Seven Key Takeaways From Eric Cantor’s Shocking Defeat (via Moyers & Company)No incumbent majority leader had lost a seat in Congress since 1899, when the post was first created. Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) broke that streak last night. He’s announced that he’ll step down from leadership within weeks. Cantor’s stunning defeat…
Massive Fail! (via The Moderate Voice)Instead of millions it looks like hundreds showed up for Operation American Spring. Perhaps there aren’t as many wingnuts as we thought. It’s still early, but it appears safe to say that tens of millions of people will not be turning out to participate…
Republicans blame selves in 2012 poll 'post-mortem' (via AFP)
Why Fox News dropped Sarah Palin (via The Christian Science Monitor)
During an appearance on CNN’s Starting Point on Monday, the former New York City mayor argued that the administration is purposely delaying investigations into the incident until after the election to “cover up” its own failures. But asked to substantiate the claim, Giuliani became agitated. He announced that he did not have to give Obama the benefit of the doubt or withhold judgment about the incident until a full investigation is complete because the president is a DemocratThe Republicans and the conservative echo chamber are accusing the Obama administration of a cover up. I can't believe that the Obama administration is that stupid - there was simply no way they could cover it up until the election. Now I will admit they didn't exactly tell the truth but are there reasons they would do this. Was the "cover up" directed at forces outside of the United States? We now know that many if not most of the occupants of the Benghazi compound were CIA agents - was there and attempt to conceal that? Did they have some leads as to who was responsible and they wanted some time to follow up on those before it became publicly known that we knew what happened? There was more going on here than we know.
President Obama is outside the ideological mainstream, viewed as very liberal by an electorate that’s moderate or somewhat conservative. His domestic policies are unpopular, notably his health care law, economic stimulus, and spending plans. His foreign policy initiatives—curbing Iran’s nuclear weapons program, improving America’s position in the Middle East, fostering better relations with Russia—have failed. The public wants Obama to jettison his ineffective economic policies and implement new ones. But he refuses.Yes I know, Fred Barnes is an idiot but he fails to recognize that a majority of voters don't want any more wars and interventions. They are tired of extremists in Israel dictating U.S. foreign policy. They are tired of Bibi Netanyahu interfering in U.S. election politics. They are tired of the tail wagging the dog.
Notice the absence of facts, polling data. Notice the absolute wrongitude of Barnes’s foreign policy postures: the truth is, the American people–and most foreign policy experts who are not neoconservatives–believe that Obama has been a very successful foreign policy President. The public has mixed feelings about Obama’s domestic policies, which have not been a roaring success, but not nearly the utter failure that Republicans seem to have imagined in their Fox-Rush echo chamber. The stimulus prevented a Great Depression. Most of the health care plan hasn’t been implemented yet and the parts that have been are wildly popular, especially the “pre-existing condition” rules and the extension of coverage to children up to the age of 26. As for spending, his proposed balance of new revenue and entitlement reform, though relatively modest, is deemed far more realistic than the Republican tax cuts forever and ever mantra.
These are not “very liberal” policies. They used to be Republican policies, especially the health care provision and the intelligent use of force overseas against our Al Qaeda enemies. The notion that Barack Obama is anything beyond a moderate liberal is laughable, especially given the wildly right-wing Romney positions on social issues, foreign policy and the aggrandizement of the plutocracy.As Daniel Larison pointed out the other day the Republican party lost their foreign policy advantage because of the neoconservative misadventures championed by the likes of Fred Barnes.
For a party that focuses so much on individual responsibility, it’s ironic that Barnes is blaming others, rather than Boston, for Romney’s faults.
Nearly 60% of Americans are in favor of a government shutdown to reduce spending, but of course Americans are painfully ignorant of where the money in the budget goes. As I noted here the Tea Party wants to cut the budget but they really don't want to cut anything that really matters. What they do want to cut are some rather insignificant budget items they don't like. The current budget fight is not about balancing the budget, it is tribal warfare. There is little or no talk of cutting military spending, the Republican base likes bombing brown people and Muslims and the Military Industrial Complex would not stand for it. There is little or no talk of cutting Medicare, many of the Tea Partiers are on Medicare and the Medical Industrial Complex depends on Medicare for much of it's revenue.
