The Daily News

"If anyone has an urge to kill someone at an abortion clinic, they should shoot me. ... It's madness. It discredits the right-to-life movement. Murder is murder. It's madness. You cannot prevent killing by killing." - John Cardinal O'Connor.

by Mark Silva

We've heard a lot about the so-called "voices of the Republican Party'' lately - radio's Rush Limbaugh, former Vice President Dick Cheney perhaps. Colin Powell begs to differ, suggesting that the Republican Party he loves has a lot more room for moderation than those voices offer.

The face of the Republican Party, however, looks a lot more like its most voluble voices and less like that of Mr. Moderation, according to a Gallup Poll breakdown of the ethnicity and political views of those who identify themselves as Republicans, Democrats and independents.

More than 6 in 10 self-styled Republicans are non-Hispanic white conservatives. Another one quarter are white but not conservative. Just 5 percent are Hispanic, 2 percent black and 4 percent of other races, according to Gallup's polling.

The majority of Democrats also are non-Hispanic and white - 53 percent - but they are not conservative. Only 12 percent are white conservatives. Nearly one in five Democrats are black, 11 percent Hispanic and 6 percent of other races.

The greatest number of Hispanics, interestingly, is found among self-styled independents: 14 percent - another indication of the potential swing vote that lies within the fastest growing minority of the American population. Blacks account for 6 percent of independents, but the greatest percentage of independents -- 48 percent - are non-Hispanic and white.

The numbers "reinforce the basic challenge facing the Republican Party today as it ponders how best to remedy a situation that finds Democrats in control of the White House and both houses of Congress,'' writes Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll.

"Republicans have a clear monopoly on the allegiance of white conservative Americans, but the GOP's challenge is figuring out whether this is enough of a base on which to build for the future,'' he notes. "The alternative is for the GOP to broaden its base to include more minorities and/or more whites who are moderate or liberal in their ideological outlook -- groups now predominantly loyal to the Democratic Party.''

Sonia Sotomayor, Pres. Obama's pick for the SCOTUS, heads to the Hill tomorrow for meetings with members. Per the WH, here is her busy itinerary:

Maj. Leader Harry Reid (D-NV)

Min. Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)

Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT)

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL)

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ)

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY)

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT)

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)

McClatchy's Mike Doyle digs up Farrell v. Burke, a case from 2006 involving a sex offender who had violated his parole by purchasing porn. The salacious details, including Sotomayor reading excerpts from Scum: True Homosexual Experiences, are here. (Unfortunately for the culture warriors, she ultimately sided with the state.) Doyle also highlights this classic exchange between the sex offender's attorney and parole officer:

MR. NATHANSON: Are you saying, for example, that that condition of parole would prohibit Mr. Farrell from possessing, say, Playboy magazine?

P.O. BURKE: Yes.

MR. NATHANSON: Are you saying that that condition of parole would prohibit Mr. Farrell from possessing a photograph of Michelangelo['s] David?

P.O. BURKE: What is that?

MR. NATHANSON: Are you familiar with that sculpture?

P.O. BURKE: No.

MR. NATHANSON: If I tell you it's a large sculpture of a nude youth with his genitals exposed and visible, does that help to refresh your memory of what that is?

P.O. BURKE: If he possessed that, yes, he would be locked up for that.

by Mark Silva

Brian Williams already has gotten a lot of public mileage out of his private time with President Barack Obama, in preparation for a day-in-the-life of the president series that NBC News will air this week, Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

The anchorman got the president to walk his Supreme Court nominee back from the remark she made about the relative wisdom of Latino women, as compared with white men. He got the president to say that he's not interested in the government owning GM. -- just a 60 percent stake, for now.

"Our viewers will see a view of the White House never televised before,'' Williims says of his program, Inside the Obama White House. "Senior staff, the president himself, the first lady and yes... Bo will make an appearance with us on television.''

Williams tells of a president who is not confined to the Oval Office, who walks from study to study dropping in on sessions, popping m&m's for snacks along the way.

"We had something like 20 camera crews....we have something like 150 hours of video tape,'' he says, and that's after a day in the White House last week, which Williams will follow up with another interview of Obama on Tuesday. "e're going through all of this to distill it down to two hours.

Williams also got a cheeseburger out of the deal - joining the president in his outing for a take-out pickup of burgers at a Five Guys in Washington.

Williams also asked Obama about the early part of his day that he hadn't seen: "I got my workout in,'' Obama said, "saw the girls off to school... always eat a hearty breakfast.''

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

What's the administration's specific aim in bailing out GM? I'll give you my theory later.

