Reed Neely, Martin Miller, Adam Shaffer, and Corey Magee are four major cogs in the Raider Machine.

As Ole Miss struggles through a miserable rebuilding year, the Chicago Bears endure another lackluster season, and my fantasy football team settles into the bottom tier of the league, my hopes for championship glory rest in my high school alma mater, JA.

A convincing 49-14 blowout of Washington School Friday Night secured a North AAA championship for JA. The Raider Nation will be returning to the playoffs for a 7th consecutive season and the 10th time in 11 years. Their first round foe, Parklane Academy, is a storied high school football program whose dominance in the 1980s and early 1990s has been eroded over the last decade by antiquated play calling and more competition for students from the resurgent public high schools in the area.

Today, people are more likely to know Parklane for its unique role as the alma mater of pop star Britney Spears, not for its football.

But though JA will be heavily favored in Friday's contest, the Raider Nation must be on guard. High school football is often predictable, but not this rivalry.

Nine years ago, Parklane was the defending state champion, and ranked No.1 in the state. The team had a huge offensive line, a bruising running game, and Britney Spears's brother at quarterback. They had defeated JA the previous Friday in the regular season finale and the Raider Nation was emotionally spent after our beloved head coach, Sherard Shaw, lost a long battle with cancer the week of the rematch.

But on a wet field in McComb, the emotional JA Raider team played their best game of the season. Fullback Jeffrey Lohmeier looked bottled up for a minimal gain, but slid out a pile of Parklane tacklers and turned in 2-yard play into a long touchdown run. The Lohmeier touchdown was the only score of the game, snapping Parklane's streak and keeping JA alive for a state championship. JA followed that upset with the program's first victory over Jackson Prep and then a championship game victory over Carroll, giving JA its first state championship and a story-book ending to a dream season.

That upset over Parklane signified a seachange for the fortunes of these two football programs. Since that game, JA has won 4 state championships and has defeated Parklane 9 or 10 consecutive times.

I expect and hope the streak to continue.

From Instapundit:

INTERESTING COMMENT FROM A RELUCTANT BUSH VOTER over at Roger Simon's place, illustrating some of the things the exit polls left out. Meanwhile, over at Andrew Sullivan's an emailer crunches the numbers on states with anti-gay-marriage initiatives and states without them, and concludes: "On the contrary, there is no evidence that suggests that the strategy of putting the anti-marriage initiatives on the ballot in several states did anything to improve Bush's performance in those states."

Sullivan's posted the numbers, which are quite interesting. This is the kind of analysis we ought to be getting from Big Media.

UPDATE: More here on "Gay Marriage and the Ground Game" from the Ashbrook Center. It's generally consistent with what Sullivan's reader says -- gay marriage didn't make much of a difference.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And here's Paul Freedman in Slate, saying the same thing: "Terrorism, not values, drove Bush's re-election."

These differences hold up at the state level even when each state's past Bush vote is taken into account. When you control for that variable, a 10-point increase in the percentage of voters citing terrorism as the most important problem translates into a 3-point Bush gain. A 10-point increase in morality voters, on the other hand, has no effect. Nor does putting an anti-gay-marriage measure on the ballot. So, if you want to understand why Bush was re-elected, stop obsessing about the morality gap and start looking at the terrorism gap.

I think that's right.

Another great column today -- Nicholas Kristof talks about how the Democratic Party must reinvent itself as Tony Blair reinvented the Labour Party in Britain.

If Democrats want to know how to win again, they have a model. It's the British Labor Party.

When I studied in England in the early 1980's, the British Labor Party seemed as quaint and eccentric as Oxford itself, where we wore gowns for exams and some dons addressed the rare female student as "sir." Labor was caught in its own echo chamber of militant unions and anti-American activists, and it so repulsed voters that it seemed it might wither away entirely.

Then Tony Blair and another M.P., Gordon Brown, dragged the party away from socialism, unions, nuclear disarmament and anti-Americanism. Together they created "New Labor," which aimed for the center and aggressively courted Middle Britain instead of trying to scare it. The result is that since 1997, Mr. Blair and Labor have utterly dominated Britain.

The Democrats need a similar rebranding. But the risk is that the party will blame others for its failures - or, worse, blame the American people for their stupidity (as London's Daily Mirror screamed in a Page 1 headline this week: "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?").

As moderates from the heartland, like Tom Daschle, are picked off by the Republicans, the party's image risks being defined even more by bicoastal, tree-hugging, gun-banning, French-speaking, Bordeau-sipping, Times-toting liberals, whose solution is to veer left and galvanize the base. But firing up the base means turning off swing voters. Gov. Mike Johanns, a Nebraska Republican, told me that each time Michael Moore spoke up for John Kerry, Mr. Kerry's support in Nebraska took a dive.

So Democrats need to give a more prominent voice to Middle American, wheat-hugging, gun-shooting, Spanish-speaking, beer-guzzling, Bible-toting centrists. (They can tote The Times, too, in a plain brown wrapper.) For a nominee who could lead the Democrats to victory, think of John Edwards, Bill Richardson or Evan Bayh, or anyone who knows the difference between straw and hay.