For the certificate store:

Can we eventually agree to bind a default CA-store to a Mozilla verified one?
Mozilla in handling Firefox does a great job in keeping CA-store up-to-date.

Integrating default mozilla CA-store with Python builds could be a nice way, it's just a matter of integrating into the build-system the download/fetching of default Mozilla store.

At least the language base it's default on a trusted entity to manage, cross-platform, the CA-store for TLS/SSL.

The mainteinance of the CA-store would be delegated to Mozilla that has been demonstrated to be independent and very security conscious, removing dirty CA-store (like Diginotar after Iranian compromise).

That way 90% of case of of SSL/TLS certificate validation will be managed and by default it would be possible to enable secure SSL/TLS client checking like described in http://bugs.python.org/issue13647 .