The Republican party is the party of corporate America and corporate America does not like regulations that make the water and air clean - so they are on the chopping block. And then there is the war on the truth - the measly five billion dollars a year NPR receives is a target. The truth is not a friend of conservatives. Planned Parenthood equals abortion to the base which puts it in the cross hairs. When you look at the budget these programs represent a few grains of sand in a large bucket.
1. Slash Medicare and defense spending
2. Raise taxes
The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera would make a great backyard telescope for viewing Mars, and we can also use it at Mars to view other planets. This is an image of Earth and the moon, acquired on October 3, 2007, by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
At the time the image was taken, Earth was 142 million kilometers (88 million miles) from Mars, giving the HiRISE image a scale of 142 kilometers (88 miles) per pixel, an Earth diameter of about 90 pixels and a moon diameter of 24 pixels. The phase angle is 98 degrees, which means that less than half of the disk of the Earth and the disk of the moon have direct illumination. We could image Earth and moon at full disk illumination only when they are on the opposite side of the sun from Mars, but then the range would be much greater and the image would show less detail.
.....nothing the surge has accomplished so far remotely approaches a solution to these enormously destabilizing realities: a largely disaffected Sunni population which finds the current Shiite-dominated government of Iraq fundamentally unacceptable; a decisively fractured Shiite population torn between an Iranian-dominated government on the one hand (controlled by the political proxies of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI, itself an Iranian proxy) or an indigenous firebrand, Muqtada al-Sadr; and a false paradise in Kurdistan, where the dream of an independent Kurdish homeland corrupts a viable Kurdish autonomy and threatens regional instability by provoking Turkish military intervention.Current US policy and the policy of the major candidates don't represent a solution to anyone of the situations in Iraq much less all five. The goal of the Bush administration is now simply to pass the mess they have created along to the next president, one reason I suspect that the Republican power brokers would not mind seeing a Democratic president elected in 2008. With the exception of Ron Paul the Republican candidates are advocating "stay the course". The Democratic candidates are advocating a change in policy without really spelling out what that might be. Violence in Iraq is down so it has been possible to sell "the surge" as a success but as Ritter explains:
[....]
There are, in fact, five Iraqs that must be dealt with by a singular American policy. The first is the Iraq of the Green Zone, and by that I mean the Iraqi government brought about by the “purple finger revolution” of January 2005. Those sham elections produced a sham democracy which lacks any viability outside of the never-never land of the U.S.-controlled Green Zone. This lack of centralized authority has led some, like Sen. Joe Biden and the U.S. Senate, to advocate the division of Iraq into three de facto states, one Sunni, one Shiite and one Kurdish, lumped together in a loose federation overseen by a weak central authority. Given that the 2005 elections were designed to prevent this very sort of Iraqi breakup to begin with, one can begin to understand the fallacy of any policy that contradicts the very foundation upon which it is built. But this sort of behavior defines the entire Iraq fiasco, one contradiction built upon another, until there has been woven a web of contradictions from which no clarity can ever be found. That, in a sentence, is the reality of the current Iraqi government. It is almost as if by design the Bush administration has cobbled together a wreck incapable of governance. How does Hillary Clinton propose to deal “quickly and responsibly” with such a mess?
The second Iraq is the one being managed from Tehran. This Iraq, stretching from Basra in the south up into Baghdad, exists outside of the reach of the compromised disaster that is the current government of Iraq, and is instead dominated by SCIRI and its military wing, the Badr Brigade. Here one finds the unvarnished reality of the dream of the pro-Iranian Iraqi Shiites, those who reached political maturity festering in the anti-Saddam ideology cooked up in the theocracy of Iran. Given the roots of this political movement, bred and paid for by the reactionary mullahs of Iran, the politics of revenge that it embraces should come as no surprise. However, whereas the mullahs in Tehran seek long-term political stability guaranteed by a friendly, compliant government in Baghdad, the Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiites seem more focused on rapidly reversing decades of inequities, real and perceived. Revenge is not a policy that breeds stability, and yet it is the politics of revenge that dominates the mind-set of SCIRI.
