First, not very break­ing news; just reported that the Appeals Com­mis­sion man­aged to review 60% of the names.

Sec­ond, leaked infor­ma­tion says that the Appeals Com­mis­sion is sub­jected to pres­sures from coali­tion lead­ers to allow or exclude names, but the last offer given to the Com­mis­sion is to exclude Dhafir Al-Ani, and allow­ing Saleh Al-Mutlaq to par­tic­i­pate in elec­tions in return. Dawa Party’s MP Haider Al-Abadi also men­tioned the same thing using “softer words” say­ing: “The Appeals Com­mis­sion is an inde­pen­dent board but the Gov­ern­ment will watch the Com­mis­sion dur­ing the review of the names of the excluded politi­cians, to ensure the con­sis­tency with the Con­sti­tu­tion and the law”.

IHEC inten­tion­ally reported today the pos­si­bil­ity to post­pone the elec­tion, due to the lack of suf­fi­cient time to start cam­paign­ing, wait­ing for the Fed­eral Court deci­sion on the excluded politi­cians. The post­pone threat is part of the pres­sure on the Amer­i­cans to accept the sit­u­a­tion as it is.

At the same time Maliki renewed his attack, warn­ing the U.S. Ambas­sador in Bagh­dad not to inter­vene in the Iraq’s affairs, stress­ing that Iraq has a strong gov­ern­ment, a par­lia­ment and a con­sti­tu­tion which is respon­si­ble for deal­ing with this issue.

Maliki’s side­kick Ali Al-Adeeb also joined the attack on the U.S. inter­ven­tion, say­ing that if the Amer­i­cans have an opin­ion then let them keep for them­selves. The U.S. Ambas­sador Christo­pher Hill con­tin­ued to defend him­self and his position.

One thing must be very clear, Maliki’s con­cerns right now is to counter attack Al-Sadr. All these Anti-Baath demon­stra­tions, the esca­la­tion of the Baghdad’s munic­i­pal­ity (headed by Maliki’s Dawa Party) to fire all for­mer Baathists, and Maliki’s meet­ing with a del­e­ga­tion from Sadrists strong­hold in Sadr-city today meant to par­tially con­tain Muq­tada Al-Sadr’s influence.