HERE’S THE PREDICTION ABOUT THE BRITISH ELECTIONS that I made a month ago:

If Blair loses or does badly, the press will say that the election was a referendum on the Iraq war and Bush. If Blair does better than expected, the press will say that the election was about local issues of no greater significance. (Either way, resentment of the Blair government’s position on the EU and immigration will be largely ignored.)

Let’s see if I turn out to have been right.

JIM GERAGHTY has further comments on George Lucas.

MORE BELLICOSE WOMEN IN IRAQ: Very interesting.

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF OFFERS A PHOTO ESSAY “On the disadvantages of pissing off America.”

Great minds think alike, as Rob Smith makes a similar observation, without the photos:

I am amused when Osama Bin Laden is referred to as a “mastermind.” BWHAHAHAHAAA!!!! He masterminded his entire organization right into the shitter when he finally managed to piss off the United States badly enough to fight back. He never thought we’d do it. He was mistaken.

I think the State Department should make sure that the photos get wide distribution. Of course, if we’d had a State Department that thought like that all along, we might not have had this problem . . . .

UPDATE: Brian Dunn emails: “Regarding the befores and afters: I guess when you know you have 72 virgins lined up for you, you just let hygiene and personal grooming go all to hell.”

This makes me feel even sorrier for those virgins than I was before.

SUBURBAN BLIGHT: “I brought up the bra, and now I have to live with the knowledge that he’s proudly informed his entire class that his mommy is coming on Friday, that she’s bringing juice, and that she’s even promised to wear a bra! to boot.”

MERYL YOURISH has a number of interesting posts, on everything from Holocaust remembrance to cats. And this post is like a mini Carnival of the Vanities.

JEFF GOLDSTEIN weighs in on Laura Bush’s comments, and explains why he’s not a social conservative.

UPDATE: Another defense of Laura Bush’s remarks, here.

JEFF JARVIS: “NPR screwed up but when that’s discovered it’s the bloggers who are amoral?”

WHEN “PRO-FAMILY” IS PRO-CANCER:

DEATHS from cervical cancer could jump fourfold to a million a year by 2050, mainly in developing countries. This could be prevented by soon-to-be-approved vaccines against the virus that causes most cases of cervical cancer – but there are signs that opposition to the vaccines might lead to many preventable deaths.

The trouble is that the human papilloma virus (HPV) is sexually transmitted. So to prevent infection, girls will have to be vaccinated before they become sexually active, which could be a problem in many countries.

In the US, for instance, religious groups are gearing up to oppose vaccination, despite a survey showing 80 per cent of parents favour vaccinating their daughters. “Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV,” says Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, a leading Christian lobby group that has made much of the fact that, because it can spread by skin contact, condoms are not as effective against HPV as they are against other viruses such as HIV.

“Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex,” Maher claims, though it is arguable how many young women have even heard of the virus.

Okay, technically, I guess, they’re just “anti-anti-cancer.” Still, this seems to me to be a pretty weak argument — don’t prevent cancer, because fear of cancer might prevent premarital sex. Pardon me if I’m unimpressed. (Via The Corner).

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh weighs in:

This strikes me as a pretty wrongheaded attitude on the Family Research Council’s part. I highly doubt that many women are now avoiding premarital sex because of the risk of HPV; I doubt therefore that more than a few women will start having premarital sex simply because they learn that they’ve been vaccinated. Moreover, premarital abstinence isn’t a perfect way to prevent HPV: Mother Nature doesn’t distinguish husbands from casual lovers for purposes of deciding whether a virus is communicated, and many an abstinent woman marries a man whose past isn’t as chaste as hers. . . .

Finally, I wonder how far the Family Research Council would take this. The availability of antibiotic treatment for syphilis, gonorrhea, and other bacterial sexually transmitted diseases similarly decreases the cost of sex, and may thus increase people’s tendency to engage in sex. . . . Would the FRC urge that people not be offered treatment for these diseases?

Before reading the above, I would have said no.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Bart Hall emails:

I’m an evangelical Christian. What’s really involved is this — for several years the more extreme social conservatives have been trying to scare kids into abstinence by saying, “You know, condoms don’t protect you against the most common STD, and it’s one that could cause cancer.” Having a vaccine takes away that club.