For now, though, some background. First and most broadly, it doesn't make sense for America to try to maintain or enlarge manufacturing as a portion of the economy. Even if the U.S. were to seal its borders and bar any manufactured goods from coming in from abroad -- something I don't recommend -- we'd still be losing manufacturing jobs. That's mainly because of technology.

When we think of manufacturing jobs, we tend to imagine old-time assembly lines populated by millions of blue-collar workers who had well-paying jobs with good benefits. But that picture no longer describes most manufacturing. I recently toured a U.S. factory containing two employees and 400 computerized robots. The two live people sat in front of computer screens and instructed the robots. In a few years this factory won't have a single employee on site, except for an occasional visiting technician who repairs and upgrades the robots.

Factory jobs are vanishing all over the world. Even China is losing them. The Chinese are doing more manufacturing than ever, but they're also becoming far more efficient at it. They've shuttered most of the old state-run factories. Their new factories are chock full of automated and computerized machines. As a result, they don't need as many manufacturing workers as before.

Economists at Alliance Capital Management took a look at employment trends in 20 large economies and found that between 1995 and 2002 -- before the asset bubble and subsequent bust -- 22 million manufacturing jobs disappeared. The U.S. wasn't even the biggest loser. We lost about 11 percent of our manufacturing jobs in that period, but the Japanese lost 16 percent of theirs. Even developing nations lost factory jobs: Brazil suffered a 20 percent decline, and China had a 15 percent drop.

What happened to manufacturing? In two words, higher productivity. As productivity rises, employment falls because fewer people are needed. In this, manufacturing is following the same trend as agriculture. A century ago, almost 30 percent of adult Americans worked on a farm. Nowadays, fewer than 5 percent do. That doesn't mean the U.S. failed at agriculture. Quite the opposite. American agriculture is a huge success story. America can generate far larger crops than a century ago with far fewer people. New technologies, more efficient machines, new methods of fertilizing, better systems of crop rotation, and efficiencies of large scale have all made farming much more productive.

Manufacturing is analogous. In America and elsewhere around the world, it's a success. Since 1995, even as manufacturing employment has dropped around the world, global industrial output has risen more than 30 percent.

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

MORE...

Eli Saslow, the young Washington Post reporter best known for his giddy promotion of Obama?"s "glistening pectorals," touted Obama as a "powerful new ally" against "Islamophobia" on the front of Wednesday?"s Style section. The protagonist of Saslow?"s story, Aida Mansoor of Hartford, Connecticut, tries to educate an apparently (and painfully) bigoted America about Islam. This is where Obama comes to the rescue:

Her attempts at cross-cultural connection can sometimes feel futile, Mansoor says, but her energy this year has been fortified by a powerful new ally: President Obama, a Christian who has promised unprecedented outreach to the Muslim world. More than 85 percent of Muslims in the United States approve of Obama's performance as president, according to a recent Gallup poll, which is his strongest endorsement from any religious group.

"What he says could go a long way toward dispelling the myths," Mansoor says. "For a long time, Muslims have been the bad guys in this country. There is so much hate and misunderstanding, and he might be able to help the world overcome some of it."

Before Obama hosts his global diversity seminar, Mansoor begins her local equivalent.

The assumption behind the Post story is that America has a long way to go to be properly "educated" that Islam is a peaceful religion. The headline was "As the Myths Abound, So Does Islamic Outreach." Will knowledge defeat ignorance? The Post's headline inside isn't optimistic: "Explaining Islam to� Americans: It's Not Any Easier These Days."

The Post doesn?"t ask: is it possible that Muslims can exaggerate the harshness and everyday commonality of "Islamophobia" among Americans? Saslow brings his story right around to how the 2008 election displayed "the worst of Islamophobia" in the United States:

After Abdul-Karim [Mansoor?"s imam] finishes his introductory lecture at the library, Mansoor plays a series of media clips compiled during the past year. The 2008 presidential election, Mansoor says, revealed the worst of Islamophobia in the United States. "Anytime you turned on the TV, they were saying, 'You know, maybe Obama is a Muslim,' " she tells the class. "Well, first of all, he's not a Muslim. But more important: So what if he was? What's wrong with that?"

Mansoor turns out the lights and starts the projector, which the class takes as a cue to relax.... One of the census employees closes his eyes as Mansoor plays the first sound bite, from a broadcast of Michael Savage's radio show:

"We have a right to know if [Obama's] a so-called friendly Muslim or one who aspires to more radical teachings," Savage says.

Then comes a clip of Sen. John McCain at one of his campaign rallies, responding to a woman who asked whether Obama was Arab: "No ma'am," McCain says. "He's a decent family man, citizen."

Eventually, Mansoor finishes with a video of an experiment conducted by a television station. The clerk at a bagel shop pretends to refuse service to a Muslim woman, and the camera focuses on other customers' responses. Three customers congratulate the clerk for taking a stand against "un-American terrorists." Several others leave the store in protest. One man, moved to tears, tells the clerk, "Every person deserves to be treated with respect, dignity."

