- Media enacts DNC talking points on blaming tea party for congressional gridlock.

- Jay Gray, the reporter who got sauced with Sandusky’s equally creepy attorney as a way to win an exclusive interview (and was later arrested on DUI charges) may have been axed from the beat. The New York Post reports:

NBC’s Jay Gray may soon be taken off the Jerry Sandusky story, after he was arrested for DUI earlier this month …

… we’re told he “was kicked off the story” and left Pennsylvania this week. Another insider said Gray was on a family vacation, and the network “hasn’t made a decision” if he’ll continue to cover Sandusky.

- NatGeo writer says God is intolerant. Take it up with Him.

- New footage shows Ron Paul may not have stormed out of CNN interview after all.

- Congress calls on Twitter to block the Taliban.

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A few weeks ago, Lord Christopher Monckton told me a distressing story about a visit to Haiti. He said that poverty in that troubled nation is so pervasive that many of its inhabitants have been reduced to eating mud pies. The term “mud pies” is not slang for a local staple made from locally-grown cereal crops. We’re talking about people reduced to eating actual dirt. Monckton watched Haitians form mud into the shape of pies, mixing in a sprinkling of whatever nutritional foodstuffs might be available (like oil and salt) and then “cooking” the mud pies in the sun.

Sounds like further evidence of the devastating effects that the January 12 earthquake had on Haiti, right? Not really. Oh, did I forget to mention? This was the situation in Haiti before the earthquake hit, as this 2008 story that appeared in National Geographic documents.

Between 2000 and 2010 the World Food Price Index, the inflation-adjusted measure of how expensive food is across the globe, almost doubled. In 2000 the index sat at a value of 90. As of January 2010, the index had risen to a value of 172. That a 91% increase in the cost of food over the course of a decade.

While Americans and citizens of other industrialized nations may be able to absorb that kind of price increase, the poor living in the Third World cannot. Tragic cases of starvation like the ones Monckton witnessed in pre-earthquake Haiti are hardly unique. Dwindling, more expensive food supplies have led to an increasing number of food riots around the world. More and more people are dying, simply because they can not afford basic sustenance. How could this happen? (more…)