Shapiro is right about Chris Dodd's surprising strength of issues and presentation, but wrong that he's not drawing crowds or cameras. Dodd spoke to nearly two hundred people in a backyard in Ames earlier this fall, on a gray drizzly day (a lot like this one), and ended up on C-Span's "Road to the White House."

http://www.c-span.org/search/basic.asp?ResultStart=1&ResultCount=10&BasicQueryText=Chris+Dodd&image1.x=0&image1.y=0&image1=Submit

That's me at the end of the clip, asking him about impeachment, in the rain. He's against it; we disagree, but I still admire him.

The Iowa Caucus being the nearly unique animal it is, you can vote more than once. I think, based on his combination of domestic and foreign policy experience (Edwards is better domestically, Richardson and Biden internationally, but no one candidate on either side combines Dodd's strengths), he's a good bet for a first ballot vote. If he doesn't attain viability (fifteen percent of votes cast in a precinct), then it's Edwards.

Edwards will move on anyway, but it would be great to see a candidate of Dodd's stature recognized. He got into the race late and is chronically underfunded, but that doesn't mean people don't respond to him and like what they see. Iowans have a record of changing their minds at the last minute, so it's not too late for Dodd.

No one, particularly the MSM, is making enough of how offensive these words must be to anybody who is not a Protestant evangelical, straightline Mormon or conservative Catholic, and requires a religious litmus test to determine their presidential candidate. That has to be a good deal more than half the country.

"Freedom requires religion?" Maybe in Saudi Arabia or Talibanistan, where nonbelievers are publicly executed.

"Secularism is a religion?" Anyone who would say that doesn't know the difference between philosophy and religion, and is incapable of successfully practicing either.

When an obviously intelligent presidential candidate has to abase himself to win the support of religious fascists in order to secure the nomination of a major American political party, at least one segment of this country is in pretty bad shape, and it's up to the rest of us to keep it from spreading. Romney's speech was a tragic example of the tail wagging the elephant.

"Our Founding Fathers spoke time and again on the necessity of religious grounding to ensure the freedom of our new republic," says "Anonymous," although why somebody feels he has to post a comment like that anonymously is beyond me. Reflexive trollism, I guess.

Anyway, I believe the words in the Bill of Rights are "Congress shall make no law" concerning the establishment of religion.

I'm free to believe what I want. You're free to believe what you want. Neither of us is free to make a particular form of religion the law of the land, or to prevent someone of a different religion from serving as anything from street cleaner to president.

The "paranoid loonies" are the ones who don't see anything wrong with doing so.

its predictable way down the drain, Georgie Fame was releasing his masterpiece "Cool Cat Blues," which devastatingly combined the best of jazz, progressive rock and R&B, all of which Reynolds decries as missing from British music of the period. Outswinging Brian Setzer, it restarted his career, leading to a long string of live and studio albums featuring guests like Clark Terry, Paul Gonsalves and Alan Skidmore (of the wrenching sax solo on Clapton and Mayall's "Have You Heard," back thirty years later and that much better) and tribute albums and cuts to Mose Allison, Hoagy Carmichael and Eddie Jefferson.

If the indie press reviewed it at all, it was to dismiss it as Dadpop from someone of dad's generation.

Don't know if the letter deserved a star or not, but it was clearly written by someone who was upset by Reynolds' snarky overgeneralization about Americans who liked BBC television. I didn't care much for it, either.

Yes, the programming the BBC used to distribute in the U.S. was generally more intelligent than what was made here. That came to an end with the lad-culture inspired English viewers' revolt a few years ago. Now what we get is just as bad as the U.S. crud, with a different accent.

Reynolds just took a cheap punky/X/lad antiintellectual shot. He was better when he stuck to what he knew, not that that's worth much.

And one more thing about G. Fame: he also did us a service in exposing the jazz roots of people like Van Morrison and Ben Sidran. Worth checking out.

Mike Huckabee computes on his fingers.

"Living it may not be enough?" Why did this get a star?

"Had enough," who's apparently channelling Newt Gingrich (unless Gingrich is channelling him) does a good imitation of every bourgeois reverse-racist blues snob of the last eighty years. No convincing white blues players or singers?

Literally impossible to list them all, but off the top of my head, and in approximate chronological order, there's Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden, Jimmy Rodgers, Hank Williams, the Delmore Brothers, the Kershaw Brothers, Eric Von Schmidt, early Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk (on Mississippi John Hurt: "He's been dead for thirty years, and he's in better shape now than I was then"), Geoff and Maria Muldaur, together and separately, Tracy Nelson, Paul Butterfield and all his friends, Charley Musselwhite, Tony Joe White, Stevie Winwood, Georgie Fame, early Joe Cocker, Leon Russell, Chris Smither, Anson Funderburgh, Rory Gallagher, The Allmans, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, The Dixie Dregs, Stevie Ray Vaughn, the list just goes on. Add your own, please. The mind boggles.

Obviously, it's not who was first, it's what you do with it and where in the soul it comes from. Cultural cross-fertilization is what makes this country, and the world, great. Denying it, from the left or the right, is what makes it a pain.