Mansoor stops the tape and turns on the lights. She's crying. The attendees set down their pens and cellphones. They're watching now.

"This always brings tears to my eyes when I see it," Mansoor says. "This is what we face every day. Every day. Maybe it gives you a little bit of an idea what it must feel like. What are your reactions?"

Nobody speaks....

Finally, Lillian Ruiz, the human-relations director, raises her hand.

"I think we need to stand up like we did in the 1950s," Ruiz said. "You watch things like this and it makes you want to just fight back and do something, because it's so sad. Obviously, discrimination is still very alive."

"Yes," Mansoor says. "Yes. Thank you."

That's how the article ends. America's stuck in the 1950s, and Muslims are the new blacks.

Here?"s where the whole story turns on fiction: Saslow is writing about a February 26, 2008 episode of ABC?"s Primetime: What Would You Do? in which actors playing an obnoxiously bigoted clerk and an offended Muslim woman try to nudge unsuspecting members of the public into action. The "Islamophobia" is exaggerated for ratings and to make a liberal point against discriminatory attitudes. ABC?"s John Quinones, the host of these "thought experiments," explained:

QUINONES: The young woman in our experiment is an actor. But for this woman, discrimination is all too real. Nohayia Javed [ph] helped us design our experiment. Although born in Chicago, she says she's constantly characterized by fellow Americans as the enemy.

JAVED: They always start off with, 'You're a terrorist. Osama-lover. Towel-head. Camel jockey." On and on.

Fellow Americans "always start" with terrorist accusations? They?"re "constantly" attacking Muslims with harsh ridicule? At what point do ABC and The Washington Post acknowledge this kind of harassment might not be a constant occurrence?

In that 2008 segment, Quinones acknowledged "At the end of the day, 13 people stood up for the Muslim woman, while six sided with the clerk. But the majority of the bystanders, 22, did or said absolutely nothing." Because twice as many expressed offense, Quinones placed all the blame on the bystanders, so that the vast majority looked like they needed an Islamic training seminar.

PS: Here's what gets left out of the sympathetic story: does Islamic outreach always ring true? A newspaper account of another Aida Mansoor event in Connecticut features Muslim convert Ingrid Mattson uncorking this whopper:

The most common misconception about Islam is that it is oppressive to women. Muslim women, like women all over the world have often had to struggle to enjoy their natural rights, but Islam is most often seen by them as a source of strength in advocating for their rights.

It's not surprising when Vice President Dick Cheney disagrees with President Obama. But it is surprising when he takes a more progressive position than the president.

Said Cheney: "I think that freedom means freedom for everyone. As many of you know, one of my daughters is gay, and it is something we have lived with for a long time in our family. I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish. Any kind of arrangement they wish. The question of whether or not there ought to be a federal statute to protect this, I don't support. I do believe that... historically the way marriage has been regulated is at the state level. It has always been a state issue and I think that is the way it ought to be handled, on a state-by-state basis... But I don't have any problem with that. People ought to get a shot at that."

• Lindsey Graham's protestations aside, it seems clear that there's neither the will nor the numbers to filibuster the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. I'm sure that won't stop Newt and Rush from alienating the rest of the country from the GOP, however.
  


• The president sent a letter to Max Baucus and Edward Kennedy reiterating his support for a public option for what feels like the inevitable health care reform bill that's slowly working its way through Congress. Meanwhile, Ezra Klein helpfully explains the relevance of MedPAC and why it might finally get some teeth, and Greg Sargent documents the Canadian influence.


• It's hard to disagree with the thesis of this Politico piece, that Obama is deliberately poaching GOP moderates for his administration in order to reduce the Republican party down to its core base of Southern supporters.
  


• The right has predictably been freaking out over a New York Times piece that asserts President Obama believes the United States could be "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world." As usual, it helps to read the official transcript in these situations. The jury's still out on whether this is sillier than the latest mutterings coming from Michael Goldfarb.


• Mark Levin, last seen screaming at and berating a woman on the air, has a list of "The World's Most Deranged Bloggers." You'd think it would be a roll call of the Left's most pugnacious but actually it's four conservative pundits who tend to point out that people like Levin are nuts. It's odd to think that Levin, author of a book called "Liberty and Tyranny," apparently knows nothing about either subject, but we'll just call this Jonah Goldberg Syndrome from now on.


• Remainders: Tim Pawlenty suggests he'll do what the Minnesota Supreme Court tells him to do; Dave Weigel watches PajamasTV so you don't have to; and Stephen Colbert edits Newsweek?

--Mori Dinauer