senate reform: link rules restricting filibusters to rules tightening up the use of the budget reconciliation process.
He predicts, quite plausibly, that if Republicans continue to gum up the works in the Senate by voting en bloc against cloture motions, needing just one Democrat (at present) to hold up action, Democrats will increasingly resort to the reconciliation process, which fast-tracks legislation and prevents filibusters. But that’s hardly an ideal scenario:

[B]ecause budget reconciliation was designed for a completely different purpose it makes an awkward fit for big policy initiatives. It’s like entering a house through the pet door instead of the front door — you might fit, if you twist just the right way, but it will be painful. Provisions that don’t directly affect the budget can’t be included, so, for example, much of the fine detail of health-insurance regulation in the current bill would likely have been lost if pushed through reconciliation. If Congress chose reconciliation as the means to pass a jobs bill, it could include tax credits for job creation but probably not many of the infrastructure-spending initiatives that would directly create jobs.

Still, what choice does any majority party in the Senate have if the minority party chooses to block all major legislation? The experience with health reform is all but certain to create momentum among Democrats for using reconciliation whenever possible. And thus the dilemma, says Schmitt:

So what we have in the Senate are two extremes: the rigid, partisan system of near-total stasis created by the filibuster, on the one hand, and the merciless, closed-door, majority-controlled arcane process of budget reconciliation on the other. A solution might be found in reforming both: Loosen the stranglehold of the filibuster…. And in return, offer the minority party a reform of the power of budget reconciliation that currently cuts them out entirely. Start by permanently limiting reconciliation to measures that actually reduce the deficit (a rule the Democrats adopted in this Congress) and then look at reforms that open up the process to longer debate and a wider range of amendments.

Schmitt cites a number of feasible filibuster reforms, including Sen. Tom Harkin’s proposal to gradually lower the votes needed for cloture after repeated efforts to move legislation are thwarted, along with the very popular idea of requiring actual stemwinding filibusters instead of paper threats. But what’s important is Schmitt’s notion of packaging together reforms attractive to both majority and minority parties. The big question is whether Republicans are interested in any reforms, if only because they hope someday to return to majority status in the Senate. Maybe a bill or two whipped through the Senate via reconciliation would bring them around.

The special election in Massachusetts next week to fill the late Edward Kennedy’s Senate term is rapidly becoming the national Republican Party’s maximum goal. The occasion–a low-turnout-special election in which Republicans are pre-mobilized and many Democrats are indifferent–is highly favorable to the little-known GOP candidate, Scott Brown. The stakes are very large. Aside from the symbolism involved in winning Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat in the home state of Barney Frank and John Kerry, Brown could and would personally derail final passage of a health care reform conference report in the Senate.
The polls on this race show Brown closing on Democrat Martha Coakley, but only if turnout follows a heavily pro-GOP pattern, much like the pattern Republicans hope for all across the country this autumn. As Nate Silver notes today, a Rasmussen poll showing a virtual dead heat also shows likely voters in this race giving Barack Obama a 57% approval rating. So it’s clear: Republicans are nationalizing this contest among Bay State voters; so, too, should Democrats.
If they do, and there’s any sort of decent Democratic GOTV effort, then GOP hopes for winning this race will probably turn out to be no more than Massachusetts Dreamin’.

As readers may have discerned, if only from the Harry Reid “Negro Dialect” furor, the big whoop in Washington during the last few days has revolved around Game Change, a 2008 campaign chronicle by DC press veterans John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.
The people flacking this book have done a brilliant job of trickling out “juicy” insider anecdotes in which major campaign figures do and say deeply embarrassing things. The most notorious example is the Reid quote, but there are others: in particular, an excerpt published by New York Magazine that provides a hellish account of the Reille Hunter saga as seen from within John Edwards’ presidential campaign. The excerpt is getting particularly large play because of its unusually negative portrayal of “St. Elizabeth” Edwards, displayed as an erratic and abusive control-freak whose used her knowledge of her husband’s infidelity as a weapon for leverage in the campaign.
You read this stuff and cringe, but in the end, wonder how much it really adds to our knowledge of the Edwards campaign, much less the 2008 elections generally. If you look very closely at the New York excerpt, buried in all the “juicy” bits, you can discern the real story of the Edwards campaign:

