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IHEC hasn't released any new results (عربي) today, so the latest official data is still the preliminary results from six provinces reported yesterday.

But the commission did release a statement that generally characterizes the vote in four southern provinces. We already knew prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law coalition did well in Babil and Najaf provinces. The commission says State of Law is also leading in Dhi Qar, Wassit, Qadisiyah and Muthanna provinces. All four are majority-Shi'ite. None are particularly large; Dhi Qar is probably the only one with a population larger than one million.

Iraq's Supreme Court has reportedly reissued a six-year-old warrant for Moqtada al-Sadr's arrest.

This story isn't getting much attention in the English-language media -- everyone's focused on the Diyala bombings (more on those soon) -- but it has the potential to be quite significant.

The warrant is for the 2003 murder of Abdul Majid al-Khoei, a pro-American Shi'ite cleric who was hacked to death by a mob in Najaf. The Coalition Provisional Authority issued a warrant for Sadr's arrest in 2004, but he was never arrested, and the warrant was eventually buried as part of a reconciliation deal with his Mahdi Army.

The Iraqi prime minister is getting hammered from all sides this morning. Iyad Allawi, the former prime minister and head of the Iraqiyya coalition, accuses Maliki of staging a coup (عربي) against a "peaceful transfer of power" in Iraq.

"The government has made a decision, in collusion with suspicious forces inside and outside Iraq, to exclude important politicians from participating in the political process. The Iraqi people know this is a conspiracy to ignore the will of voters and to exclude opponents of the parties in power... it is a preemptive coup."

Then we have Motqada al-Sadr, who condemns the Maliki government (عربي) for failing to protect the Iraqi people from ongoing violence. "Shame, all shame" on Maliki, Sadr says, "and the blood of the people is on... this government."

Iraqi president Jalal Talabani has ordered a high-level commission to investigate the Justice and Accountability Commission's decision to ban 511 candidates from the March election.

"I myself am not satisfied with the banning decision," said Talabani, a Kurd who heads the three-member presidential council. "We have sent a letter to the Supreme Appeal Court asking whether this committee that issued the decision is legitimate or not."

Talabani's announcement comes 24 hours after Iraqi vice president Tariq al-Hashimi declared the ban illegal. The two men met yesterday at Talabani's home to discuss the decision; neither has released details of the meeting, but it's clear they decided to fight the ban.

Reidar Visser makes an important discovery: Ali Faysal al-Lami, the head of Iraq's Justice and Accountability Commission -- which last week banned nearly 500 candidates from Iraq's March parliamentary election -- is himself a candidate in that election.

Lami is running as part of the Iraqi National Alliance, the coalition led by Iraq's two largest Shi'ite parties: the Sadrist movement and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

In other words: The man who controls the "vetting process for the entire election," as Visser puts it, is himself running for office. Not really a shining moment for Iraq's young democracy.

For those of you who are really, really interested in this subject, Al-Jazeera English's Inside Iraq program did a half-hour show this weekend on the constitutional crisis. It features three Iraqi MPs: Mustafa al-Hiti, Adnan Pachachi, and Abdul-Hadi al-Hassani. Video's after the jump.

Iraq's high electoral commission (IHEC) still hasn't decided whether to approve the de-Baathification commission's request to ban Salah al-Mutlak, and hundreds of other Iraqi politicians, from parliamentary elections in March.

Hamidiyya Husseini, a member of the IHEC, said today that the board has received a formal request (عربي) to exclude Mutlak and the other candidates. The commission said it will decide "within days" whether to approve the request.

Okay, as promised, some more detail on this afternoon's "Iraq in 2020" panel at the Middle East Institute conference. The whole concept was something of a conceit -- as a reader pointed out, there's a lot of uncertainty about Iraq in 2010 -- so most of the panel focused on shorter-term concerns.

I complained earlier about the lack of focus on economics. The panel mostly focused on politics and diplomacy -- how Iraqis will reconcile internally, and how they'll relate to their neighbors (and the U.S.) externally. What really struck me was the divergence between the American panelists, who tended to be more optimistic about the future, and the Iraqi panelists, who seemed pessimistic about intractable problems of Iraqi governance.

Forgot to mention this yesterday, but Nouri al-Maliki formally unveiled his new State of Law political coalition. It contains 40 different parties -- not just Shi'ites, but also Sunni and Kurdish groups.

Maliki decided to form the coalition after refusing to join the new ISCI-Sadr alliance, which refused to promise him another term as prime minister.