Morning Constitutional – Thursday, 26 August 2010

Good morning, folks. Miley and Liam broke up. Now, your morning constitutional:

An aide to Afghan President Hamid Karzai who is being investigated for corruption is actually paid by the C.I.A.

The Security and Exchanges Commission has approved new rules giving shareholders of companies more power to nominate board members.

Food inflation is unexpectedly low, despite the rise in commodity prices.

A solid case on how raising interest rates could be better for the economy than the ultra-low rates now.

Will Wilkinson: How Reason Imperils Our Fake Libertarian Heritage. Choice passage:

There is no form of libertarianism that simply falls out of our cultural endowment, as American moral culture has never been remotely libertarian. The average Tea Partier is, like the average voter, a collection of reflexes, prejudices, resentments, and demands that add up to no coherent philosophy at all. The heritage of the progressive managerial social insurance state is no less an authentically American one than is the heritage of Jim Crow apartheid, the heritage of utopian collectivist frontier communes, or the heritage of founding-era republican liberty for propertied males. It is the business of conservative elites to fabricate a narrative and ideology of authentic Americanism, and to convince the right-leaning public that this is what their particular concatenation of impulses really comes to, in order to give it some strategically useful partisan shape and motivation.

The effect of the Bush tax cuts on income inequality.

On the disparity in sentencing between aggravated battery and domestic battery.

Will the fact that former Republican chairman Ken Mehlman has come out change the same-sex marriage debate?

The oil spill in the gulf has led to more regulation, but not less off-shire drilling.

Facebook sues Teachbook.com for using \”book\” in name.

Finally, a bear takes off in a car with a sandwich.