Mickey Kaus' Kausfiles has been on the ground on the campaign trail (on Slate's dime) for a couple of weeks, getting back in touch with his inner Democrat. Good stuff, if you don't mind his open loathing (bordering on apoplexy) of Kerry and Bob Shrum. It plays to his strengths: he knows the players, the hangouts and the lore (he's worked on the campaign side in New Hampshire before), and he gets to be opinionated on lots of issues, but most of the time there's so much interesting inside baseball stuff he doesn't obsess on welfare or race.

His stated presidential preferences before the New Hampshire vote, in order: "Edwards, Dean, Gephardt, Lieberman, a Bush-Clark tossup, the complete telephone books of all major American cities, Kerry."

Meanwhile, a Wall Street Journal story today anointed five political websites that it says "cut through the bluster":

Campaigndesk.org
The Note
Factcheck.org
Josh Marshall/Talking Points Memo
Andrew Sullivan/Daily Dish

Marshall, by the way, has a "Critic at Large" piece in this week's New Yorker. Amy Wallace, a senior writer at Los Angeles, also has a New Yorker story (not online) about Larry Cohen, "Hollywood's king of schlock."