Serving as a major domestic counterweight to SCIRI is the indigenous grass-roots Iraqi Shiite movement controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr, the third Iraq. Possessing similar geographic reach as SCIRI, the Iraq of the “Mahdi Army” is one which rejects the SCIRI proxy government operating out of the Green Zone as but a tool of the American occupation, and the SCIRI movement itself as a tool of Iran. While maintaining close relations with Tehran, al-Sadr mocks those who would govern in south Iraq as having Farsi, vice Arabic, as their first tongue. The movement headed by al-Sadr bases its credibility on its pure Iraqi roots, derived as it is from the Shiites of Iraq who actually lived under the rule of Saddam Hussein. Surprisingly, these Shiites are more inclined to find common cause with their fellow Iraqis, including Sunnis who are disaffected with the current government, than with their SCIRI co-religionists. While much has been made of the Sunni-Shiite divide, the fact is that one of the most serious threats to stability in Iraq is the emerging Shiite-versus-Shiite conflict between al-Sadr and SCIRI.
The fourth Iraq is the Iraq of the Sunni. The first three years of the American occupation were dominated by violence emanating from the Sunni heartland as those elements loyal to Saddam, and those opposed to Shiite domination, worked together to make the American occupation, and any affiliated post-Saddam government derived from the occupation, a failure. To this extent, elements of the Sunni of Iraq, drawn primarily from the intelligence services of the Hussein regime, facilitated the creation and operation of al-Qaida in Iraq. The work of this Iraqi al-Qaida has been successful in destabilizing the country to the point that the United States has been compelled to fund, equip and train Sunni militias in an effort to confront al-Qaida, as well as to make up for the real shortfalls of the central Iraqi government when it comes to security and stability in the Sunni areas. The newfound relationship between the Sunni and the United States, especially in Anbar province, is cited as a major factor in the success of the surge.
The fifth Iraq is that of the Kurds. Long hailed as a poster child of stability and prosperity, the fundamental problems inherent in post-Saddam Kurdistan are coming to a head. The inherent incompatibility between the “sanctuary” created by the United States through the northern “no-fly zone” and post-Saddam Iraq is more evident today than ever. The Kurds, pleased with their status as a “special case” in the eyes of the Bush administration, have made no honest effort to assimilate into a centralized system of government. Furthermore, the false dream of an independent Kurdish homeland has not only poisoned relations with the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad (witness the conflict over oil deals in Kurdistan and the Iraqi national oil law), but also between the U.S. and its NATO ally, Turkey. The Iraqi Kurds’ ongoing support of Kurdish nationalist groups in Turkey and Iran has led to increased instability, the most current manifestation of which are the ongoing cross-border attacks into Iraqi territory by the Turkish military. And, given the high level of emotion attached to matters pertaining to Kurdish nationalism, the likelihood of the situation de-escalating anytime soon is remote.
History will show that this period of relative “calm” we attribute to the surge is but the pause before the storm. Hillary Clinton is correct to label the surge a failed strategy. But her motivation for doing so rests more with her desire to position herself politically on the domestic front than it is a reflection of a thoughtful Iraq policy. So long as American politicians, regardless of political affiliation, seek to solve the problem of Iraq from a domestic political perspective, then the problem that is Iraq will never be resolved, either “quickly” or “responsibly.” Iraq is an unpopular war. There are, therefore, no “popular” solutions, only realistic ones.Ritter addresses the contradiction in US policy here. While SCIRI is little more than an Iranian proxy al-Sadr is an Iraqi nationalist who is willing to work with the Sunni and is the one who is most likely to unite Iraq. Of course he is anti-occupation and would not allow US influence in Iraq so he is unacceptable to those who want control of Iraq's oil and permanent military bases in the region. Control of the oil and continued influence are far more important than a stable Iraq to the powerful in the United States, both Democrat and Republican, than a stable Iraq and region.
The five-dimensional problem embodied in post-Saddam Iraq cannot be bundled up into a neat package. America, and its leaders, must do the right thing in Iraq, not for Iraq, but for America, even when doing so requires making some tough decisions. Narrow the problem set from five dimensions to two, and the problem becomes more manageable. For my money, I choose working with the Sunnis and al-Sadr to create a viable coalition, and then cutting a deal with Iran that trades off better relations in exchange for encouraging the current failed Iraqi government to step aside in favor of new elections. And the Kurds? Autonomy or nothing.
