Via Robert Farley, it seems Nuri al-Maliki’s attempted purge of the Interior Ministry has backfired:

Iraq’s interior minister said all 24 of his officers who had been arrested in a security crackdown this week would be released. And in a bold gesture of defiance, he publicly condemned his own government’s investigation, calling the accusations false and motivated purely by politics.

The minister, Jawad al-Bolani, in a series of interviews and at a news conference on Friday, insisted on the innocence of the officials detained on charges of aiding terrorism and having inappropriate ties with political parties, including Al Awda, an illegal party that is a descendant of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.

“It’s because of the competition of the provincial elections,” Mr. Bolani, who arrived in the country on Friday after a week away, said of the arrests in an interview. “It’s just electoral propaganda, and that’s playing with fire.”

If you come at the king, you’d best not miss. So I suspect this won’t be the last of Bolani-Maliki tensions or of troubles between the Interior Ministry and Maliki’s double-special elite counterterrorism squad.

Another interesting graph from Lane Kenworthy:

My understanding of the evidence is that, interesting, trouble winning elections is not a significant barrier to women getting elected to congress. Women who secure a major party nomination do, on average, just as well as men. The difficulty is that women are less likely to run for office. There are a few causes of that, but the clearest are that women are less likely to have a spouse who supports their political ambitions and women are less likely to be recruited for office by political parties.

This is, I think, a large and underappreciated problem for progressive politics. Most progressives in the United States are women. Therefore, if women are systematically underrepresented in the pool of candidates (which they are) the progressive talent pool gets shallower relative to the progressive pool. There are other considerations of equity to worry about here, of course, but people on the left should recognize that it’s also very much a practical problem. I’m not sure exactly what can be done about the asshole husband issue (men in the audience — don’t be an asshole!) but the candidate recruitment issue is something that can and should be the subject of deliberate action.