As a reward for sitting through Friday Night Lights this morning, I’m going to see Team America: World Police next week. In the meantime, anyone who loves South Park should check out Mike Russell’s excellent interview with Trey Parker and Matt Stone in In Focus.

The latest Pew Research Center poll shows George W. Bush leading John F. Kerry, 48 percent to 41 percent among all voters. The president holds a slightly narrower lead over his opponent among likely voters, 49 percent to 44 percent. And the newest ABC News poll has Bush edging out Senator Kerry 51 percent to 46 percent, also among likely voters.

And yet, for some strange reason, the headline at CNN/Netscape News still reads: “Bush Slipping Fast in Polls.”

If you haven’t forked over your $60 to George Lucas yet, I’ve got a piece up about why the Star Wars trilogy DVDs are a sham and an attack on everything we hold dear about Star Wars. Matt Continetti, on the other hand, has chimed in with a fan-boy’s defense of Lucas.

Reader J.B. writes in with this link to Snopes.com, which has an exhaustive entry on the Subservient Chicken. Including, if you’ll believe it, a list of commands that he responds to.

I kept a lengthy scorecard as the debate was happening and the conclusion I came to (without listening to any other analyses) was that they each won 9 of the 18 questions, making it a draw.

Of course it’s more complicated than that. There is the overall gestalt of the debate, and in analyzing this, each candidate can plausibly claim a tactical victory. Kerry looked presidential, didn’t sound condescending, and appeared to have a grasp of small details. His problem was that some of these small details were flat wrong. For instance, he criticized the president for shutting down the NY subway during the convention–which never happened.

That might have been a mental hiccup, but another one of his mistaken details was simply dishonest: Kerry criticized Bush’s transformation of the FBI, pointing to the 1,000 hours of untranslated intelligence tapes and saying that the key clue for stopping the next 9/11 could be somewhere in this pile. Let’s look at the facts: For one thing, Bush has transformed the FBI from being a law-enforcement agency to a counter-terrorism agency. No one with a serious grasp of what the FBI does could fail to see the magnitude of this sea-change. Where the FBI used to have 35 joint-terrorism task-forces before 9/11, it now has 100. In just three years, the FBI created and made operational the Terrorist Screening Center and Terrorist Threat Integration Centers. By the end of this year, there will be more than 50 FBI Legat offices overseas in terrorist hotspots like Yemen. On September 10, 2001, the FBI was primarily concerned with the mafia and the drug trade. It is now America’s equivalent of MI-5.

But back to those untranslated tapes. Since 9/11, the FBI has hired more than 700 new linguists to translate intelligence and the Bureau has put in place a complex system to prioritize incoming intelligence. All al Qaeda intercepts are reviewed and translated within 24 hours. Either Kerry was self-consciously demagogueing the FBI, or he has no idea what’s going on inside America’s primary domestic counter-terrorism agency.

As for Bush, he hammered the theme that his campaign believes is the key to the election: Kerry is a flip-flopper who doesn’t know his own mind and can’t be trusted to be commander-in-chief during wartime. We’ll soon see if that line of attack has any resonance. If it does, then Bush will have done real damage to Kerry with his single-minded focus.

The problem for Bush was that he looked a bit like the angry Al Gore from that 2000 debate. He sighed and made strange noises. He was tart and, at times, peevish. The message he seemed to be projecting was, Hey, I’m trying to protect the free world against nut-ball terrorists and you want me to debate this guy? Just go ahead and vote for me already.

I’m not sure how that sort of confidence and superiority will play with the voting public–it’s entirely possible that they like it. But by being so superior, Bush did save Kerry from himself. Next to the Bush we saw last night, Kerry didn’t have to worry about looking like a condescending, know-it-all Lurch.

There is no Pottery Barn Rule.

Soxblog make the smart point that pundits don’t decide who wins a debate–polls do. And the Gallup numbers aren’t all that rosy for Kerry.

Besides last night’s debate, there is one other pressing issue I would like to bring to our readers: The opening of DreamWorks SKG’s star-studded Shark Tale in theaters near you and complaints about the film’s stereotyping of the sharks (who are the villains) as mobbed-up Italians. To wit, the predators bear names like Luca and Gino and use phrases such as “ma’donn” and “capeesh.”

So what’s the big deal? After all, it’s just one of those animated cartoons for kids, so who cares? Well that is exactly what bothers Lawrence Auriana, president of the Columbus Citizens Foundation. In a statement regarding the movie, Auriana insists that Shark Tale “introduces young minds to the idea that people with Italian names–like millions of Americans across the country–are gangsters. Shark Tale creates in its audiences an association between gangsters and Italian-Americans that will become imprinted in the developing minds of children…. In part because of DreamWorks’s portrayal of gangsters in Shark Tale, in both the movie and the related books now available across the country, thousands of Italian-American boys and girls will feel a similar pain.”

Auriana’s organization (which performs important charitable works across America) has asked Steven Spielberg and his company to remove “Italian names from characters,” eliminate Italian-related phrases and slang, and even remove “physical gestures and customs found in Italian and Italian-American culture.”

I’m guessing this is an offer Spielberg can refuse. Still, some of this is understandable. After all, kids say and think the darndest things. But shouldn’t Auriana and others be more alarmed by other atrocities committed against the Italian-American people? What about that abbondanza of evil known as the Olive Garden? What about Joey?

Besides that, if the movie takes place entirely underwater, who will the fish be sleeping with if they can no longer be sleeping with the fishes?