When this country was founded, James Madison envisioned a noisy public square with different religious denominations arguing, competing and balancing each other’s passions. But now the landscape of religious life has changed. Now its most prominent feature is the supposed war between the faithful and the faithless. Mitt Romney didn’t start this war, but speeches like his both exploit and solidify this divide in people’s minds. The supposed war between the faithful and the faithless has exacted casualties.And I think he's on the right track here but to be honest I'm not sure.
The first casualty is the national community. Romney described a community yesterday. Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community. The nonobservant are not. There was not even a perfunctory sentence showing respect for the nonreligious. I’m assuming that Romney left that out in order to generate howls of outrage in the liberal press.
The second casualty of the faith war is theology itself. In rallying the armies of faith against their supposed enemies, Romney waved away any theological distinctions among them with the brush of his hand. In this calculus, the faithful become a tribe, marked by ethnic pride, a shared sense of victimization and all the other markers of identity politics.
In Romney’s account, faith ends up as wishy-washy as the most New Age-y secularism. In arguing that the faithful are brothers in a common struggle, Romney insisted that all religions share an equal devotion to all good things. Really? Then why not choose the one with the prettiest buildings?
Romney’s job yesterday was to unite social conservatives behind him. If he succeeded, he did it in two ways. He asked people to rally around the best traditions of America’s civic religion. He also asked people to submerge their religious convictions for the sake of solidarity in a culture war without end.Now if Brooks is saying what I think he's saying here he's right - Romney is further dividing an already divided country. Romney is saying what the Evangelicals want to hear - that they are being persecuted by the Satan inspired secularists. From my experience with the Mormons Romney is not pandering here, he really believes it. I'd feel better if I thought he was pandering.
"I believe that every faith I have encountered draws its adherents closer to God. And in every faith I have come to know, there are features I wish were in my own: I love the profound ceremony of the Catholic Mass, the approachability of God in the prayers of the Evangelicals, the tenderness of spirit among the Pentecostals, the confident independence of the Lutherans, the ancient traditions of the Jews, unchanged through the ages, and the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims. As I travel across the country and see our towns and cities, I am always moved by the many houses of worship with their steeples, all pointing to heaven, reminding us of the source of life's blessings.I wasn't the only one who noted that something was missing from Romney's address, so did Ramesh Ponnuru.
"It is important to recognize that while differences in theology exist between the churches in America, we share a common creed of moral convictions. And where the affairs of our nation are concerned, it's usually a sound rule to focus on the latter – on the great moral principles that urge us all on a common course. Whether it was the cause of abolition, or civil rights, or the right to life itself, no movement of conscience can succeed in America that cannot speak to the convictions of religious people.
"We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.
It would have been nice if Romney, while making room for people of all faiths in this country, could have also made some room for people with none.While it's true that the constitution says that there shall be no religious test for public office the individual voters will more often than not apply their own religious test which is the reason Romney and Kennedy before him had to address the issue. The reality is at this time and probably for the foreseeable future no Muslim could be elected president. The same can be said for we atheists and agnostics. Even in the relatively progressive state of Oregon it is doubtful I could be elected to a state wide office if it was known I'm an atheist. Of course Romney didn't address this - if he did he would have alienated the very group he was trying to convince. Yes there is a religious test for elected office in the US and none of the above will result in failing the test.
I'll add this: Romney is a bigot. Don't expect much criticism of Romney, for it, in the corporate media. Had he said that freedom requires one or another religion, he'd have been vilified. For this, he won't be. Bigotry against atheists and agnostics is still allowed, in modern theocratic America.Go read the entire post.
With all the problems facing this country, both in Iraq and at home, why is Congress spending time trying to pass a resolution condemning the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago?We on the left have spent the last six to ten years screaming about the "irresponsible politics" practiced by the left. I think Sowell calls this one right - it is irresponsible politics. I think we should begin to withdraw from Iraq at once. Pelosi's attempt to force the issue is wrong and dangerous. This is not a time to make an additional enemy in the region - one will need when we begin the withdrawal.
Make no mistake about it, that massacre of hundreds of thousands -- perhaps a million or more -- Armenians was one of the worst atrocities in all of history.
