Charles Krauthammer has a fairly convincing rebuke to Mickey Kaus’s too-clever-by-three-quarters argument that the terrorists really want Bush to win the election.

I saw Friday Night Lights and it isn’t worth a full review. I’ll just say this: Friday Night Lights isn’t the best sports movie ever made (Bull Durham). It’s not the best football movie ever made (Any Given Sunday). It’s not even the best West-Texas, high-school football movie ever made (Varsity Blues). Instead, it’s a mish-mash of every cliché imaginable, all filmed with an annoying, cinema vérité-style shaky camerawork. The result is something like The Program crossed with Kids.

Sadly, there’s a good movie in there somewhere. If the script had been reworked three or four times, if the director had made better choices, if the editor had been more disciplined, Friday Night Lights could have been a fine film.

As it is, stay away.

Stephen Schwartz thumps the Nobel committee for awarding this year’s prize in literature to Elfriede Jelinek: a semi-pornographic, anti-American, communist hack.

Tired of news from Iraq being filtered by the mainstream media? If so, I am more than happy to pass on to you a link from a Weekly Standard reader whose husband is serving bravely in Mosul. “It is hard to be just one voice in a maddening sea of negativity about this war,” she tells me. “I can hardly bring myself to watch the news because I know that it doesn’t accurately represent this war effort. There doesn’t seem to be too much interest in getting the military voice heard unless it ‘confirms’ the negative.” For those of us who share similar feelings, this site–though there’s nothing fancy about it–is a breath of fresh air.

FoxNews.com has a story about John Edwards’s appearance on Regis and Kelly, where he speculates on casting for a movie about the 2004 campaign. Kelly Ripa suggested that Harrison Ford play Kerry. From there:

Edwards responded that someone recently said%A0they had a mental%A0image of him in the movie, A Few Good Men, starring Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, “me as Tom Cruise and Dick Cheney as the Nicholson character.” “Can you see it now, Cheney: ‘You need me on that wall, you want me on that wall’ . . . and me saying, ‘You can’t handle the truth!'”

The only problem with this, of course, is that “You can’t handle the truth” is Nicholson’s most famous line from A Few Good Men.

Be that as it may, I’m now commencing open casting for 2004: The Movie. Suggestions welcome.

If you haven’t seen it already, check out Media Tenor’s Slant-o-meter. Their breakdown of the Bush-Kerry post-debate analysis shows that two of the Big 7 networks differed wildly from the rest of the pack in their negative comments about Bush and positive comments about Kerry.

If you guessed that those two networks were CBS and ABC, you’d be right. But even more interesting is Fox News. Although you’re supposed to say that Fox is homebase for GOP evildoers, compare them the average of the rest of the pack (excluding super-biased CBS and ABC) and they are, dare I say, fair and balanced.

Beldar is worth it just for the story and the picture.

The otherwise brilliant and sensible Soxblog is calling the 2004 Red Sox a “buzz-saw” and comparing them to the ’86 Bears. (Psst, hey, Fate . . . over here. Piss off!)

As a newly-minted citizen of Red Sox Nation, I hope he’s right. After the three long months I’ve spent in love with the Sox, I figure they owe me a championship. Has Soxblog taken leave of his senses? Maybe. But this quote suggests he hasn’t taken full leave of his senses:

“They are of course still the Red Sox and anything can happen. They play before a fandom that fully expects tragedy to happen imminently and that can’t be easy for the players. And for those of you who reside outside New England, it is probably impossible to imagine how the local media pride themselves on being a destructive force. The daily, almost hourly, barrage of negativity and hostility–unless you live in Philadelphia you’ve never seen anything like it.” [Emphasis added]