Read Will Bunch’s terrific post for a breath of fresh air:

…The Democrat’s positions are very much in the majority — a new kind of “silent majority” that leans to center-left as opposed to Nixon’s center-right grouping.

They are not the people posting multiple diaries on blogs like Daily Kos, or obsessing over the latest doings inside the Beltway — as you probably do if you’re reading this. They’re too busy making a modest living.

They are, instead, the people that we see so often when TV or radio tries some rare “man on the street” reporting — bashing the war in Iraq or asking the government to stay out of their bedroom, and occasionally getting funny looks from reporters who fail to realize just how “mainstream” these points of view actually are.

They are cab drivers and nurses, waitresses and insurance agents. They don’t read blogs but most of them vote — and so it’s why the Democrats got the most ballots for president in 1992, 1996, and 2000, and came within an eyelash of ousting “a war president” in 2004.

The things that this “silent majority” believes may not boil down easily to a single word or a short soundbite, but they are common sense ideals, and truly American. And so they believe in family values and probably in a God as well, but not in the government intruding on their private lives, let along reading their emails. They believe in a strong defense, but not in wars that America starts first. They believe in free-market capitalism, as long as rich people pay their fair share and the environment is protected.

True, in many ways they are a different “silent majority” from the one that elected Richard Nixon in 1968. Times have changed. America is both more diverse and — Lou Dobbs and his noisy minority of fanatics notwithstanding — tolerates more diversity.

And so they are all around you, and yet this “silent majority” is able to hide in plain sight, not just from the news media but even from the leaders of the Democratic Party, the partisans who would seem best positioned to represent them in D.C.

And so we watch a Democratic Party that is splitting itself in two, arguing what’s the real message and what’s the best way to woo over a mass of people who might very well tell you — if you would just listen — that “you had me at ‘hello.'” And we guess there will always be debates over strategy and tactics — that’s why consultants and even a few bloggers get paid the big bucks.

But at the end of the day, should it really be hard for a Democrat like Sherrod Brown to win in 2006?

Everyone should just stop yelling for a moment…and listen to your silent majority.

If you are pro-life, then it’s this that should concern you: CNN.com:

American babies are three times more likely to die in their first month as children born in Japan, and newborn mortality is 2.5 times higher in the United States than in Finland, Iceland or Norway.

…The “Mothers’ Index” in the report ranks 125 nations according to 10 gauges of well-being — six for mothers and four for children — including objective measures such as lifetime mortality risk for mothers and infant mortality rate and subjective measures such as the political status of women.

Charles MacCormack, president and CEO of Save the Children, said the report card “illustrates the direct line between the status of mothers and the status of their children.”

“In countries where mothers do well, children do well,” he said in a written statement accompanying the report.

…As Americans celebrate Mother’s Day on Sunday, “5,000 mothers will mourn the loss of the newborn they bear that very day in the developing world,” said Anne Tinker, director of Save the Children’s Saving Newborn Lives initiative.

“All children, no matter where they are born, deserve a healthy start in life,” Melinda Gates wrote in a foreword to the report, which was funded in part by the foundation she runs with her husband, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

…The report highlights the three areas it says have the most influence on child well-being: female education, presence of a trained attendant at birth and use of family planning services.

Educated women, the report said, are more likely to marry and give birth later in life, to seek health care and to encourage education for their children, including girls.

The report said that family planning and increased contraception use leads to lower maternal and infant death rates. Many women and children in developing nations, it said, die as a result of births that come at the wrong time — too close together, too early or too late in the mother’s life.