"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.

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.

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.

Iowa only went for Bush, narrowly, in '04, because Kerry's advisors told him to write off the entire western half of the state, which is conservative but not uniformly so. Gore won it in '00 with a full-state strategy, in defiance of DLC ideas. In '06, Democrats took the Governor's office, control of both houses of the Legislature, and 60% of the Congressional seats. That's makes Iowa purple, tending to violet.

"It's a major of driveway philosophers" as in, that's their university, they've majored in driveway. No additional word needed.

Actually, the whole thing is a joke, or a magnificent disconnect from fifty years ago. Those "driveway philosophers" (who actually prefer to sit in the open doors of their garages, the preferred male meeting room outside of a bar) all have laptops. The tractors, which look like something from another world, all have wi-fi access. It's a bizarre combination of influences, but no less connected than New York, and apparently (if you judge by some of Salon, like judging Iowa from pieces like this) more connected than San Francisco.

The caucus turnout is low compared to a primary vote, but shouldn't be compared; there are no absentee ballots, you actually have to show up, sit in a room and argue. Not to everybody's taste, but those who do it are inevitably better informed than the average voter. Not that there aren't ways to game it; Kerry did it in '04 with (ironically) Vietnam veterans who immediately went back into the woodwork, and Hillary, with the same advisors, is trying the same tactic this year with women.

If something isn't done, though, this may be the last year you'll have Iowa to kick around. Jan. 3 is two weeks too early to do meaningful organizing; even the veterans aren't sure what to do with this mess. Moving the whole thing back to the middle of January would make no difference to the process, while allowing the same vetting to go on. And, no mistake, Iowans are good at parsing the Shinola from the other stuff. That's why Edwards is so popular here.

And please take it from a former, and current, Dean supporter: Howard defeated himself. A great American, organizer and theoretician, and God help us if he loses his influence with the Dems, but not a great candidate. Ask him; he'll agree.

(and is still around), although Clapton did a pretty good imitation. But you should hear Guy's imitation of Clapton. And Hendrix. Hilarious, and eerie, like a snake eating its own tail. Clapton, who's done more to popularize the real blues through his Crossroads Guitar Festival, among other activities, than anyone outside of the Smithsonian, likely would agree.

Any doubt, reading these posts, that it's not sexual?

Okay, worse than "moist sputum:" dry sputum.