This one's all over the place; I won't even pretend there's a coherent theme to tie these bits and pieces together. In the world of politics, Christopher Albritton writes that the Iraqi Constitution situation might not be as grim as initial reports indicate.

so far it's not bad. There seems to be no role for the Shi'ite hawza, women are mentioned in almost every clause that guarantees rights, the court system is independent and liberal. Islam is the official religion and “a main source of legislation,” but religious minorities are guaranteed freedom of worship. However, no law may contradict the principles of Islam, democracy or the rights and freedoms mentioned in the constitution, which sets up an immediate contradiction when you get to the rights of women.

Pat Robertson pissed off almost everyone by calling on the US to assassinate Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez. Media Matters has the video clip of the statements in question. "...I don't think any oil shipments will stop," he said. "...It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with." What Chavez needs to do is ditch that oil and get his hands on some diamonds. Then he could count on Robertson's support. It worked for Seko.

My long-neglected personal site Predicate.org has received a drupal-flavored facelift, and a small crowd of compatriots are posting there now. It's fun to see it get off the ground; hopefully some of the other interesting folks I know will filter over there and poke around. I've debuted a couple of interesting drupal hacks on it, including comment threads with inline image uploading, previously impossible with the stock Drupal install. The patches might make it into the next official version of the Drupal core, which is quite gratifying. Whee!