If you haven't already, please read this NYT article about how spiking food prices is leading to hunger and civil unrest across the globe. Here's a snippet.

Saint Louis Meriska's children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day. His eyes downcast, his own stomach empty, the unemployed father said forlornly, "They look at me and say, 'Papa, I'm hungry,' and I have to look away. It's humiliating and it makes you angry."

That anger is palpable across the globe. The food crisis is not only being felt among the poor but is also eroding the gains of the working and middle classes, sowing volatile levels of discontent and putting new pressures on fragile governments.

In Cairo, the military is being put to work baking bread as rising food prices threaten to become the spark that ignites wider anger at a repressive government. In Burkina Faso and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, food riots are breaking out as never before. In reasonably prosperous Malaysia, the ruling coalition was nearly ousted by voters who cited food and fuel price increases as their main concerns.

And here are a couple takes on what is fueling the problem.

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John McCain, a longtime crusader against the corrupting influence of lobbyists in American politics, certainly has not shunned their help when it comes to his run for the presidency. The deeper into the campaign season we get, the more we seem to be learning about his not insignificant connections to the very influence peddlers he's so often railed against. Today, we get another piece of the puzzle, thanks to Sam Stein at the Huffington Post, who reports that Charlie Black, one of McCain's chief political strategists and himself a longtime Washington lobbyist, is the author of a pair of letters to federal officials in defense of Wayne Drizin, "a convicted felon, disbarred lawyer, and failed brothel owner with long business connections to the controversial Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi."

According to Stein:

The letters, obtained by The Huffington Post, were sent to a U.S. district court judge and the U.S. Justice Department's inspector general's office. They are scrupulously detailed and, at times, personal notes, praising Drizin and alleging that a conspiracy of zealous federal investigators was to blame for his legal woes.

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"I wish you could conduct a campaign on policy and policy differentiation," Howard Wolfson, Senator Hillary Clinton's campaign communications director, said in a conference call with reporters on Thursday morning. He added that Clinton "would like nothing more."

This was moments after Wolfson and Phil Singer, another top Clinton aide, had hammered Barack Obama for having held a fundraiser during his first state senate campaign in Illinois at the home of William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois and a former aide to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who was a member of the radical Weather Underground Organization, which was responsible for several bombings in the early 1970s. Ayers was never arrested for his activities. But in 2001, he did say, "I don't regret setting bombs." The issue had come up during the previous night's debate. Responding to a question about Ayers, Obama had said, "the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn't make much sense." Wolfson, this morning after, insisted that Obama had "to be more forthcoming about that issue" and state clearly whether it had been "appropriate" to attend a fundraiser at Ayers' home.

When it came time for questions for Wolfson, I asked an obvious one: Did Hillary Clinton believe that it had been appropriate in 2001 for President Bill Clinton to have pardoned two members of the Weather Underground as he left office? The two recipients of Clinton's munificence were Linda Evans, who was sentenced to five years in prison for her participation in a string of 1980s bombings, and Susan Rosenberg, who was charged with participating in a bank robbery that left one guard and two police officers dead. And, I continued, has Senator Clinton ever criticized this decision? Has she ever said anything publicly about it? Rosenberg, I noted, had been apprehended with 740 pounds of explosives in her possession.

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The Reverend Wright controversy, the flag pin controversy, and the William Ayers controversy were all dying or dead. Now, they're back in the headlines.

In lieu of questions on education, the environment, trade, health care, or almost any other serious issue, the moderators of Wednesday's Democratic presidential primary debate on ABC chose to reinvigorate what Barack Obama called "manufactured" issues.

"Manufactured" issues are ones the media and the blogosphere believe should be a big deal, and treat as such, even if there is little evidence that voters really care about them. They are less frequently about a controversial position on a serious topic, since no mainstream presidential candidate ever dares to take one of those, than they are guilt-by-association situations that say little or nothing about the candidate him or herself.

William Ayers is a perfect example of this. Ayers was part of a domestic terror group from the '60s and '70s called the Weather Underground or the Weathermen. Obama knows Ayers and his wife, also a member of the Weather Underground, because they ran in the same Chicago political circles in the 1990s. Ayers hosted the event in which Obama was unveiled as a state senate candidate, and gave money to Obama's state senate reelection campaign in 2001. The men are not friends, though they have been described in the past as friendly. Ayers, now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, declines to disavow his past, leaving Obama open to headlines like "Obama worked with terrorist."

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