Countdown to the one-party state

Item #1: Condi Rice's State Department will not honor the official request by Sen. Joe Biden, ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for documents relating to the political interference by John Bolton, Bush's nominee as US ambassador to the UN, in American intelligence-gathering.

The State Department spokesperson says that only requests from Republican members of the Senate will be considered.

(For the latest on the Bolton nomination, check out The Washington Note.)

Item #2: In the western reaches of North Carolina, members of the East Waynesville Baptist Church, led by pastor Chan Chandler, voted out of the church nine congregants who weren't sufficiently supportive of President Bush.

The question isn't whether these people in this small church understand the foundations of the American form of government--clearly they don't, or at least they think these principles no longer apply to them. The question is whether the US Government will recognize that these congregation members have voted to stop being a church and start becoming a partisan political organization.

At this exact moment in American history, this seems unlikely. For starters, the IRS is too busy putting the screws to the Earned Income Tax Credit recipients.