I see someone else is trying to make a Python port of the Textile 2 syntax. My approach so far has been a straight port of the Perl code by Brad Choate, with some minor tweaks (using urlparse and mimetypes, for example), rather than trying to hack Mark’s existing module.

Now that I’ve been hacking away for a week (and am about 700 lines away from being done—I just started on format_table, which looks downright nasty), I’m becoming convinced that the smarter plan would have been to write a lexer from scratch for the Textile markup, rather than trying to use the regex-happy approach Choate used (which works far, far better in Perl than in Python).

I think Brock below is being a bit obtuse in claiming the President’s position on a federal marriage amendment is an endorsement of “enshrining anti-gay bigotry into the United States Constitution”—particularly since that self-same alleged anti-gay bigotry is essentially the law of the land as of February 25, 2004. And I also think it’s absurd to criticize the president for not living up to one’s own fantasies about him, as Andrew Sullivan has done.

Funnily enough, my thoughts on the matter, from a policy perspective, generally coincide with those of Steven Taylor—although I personally do not share Taylor’s “moral objections” to homosexuality. As a supporter of same-sex marriage, I firmly believe the process that has been used to this point by its more overzealous proponents—particularly the extralegal behavior of officers of the City and County of San Francisco—is likely to energize enough additional support for FMA for it to pass, particularly if, as I expect will happen, Congress calls for ratification by special state conventions.* But my emotional reaction to the president’s support for FMA is closer to Tim Sandefur’s—which was perhaps even stronger than Brock’s.

Elsewhere: Dan Drezner is hosting a discussion of the politics of the proposal.