Too bad. If your encouragement of abstinence on SPIRITUAL grounds isn’t strong enough to convince a person, then it borders on the reprehensible to try to scare them into the behaviour YOU desire. I believe it was Reinhold Niebuhr who said (paraphrasing from memory) “Frantic orthodoxy is a sign not of strength, but of weakness.”

It’s seemed that way to me.

JIHAD FEVER:

I have been looking at myself, and millions of my brethren, fellow evangelicals along with traditional Catholics, in a ghastly arcade mirror lately — courtesy of this newspaper and the New York Times. Readers have been assured, among other dreadful things, that we are living in “a theocracy” and that this theocratic federal state has reached the dire level of — hold your breath — a “jihad.”

In more than 50 years of direct engagement in and observation of the major news media I have never encountered anything remotely like the fear and loathing lavished on us by opinion mongers in these world-class newspapers in the past 40 days. If I had a $5 bill for every time the word “frightening” and its close lexicographical kin have appeared in the Times and The Post, with an accusatory finger pointed at the Christian right, I could take my stack to the stock market.

I come at this with an insider/outsider vantage and with real affection for many of those engaged in this enterprise. When the Times put me on its reporting staff, I was the only evangelical Christian among some 275 news and editorial employees, and certainly the only one who kept a leather-bound Bible on his desk.

Yeah. I disagree with the Christian Right on most of the hot-button issues, but I don’t think that they’re indistinguishable from the Taliban, though one hears such overheated rhetoric all the time. I can’t help but think that the mainstream press would be far more sensitive to avoid stereotyping blacks, Muslims, or gays.

UPDATE: Joe Gandelman is less sympathetic.

THEY CAN HANDLE SADDAM AND AL QAEDA, but the Pentagon is still flummoxed on how to handle bloggers.

RUSH LIMBAUGH is currently having an amusingly flustered discussion of anal sex in the context of marriage, gay and straight, with a female caller. One of Limbaugh’s charms is his complete inability to pose as a convincing social conservative.

UPDATE: Got in the car right after posting this to go take the Insta-Daughter to the doctor and heard more. Limbaugh makes a poor defender of traditional marriage, but he gave it the old college try.

JACOB SULLUM: “[I]t’s remarkable that the organizers of a major conservative conference apparently could not find a single person who was willing to publicly defend the war on drugs.”

LOTS OF INTERESTING POSTS over at the Counterterrorism Blog. Just keep scrolling.

DARFUR UPDATE: Pictures of the genocide there, from children who survived:

Ala’ drew a scene he had witnessed in which a rebel soldier was shot in the genitals by a Janjaweed. Ali, a teacher in the refugee camp, explained that rebels were killed that way to emasculate them. “They [the Janjaweed] know what they are doing,” he said.

It remains a disgrace that so little is being done on this subject. There are some efforts to get NATO involved, but France is expected to object. Perhaps we should send the rebels some Special Forces trainers and a whole lot of guns? We could ship them direct from Saddam’s armories . . . .

RICH, BLOGGY GOODNESS: This week’s Carnival of the Vanities is up.

IN THE MAIL: My earlier post on fitness and weight training resulted in a care package from Dave Draper, including an autographed copy of Brother Iron, Sister Steel: A Bodybuilder’s Book, and a nice note from his wife, Laree. Turns out they’re InstaPundit readers. The book looks pretty good, combining a focus on traditional compound movements with good advice on diet, motivation and recovery from injuries; the Insta-Wife, who worked as a trainer at NYU during her grad-school days, liked it a lot.

STRATEGYPAGE notes that the Muslims-killing-Muslims strategy isn’t working for Al Qaeda:

Even outside of Iraq, many Sunni Arabs were getting disenchanted with al Qaeda terrorism. In a war of symbols, blowing up Moslem women and children is not a winning tactic.

Another major difference between 2003 and 2004, was the shifting of al Qaeda support from people in Moslem countries to expatriate Moslems in Europe. Many al Qaeda members had fled their native countries, because of the increasingly hostile atmosphere, for the relative sanctuary of Europe. Going into 2005, al Qaeda is dying in Iraq and plotting in Europe.

Europe has become a safer haven. That’s certainly consistent with this alleged Zarqawi letter, complaining about poor morale in Iraq. Yeah, guys, why would everyone there hate you? It’s not like you keep blowing up their relatives and acting like thugs, is it?

