Rory Carroll reports from Haiti:

At first sight the business resembles a thriving pottery. In a dusty courtyard women mould clay and water into hundreds of little platters and lay them out to harden under the Caribbean sun. The craftsmanship is rough and the finished products are uneven. But customers do not object. This is Cité Soleil, Haiti’s most notorious slum, and these platters are not to hold food. They are food.

Brittle and gritty – and as revolting as they sound – these are “mud cakes”. For years they have been consumed by impoverished pregnant women seeking calcium, a risky and medically unproven supplement, but now the cakes have become a staple for entire families. It is not for the taste and nutrition – smidgins of salt and margarine do not disguise what is essentially dirt, and the Guardian can testify that the aftertaste lingers – but because they are the cheapest and increasingly only way to fill bellies.

Here’s another report. Except note that both of these articles are from 2008, before the earthquake.

Since that time, obviously, the physical devastation will have reduced the country’s ability to grow, harvest, and distribute food. It will also have reduced people’s ability to earn a living and purchase imported food. And this was a population already living on the brink of starvation, with no margin for error. Under the circumstances, aid is vital but it’s emigration that offers the best hope for most Haitians. If developed countries really care about helping, they’ll change their policies and make it possible for more Haitians to move.

A Josh Marshall correspondent says people should stop whining about filibusters:

The Framers didn’t design the Senate as a clone of the House. It is obviously frustrating to both sides when dirt gets thrown in the gears. But I think people tend to get aggravated about what’s going on today, and forget about how this has been happening for over 200 years in the World’s Most Deliberative Body.

I don’t think this is remotely persuasive. Not only does it neglect the considerable evidence that the situation has, in fact, worsened over time, but it’s not even the sort of thing that would be persuasive. If the framers had deemed it crucial that the Senate operate via supermajority, they could have written that into the constitution. What’s more, it’s not really clear what relevance the framers have here—they wanted an un-elected Senate, they wanted slavery, they wanted lots of things. Last, the fact that some version of this problem has existed for a long time is no reason not to change it. An anti-lynching bill could have passed during the Hardin administration if not for the filibuster. That counts as a point against filibusters, not for them.

People’s takes on whether or not reconfirming Ben Bernanke would be a good idea turn out to have a lot to do with their judgments about politics—what would happen next in the Senate—and don’t reveal that much about their views on economic policy. Scott Sumner has better questions:

We should be debating:

1. Whether to cut the fed funds target from 0.25% to 0%

2. Whether to put an interest penalty on excess reserves

3. Whether to do additional QE

4. Whether to set an inflation or NGDP target

5. Whether to target growth rates or levels

6. And of course the key overarching question: Would the economy benefit from an increase in AD, or nominal spending?

Right. We the public actually know—by design—surprisingly little about the views of the people on the Fed’s Open Market Committee. Brad DeLong seems to think that Bernanke secretly holds better views than his expressed ones and that the real problem is the other members of the FOMC. That sounds wrong to me, but there’s no way to know for sure. Easier to stick the questions of what it is the Fed should be doing, namely worrying more about unemployment and the risks of a “double dip” and less about hypothetical future inflation.

Andrew Golis tweeted this out recently:

I remember during the Bush years when Nathan Newman and I were saying that liberal infatuation with the filibuster was short-sighted and it would be smart to take advantage of the right’s momentary frustration with it to return the Senate to something approaching a workable set of procedures.

Nowadays it’s the right that’s discovered the alleged principled virtues of governmental paralysis. And really it all might be fine if stasis were actually a viable option. The American people seem fairly small-c conservative and maybe our system of government should be too. But small-c conservative measures aren’t going to deal with the long-term fiscal challenge. And a system that’s too small-c conservative to allow the executive branch to be fully staffed one year into a new administration isn’t working at all. If you look at the chart, it’s pretty clear that the Democratic response to unprecedented Republican obstructionism is going to be an even higher level of obstructionism once the tables are turned.

Apparently Evan Bayh is pining for a presidential announcement of a discretionary spending freeze:

I keep resolving to stop blogging about Evan Bayh. Suffice it to say that I don’t, personally, think it makes sense $250 billion in tax cuts for wealthy heiresses and then turn around and insist on the need to take food out of the mouths of poor children. So we’ll just have to disagree about that.

But what was really interesting here, to me, is that Bayh forget to work in the usual caveats about exempting defense, intelligence, and veterans spending from the “discretionary” catch-all. And yet the more I think about it, the more that national security, along with Medicare, stand out as the places likely to get the ax when the budget crisis really comes. One of the many virtues of The End of Influence is that it really lays out in detail the extent to which the sustainability of US fiscal policy is a matter of deliberately Chinese public policy. The dynamic isn’t sustainable in general, but it’s a particularly absurd financial basis for a policy of worldwide military domination. If a real debt crunch emerges, Chinese officials are going to be right in the thick of it with a say over what gets cut.

Via James Fallows, an effort to redraw the United States into jurisdictions with more-or-less equal populations that still reflects the ancestry of existing borders:

One interesting thing about this is that it would shake up some of our existing party/region alignments. Today, for example, the Pacific coast is a solid stack of three Democratic states. But there are actually a lot of conservative voters living in Oregon, Washington, and California, and I believe the expansion of Oregon into “Willamette” would produce a red state. But it would be a different kind of red state from our existing red regional blocs. Conversely, some of these new southern states would be considerably more liberal than any existing ones, but their Senators would still band together with southern conservatives on certain topics of regional interest.

In some ways, even the sparsely populated areas currently overrepresented in the Senate would benefit from this arrangement. Consolidating several big empty square states into a “high plains” unit would allow these areas to cut down on some inefficient duplication of effort. With just one state capitol, you’d have a wider population pool from which to recruit really good people to run your state agencies. And with only one capitol to cover, it’s much more likely that you’d have first-rate reporters figuring out what’s happening. You could focus on creating one really good flagship state university campus instead of struggling to maintain six middling ones.