To Edwards, the pathway to the nomination seemed clear: beat Clinton in Iowa, where his surprising second-place finish in 2004 had catapulted him to national prominence; survive New Hampshire; then kill her off in the South Carolina primary, which he’d carried the last time around. Over and over, he proclaimed to his aides, “I am going to be the next president of the United States.

To put some flesh on these bare bones, the Edwards campaign was a strategic gamble which heavily influenced everything the candidate did after 2004: his faithful adoption of the “crashing the gates” netroots narrative of the corrupt DC Democratic establishment, epitomized by the Clintons; his hiring of netroots veterans like Joe Trippi; his highly consistent anti-corporate rhetoric; his repeated assertions that only a southerner could win a tough general election; and his slavish devotion to nurturing his organization in Iowa.
It never worked out, of course, in part because he fatally underestimated Barack Obama, and by Caucus Night, the fiery populist was reduced to hoping for a low, senior-dominated turnout.
Now maybe it’s just me, but I find this story, which seems to get little attention in Game Change, to be as interesting and even dramatic as all the internal maneuverings around Reille Hunter. Other accounts have suggested that Elizabeth Edwards played an outsized role in shaping the strategy for her husband’s campaign, and perhaps their weird relationship made that possible. But otherwise, aside from speculation about the explosive impact the Hunter scandal might have had if Edwards had actually won the nomination, it’s not that clear why it much matters to anyone other than the unfortunate immediate participants. And that may be true of other “revelations” in this book.

Up until yesterday, disgruntlement with the National Tea Party Convention set for Nashville next month was largely limited to scattered grumbling about the registration fee, though underneath the surface, there were all sorts of subcurrents involving hopes or fears that the convention was leading the Tea Party Movement in this direction of a third party (hard to understand, given the dominance of the Convention’s speakers’ list by Republican pols).
But then one of the Republican Right’s most influential new figures, RedState’s Erick Erickson, weighed in with a post not only criticizing the Nashville event, but the Tea Party Movement as a whole, and also firing a shot across the bow of Sarah Palin for good measure:

I have asked several of the tea party organizations that, early on, I was supportive of to stop using my name and RedState’s logo. I think the tea party movement has largely descended into ego and quest for purpose for individuals at the expense of what the tea party movement started out to be.
That’s not to say it is in every case. I have much good to say about groups like Tea Party Patriots, but I think this national tea party convention smells scammy….
Sarah Palin is certainly giving the National Tea Party Convention legitimacy. But at what cost? I am fearful this thing will blow up and harm her. I am more fearful that a bunch of well meaning people from across the nation are going to show up, expect more, and then grow disaffected or burn out when the deliverables they expect do not come in.

In all the criticism of the Nashville event, It’s hard from the outside to separate the legitimate concerns about a for-profit group “hijacking” the Tea Party Movement, and the political calculations going on about the relationship of said Movement with the Republican Party. A guy like Erickson is focused like a laser beam on a right-wing conquest of the GOP, and presumably wants Tea Party types to serve as junior coalition partners and shock troops in that effort, not as some independent force. But in any event, political journalists who so enjoy writing “Democrats in disarray!” stories ought to devote more attention to the apparent disarray in the Tea Party Movement.
UPDATE: Dave Weigel of the Washington Independent, who’s been doing the best work on this subject, reports that the Tea Party Convention is closing most of its proceedings from the press–including, it appears, Palin’s keynote address. Notwithstanding conservative paranoia about “the media,” this is a move guaranteed to stimulate even more skepticism about the event’s character.