Meanwhile, there’s another big capture in Pakistan. I don’t usually bother to mention those “senior Al Qaeda aide captured” stories, because individually they’re not news. But over time, they make a difference, and they are. The terror war isn’t over, but the strategy of making Al Qaeda fight it on their own turf, not ours, seems to have worked out pretty well.

UPDATE: Here’s an interesting look at where terror attacks actually occur. And here’s a useful Iraq roundup from the Christian Science Monitor.

UNUSUALLY, I’ve been doing some education-blogging of my own today. But for the real deal, check out this week’s Carnival of Education.

SOMEHOW, I think that characterizing a wedding as “vicarious Tantric sexplay” may do more to promote marriage than all the efforts of James Dobson . . . .

BREVITY IS THE SOUL OF WIT — but prolixity is the key to a high S.A.T. score:

In the next weeks, Dr. Perelman studied every graded sample SAT essay that the College Board made public. He looked at the 15 samples in the ScoreWrite book that the College Board distributed to high schools nationwide to prepare students for the new writing section. He reviewed the 23 graded essays on the College Board Web site meant as a guide for students and the 16 writing “anchor” samples the College Board used to train graders to properly mark essays.

He was stunned by how complete the correlation was between length and score. “I have never found a quantifiable predictor in 25 years of grading that was anywhere near as strong as this one,” he said. “If you just graded them based on length without ever reading them, you’d be right over 90 percent of the time.” The shortest essays, typically 100 words, got the lowest grade of one. The longest, about 400 words, got the top grade of six. In between, there was virtually a direct match between length and grade.

He was also struck by all the factual errors in even the top essays. . . .

How to prepare for such an essay? “I would advise writing as long as possible,” said Dr. Perelman, “and include lots of facts, even if they’re made up.” This, of course, is not what he teaches his M.I.T. students. “It’s exactly what we don’t want to teach our kids,” he said.

Sigh.

UPDATE: More criticism here:

The new writing tests that have been added to both the SAT and the ACT:
A. Are unlikely to predict success in college writing.
B. Will send high school writing instruction in the wrong direction.
C. Reward those who write “conventional truisms and platitudes about life.”
D. All of the above.

According to the National Council of Teachers of English, the answer is D. The council released an analysis of the new writing tests Tuesday, and it found little to like and much to dislike.

On the other hand, I think it’s very important that actual writing ability be tested, somehow, and I hope that this criticism doesn’t cause ETS to abandon the effort. Reading further in the article, I see that some of the critics are basically hostile to the idea of a short, extemporaneous writing assignment. I completely disagree with that position; the ability to write quickly and well about all sorts of topics is only going to become more important in coming decades.

UPDATE: Kimberly Swygert defends the test and critiques the critics, in particular the NCTE:

Given that the essay section was developed because young men and women were graduating from high school with no writing skills whatsover, it’s disheartening to see the NCTE latch onto this essay – which has been operational for a grand total of two months – as though it, and it alone, can really bring down writing education in the US. . . .

I’d say there are plenty of other people doing that.

SOCIAL SECURITY: David Henderson and Charles Hooper say that Al Gore was right.

INSTAPUNK is defending Laura Bush against charges of unladylike behavior.

Personally, I think she was just channeling Pat Buttram.

MORE ON FILIBUSTERS, over at GlennReynolds.com.

BUREAUCRATS AND BAD LAW are frustrating space tourism efforts:

It is not the technical issues, or even the financing, that is causing concern. It is uncertainty about US licensing requirements.

“At this point we are not able to even view Scaled Composites’ designs for the commercial space vehicle,” Mr Whitehorn testified before the House committee.

“After US government technology-transfer issues are clarified, and addressed if deemed necessary, we hope to place a firm order for the spacecraft,” he said.

Mr Rutan added that the regulations have already affected financing for the project, which originally was to come from Mr Branson’s London-based Virgin Group. . . .

Mr Rutan saved his harshest criticism for another branch of the US government, the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, which oversaw the flights of SpaceShipOne.

“The process just about ruined my programme,” he said. “It resulted in cost overruns, increased the risk for my test pilots, did not reduce the risk to the non-involved public, destroyed our ‘always question, never defend’ safety policy and removed our opportunities to seek new innovative safety solutions.”

Mr Rutan said the problems arose because the same rules that applied to unmanned, expendable boosters were being applied to passenger spaceships.

The good news is that Congress seems to be paying attention.