America Conor O'CleryNuclear war is coming. Armageddon is near. Beware the wrath of the righteous.
Senate majority leader Bill Frist is on the brink of choosing what is known as the "nuclear option" in a vicious Senate fight that could lay waste to the upper chamber of Congress. And he is joining in a rally of the Christian right next week that claims God is on his side in the looming showdown.
The Tennessee senator wants to ban filibusters. Republicans are furious that Democrats have used the filibuster to prevent confirmation of several of Mr Bush's court nominees whom they consider too conservative.
This filibuster mechanism traditionally empowers the Senate minority to thwart controversial appointments or laws.
When Bill Clinton was president, Republicans used the filibuster to block several judges they considered too liberal.
Cinemagoers may remember Jimmy Stewart as young Senator Jefferson Smith invoking the filibuster to oppose the corrupt plans of his comrades in Frank Capra's 1939 classic film Mr Smith Goes to Washington.
Here's the problem for the Republicans today. A filibuster can only be stopped by a vote of 60 of the 100 senators, and the Republicans have only 55 votes.
This means that if a Supreme Court vacancy arises soon (which is very likely) and Mr Bush nominates a conservative (as his evangelical Christian base will demand) Democrats can use the traditional blocking mechanism.
But if Senator Frist abolishes the right to filibuster, which he can do by simple majority vote, Democrats will try to shut down the Senate. To make his case Senator Frist is taking part in a telecast next weekend portraying Democrats as opposing God's will.
It is promoted in leaflets with the slogan, "The filibuster against people of faith", and showing a youth holding a bible and gavel with the admonition: "We should not have to choose between public service and faith in Christ."
To the Christian right, nuclear action is the only way to try to reverse liberal court decisions legalising abortion and gay rights, banning school prayer and starving Terri Schiavo. The telecast, organised by the Family Research Council, will be broadcast via SkyAngel2 on satellite to churches across America from Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky.
The tone has been set by Family Research founder Tony Perkins who states on his website that activists' courts "working like thieves in the night" are trying to "rob us of our Christian heritage".
Democrats are setting up a "war room" to fight Frist's plans, and they have some allies on the Republican side, including Senator John McCain who will vote against the change because he points out "we won't always be in the majority."
John Kerry is coming back to prominence five months after his election defeat, and he evidently still feels sore about George Bush winning.
Last Sunday he complained that many Democrats were denied access to the polls through trickery and intimidation. He claimed leaflets were handed out saying Republicans should vote on Tuesday (election day) and Democrats on Wednesday, and that people got telephone calls to say if they ever had a parking ticket they could not vote.
Kerry has never disputed the outcome of the election. He left that to his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who said that "two brothers own 80 per cent of the machines used in the United States" that use optical scanners and it is "very easy to hack into the mother machines."
But the internet is still flickering with allegations of a conspiracy to steal the election, fuelled by the discrepancies between exit polls that predicted Kerry would win by a margin of 3 per cent and the official result which saw Bush win by a margin of 2.5 per cent.
A new survey by a non-profit organisation, US Count Votes, listing several PhDs among its authors, argues that there were "significant irregularities" and that the burden of proof should be on showing the election process to be accurate and fair.
The arguments have been given a boost by a story in the St Petersburg Times in Florida, which is sceptical of conspiracy claims, but details charges by Clint Curtis, a 46-year-old computer programmer, that he was asked by a Republican Congressman, Tom Feeney, to come up with an undetectable system to fix elections.
Feeney denied the charge saying: " . . . and I didn't lead the purple Martian invasion of Earth either". But Curtis passed a lie detector test, and the blogs are lighting up again.
The 2008 election campaign is well under way. Hillary Clinton is being introduced at some events as "the next president of the United States".
As the New York senator gains in the polls, Republican consultant Arthur Finkelstein has launched a $10 million "Stop Her Now" campaign. Clinton has warned her fans that she will be the prime target of "the rightwing attack machine" that will use "lies and distortions".
Finkelstein, an adviser to New York governor George Pataki, is an unlikely champion of the right. He has just disclosed that he recently married his male partner at a civil ceremony in Massachusetts.
Bill Clinton let fly at Finkelstein this week. "He went to Massachusetts and married his longtime male partner and then he comes back here and announces this. Either this guy believes his party is not serious, and is totally Machiavellian in his position, or there's some sort of self-loathing there."
Republican strategist, Michael McKeon, retorted that after everything Clinton had been through in his own life "you'd think he'd know better."
Meanwhile John Edwards, Kerry's running mate, is also out to stop Hillary. The former senator wants the nomination himself. "Talking about a front-runner four years before an election is ridiculous."
The last time a prominent Democrat raised sexual preference as an issue was when John Edwards noted in an election debate with Dick Cheney that the vice-president's daughter, Mary, was a lesbian living with her partner while she acted as her father's campaign manager.
Mary Cheney, derided by Republican candidate Alan Keyes as a "selfish hedonist", has now sold the rights to her autobiography to Simon & Schuster for $1 million.
George Bush promised the Christian right that he would support a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. But on this issue Dick Cheney is opposed to the president, and nothing much has been heard of the proposal recently.