As with the later Holocaust against the Jews, it was not considered sufficient to kill innocent victims. They were first put through soul-scarring dehumanization in whatever sadistic ways occurred to those who carried out these atrocities.
Historians need to make us aware of such things. But why are politicians suddenly trying to pass Congressional resolutions about these events, long after all those involved are dead and after the Ottoman Empire in which all these things happened no longer exists?
The short answer is irresponsible politics.
And yes, Southern white exceptionalism is about race, much more than it is about moral values, religion, support for the military or other explanations sometimes offered. There’s a large statistical literature on the subject, whose conclusion is summed up by the political scientist Thomas F. Schaller in his book “Whistling Past Dixie”: “Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters to depict American conservatism as a nonracial phenomenon, the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past.”The bigot strategy of the Republican party is rapidly becoming the strategy of the parties demise for two reasons:
Republican politicians, who understand quite well that the G.O.P.’s national success since the 1970s owes everything to the partisan switch of Southern whites, have tacitly acknowledged this reality. Since the days of Gerald Ford, just about every Republican presidential campaign has included some symbolic gesture of approval for good old-fashioned racism.
But to get the Republican nomination, a candidate must appeal to the base — and the base consists, in large part, of Southern whites who carry over to immigrants the same racial attitudes that brought them into the Republican fold to begin with. As a result, you have the spectacle of Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, pragmatists on immigration issues when they actually had to govern in diverse states, trying to reinvent themselves as defenders of Fortress America.But I think that number two may be even more important - for younger people the tribe just got bigger.
And both Hispanics and Asians, another growing force in the electorate, are getting the message. Last year they voted overwhelmingly Democratic, by 69 percent and 62 percent respectively.
In other words, it looks as if the Republican Party is about to start paying a price for its history of exploiting racial antagonism. If that happens, it will be deeply ironic. But it will also be poetic justice.
Rich liberals who claim they’ll help America’s less fortunate are phonies.Fred Thompson, authentic or phony?
Let me give you one example — a Democrat who said he’d work on behalf of workers and the poor. He even said he’d take on Big Business. But the truth is that while he was saying those things, he was living in a big house and had a pretty lavish summer home too. His favorite recreation, sailing, was incredibly elitist. And he didn’t talk like a regular guy.
Clearly, this politician wasn’t authentic. His name? Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Luckily, that’s not how the political game was played 70 years ago. F.D.R. wasn’t accused of being a phony; he was accused of being a “traitor to his class.” But today, it seems, politics is all about seeming authentic. A recent Associated Press analysis of the political scene asked: “Can you fake authenticity? Probably not, but it might be worth a try.”
What does authenticity mean? Supposedly it means not pretending to be who you aren’t. But that definition doesn’t seem to fit the way the term is actually used in political reporting.
On the other hand, consider the case of Fred Thompson. He spent 18 years working as a highly paid lobbyist, wore well-tailored suits and drove a black Lincoln Continental. When he ran for the Senate, however, his campaign reinvented him as a good old boy: it leased a used red pickup truck for him to drive, dressed up in jeans and a work shirt, with a can of Red Man chewing tobacco on the front seat.And what about Rudy Giuliani?
But Mr. Thompson’s strength, says Lanny Davis in The Hill, is that he’s “authentic.”
And where do you start with Rudy Giuliani? We keep being told that he has credibility on national security, because he seemed so reassuring on 9/11. (Some firefighters have condemned his actual performance that day, saying that rescue efforts were uncoordinated and that firemen died because he provided them with faulty radios. “All he did was give information on the TV,” said a deputy fire chief whose son died at the World Trade Center. “He did nothing.” And the nation’s largest firefighters’ union has condemned his handling of recovery efforts in the weeks following 9/11.)So forget "authentic".
But he’s spent the years since then cashing in on terrorism, and his decisions about Giuliani Partners’ personnel and clients raise real questions about his seriousness. His partners, as The Washington Post pointed out, included “a former police commissioner later convicted of corruption, a former F.B.I. executive who admitted taking artifacts from ground zero and a former Roman Catholic priest accused of covering up sexual abuse in the church.”
The point is that questions about a candidate shouldn’t be whether he or she is “authentic.” They should be about motives: whose interests would the candidate serve if elected? And think how much better shape the nation would be in if enough people had asked that question seven years ago.But that of course is not what will get in the infotainment the corporate media try to pass of as news.
I have often discussed the absurd meme that the Islamic terrorists hate us because of who we are - because of our freedoms. As Pat Buchanan said they don't hate us because of who we are they hate us because of where we are. Over at LewRockwell.com Steven LaTulippe discusses this in relation to the recent Republican "debate" in South Carolina and the flap over Ron Paul's remarks.While watching the South Carolina Republican debate a few weeks ago, I finally succumbed to Justin Raimondo’s theory that 9/11 ripped a hole in the space-time continuum and transported us all to Bizzaro World – an upside down universe of fun-house mirrors and distorted thinking.Of course it's anything but "quackery". The US and Europe have been imperialistically manipulating the middle east since oil was first discovered there in the 1920s. That includes supporting tyrants and in the case of Iran overthrowing a democratically elected government.
I am, of course, speaking of Rudy Giuliani’s reaction to Ron Paul’s statement that our foreign policy has fueled Muslim anti-Americanism. Rudy seemed surprised and angry as he pandered to the crowd and demanded that Rep. Paul retract his statement.
Ron Paul, to his credit, stood his ground.
But as ignorant as Rudy’s comments were, the real strangeness is to be found in our mainstream media’s reaction to the incident. Even establishment liberals like Chris Matthews have treated Rep. Paul with bemused disdain and have written off his assertion as sheer quackery.
On one side, we have the "Rudy theory." This view – held by our entire political and media establishment – asserts that Muslim extremists are attacking America because they "hate our freedom."When the subject is framed with the above questions we can see how absurd the "conventional wisdom" is. Of course they don't hate us because of who we are. They hate us because we are in the middle east to gain control of their natural resources. It of course doesn't help that at the same time we show disdain for their culture and religion.
Even a cursory examination of this hypothesis exposes its sheer absurdity.
Are we to believe that waves of Muslims have spontaneously decided to immolate themselves in suicidal attacks because we have freedom of the press and freedom of religion? Would the Muslim world initiate a horrific war with the most powerful military in history merely because we have elections and jury trials? Do they really hate Britney Spears so much that they would blow themselves up just to take a few of us down with them?
The questions answer themselves.
That this theory is the only one "permitted" in public discussions is proof positive of our descent into Bizzaro World. No other evidence is necessary.
When our political situation has become so distorted that an obvious truism is discarded outright while an obvious falsehood is universally acclaimed, then something is seriously wrong.
Perhaps it really is Bizzaro world...or maybe it’s something more sinister.
Either way, given what I saw in South Carolina, it’s obvious that our political system is nowhere near curing what ails us, and we can expect more of the same for as far as the eye can see.
To make it clear up front I am one of those godless atheist lefties the right so much likes to rant about. I grew up in the church but at some point I found that there was as much in the Bible that I considered immoral and left the church. As I went through college and studied physics, chemistry, biology and geology I came to the conclusion that a god was simply not necessary. With that, after dropping him from my blogroll a couple of days ago I'm going to link to this post by Atrios:So, "the religious community can be the conscience and the soul of the Democratic party." Presumably, and if I'm misunderstanding correct me, she's suggesting that basic moral grounding must come from the religious community. Now, this is part and parcel with the basic messages people like me get regularly from people all over the spectrum, that atheists and agnostics lack a conscience and a sense of values, and these things only come from religion and the religious.Now there is a lot of profound morality in the Bible. Thomas Jefferson isolated that when he removed the old testament and the magic from the Christian Bible and left only the philosophy and teachings of Jesus in what has become to be known as the Jefferson Bible. I object to the idea that only the "religious" can determine morality - it doesn't matter if it's left or right. Religion in politics is by it's very nature dangerous and un-Democratic because the religious always feel they have the one true path. A Democratic Party overly influenced by the "religious left" will end up being the same as a Republican Party controlled by the religious right.
I'd never write that "the atheist community can be the conscience and the soul of the Democratic party," though I imagine if I did Bill Donohue would send out a press release. It'd be a highly exclusionary statement, and it would suggest an inherent moral superiority of the godless over the faithful.