Tom DeLay needs to go. Now.

What do you say to those who you not disagree with in a free society? Of course! You threaten them!

Concerning the court, DeLay tells us "we set up the courts. We can unset the courts." In case you didn't read about this the first time, it's Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here.

The time will come for you, sir, to answer for your behavior. And now we can buy assault rifles. Ooops, that was "inartful" of me.

I am not surprised at the recent surfacing of a memo to replublican legislators politicizing the Schiavo incident written by (supposedly) a member of the staff of florida senator Mel Martinez. But, according to Sen. Martinez, he had no knowledge of this memo. Allegedly, it was written by a member of his staff without his authorization.

To this I call bullshit.

Sen. Martinez ran one of the most dirty campaigns that I have ever seen. He attacked fellow Republicans to reach the nomination, on one occasion sending out a direct mailing referring to one Republican senate candidate "the new darling of the homosexual extremists," for sponsoring hate-crime legislation. He denied knowledge of this mailing, which (deja vu?) came out of his campaign staff. When later asked to agree to a clean campaign in the senate debates, he outright refused. He is an unethical and disgraceful person and has no business in politics, much less in the US Senate. He's the kind of guy that gives far right reactionary Christian conservative fascists a bad name.

I believe that a member of his staff wrote the memo. The vine rots from the root, and I can only imagine the horde of evil that staffs his senate office. But, I don't believe for a second that he had no knowledge of the memo.

Oh, yeah--and by the way--he is the one that distributed this document of which he (allegedly) had no knowledge, on the senate floor no less. I'm not sure if he is that stupid, or if he thinks that we are that stupid. Spit on him if you ever meet him. No, better yet, that's probably a waste of good saliva. I'm embarrassed every day that he is "representing" me.

I am troubled by the recent arrests involving threats made against Michael Schiavo in the aftermath of this whole ordeal down the road. Dera Marie Jones was arrested today for making threats on an AOL chatroom. Another man was arrested a week ago for allegedly claiming that he'd pay someone to do it.

I'm not sure if its the Patriot Act that allowed this new form of censorship, but I hope that the people being arrested are more obviously guilty of anything save for saying something dumb in a chatroom. But, this is based upon the premise that these people are sane. You see, we hope that we live in a society where, people might say things that they ordinarily wouldn't do. This is to say that someone might make a threat that he or she might never, in principle, act upon. But I cannot presuppose that the far right is in any respect sane more often than not.

Bottom line: Words are words. Actions are different. If people are guilty of foul or degrading speech, so be it. But, most importantly, doesn't the FBI have anything better to do than cruising chatrooms?

On the Eve of the passing of a great scholar, a great hero, and a great reformer, my first instinct is to joke.

I was raised Roman Catholic.

Now, there are people who are going to respond, "I, too, was raised catholic." No, no, no . . .

I was raised Roman Catholic.

I was taught to believe that mere 'catholics' were going to hell. I was raised to believe that The Pope is God. The Pope for Roman Catholics is the most perfect divine and human emissary, hand picked by God, from whose will His will will come. The Pope's the dude. He gets the cool hat, he gets the popemobile, and (oh, yeah!) and an independent country, .17 square miles, with no worry for defense of borders.

I was confirmed a Catholic in the sixth grade. Archbishop Anthony Bevilacqua had just become Cardinal at the time. And it was in (what seemed for an sixth grader) his first act as Cardinal, I confirmed my commitment to the very religion which exists as the last great remnant of the Middle Ages, feudalism, and the Holy Roman Empire.

I was raised Roman Catholic.

I often still have the urge to 'joke' about religion, as it is fashionable in academic circles to do so. My discoveryies have brought me odd teachers. I was enthused when I found such people as Feuerbach and (and more popularly by) Nietzsche, in that there is a fantastic Weltgeist which believes in freedom, in possibility, in hope. At an early age, I decided that this religion is not for me. I found philosophy because it allowed me the freedom to transcend the ideology that I was spoon fed. What ideology?

America. Freedom. War.

Disney. the NASDAQ. Work.

Religion. Sex. Violence.

I never got it. I never got the cultural form that I was born into.

In my early studies in philosophy, I used to be a rabid atheist: I used to argue that people should not say "God Bless You," when someone sneezed. When on occasion I would read Locke or Hobbes, I would have to think "Science!" loudly in my mind when my eyes got to the word "God" on the page. I refused to read a book for a course because the first three words were "The Pagan Aristotle . . . "

I was raised to believe that this man instantiated the god that I have since denied.

This is all a roundabout way of remembering a great man who passed today. He tried to give us value in this moral desert we try to call capitalism. He tried to give us meaning in a world totally devoid.

A great influence on me, Mary T. Clark, and another, Graham Greene, taught me to understand catholicism in a new ways, ways that allowed me to understand what it means to be a young Karol Wojtyla, a philosophy graduate student, and, to (I dunno . . .) re-think the way religion is done.

Vatican II is in the same spirit as "God is the opiate of the masses," and "God is Dead," in that it has allowed the cultural form to loosen up a bit, to lead us from the 1950's to the 1970's, to allow us to be here having the freedom to choose religion or to not. And the late Holy Father, this dead pope, was instrumental in this great re-thinking, to ultimately making God personal to people's lives.

I just chose not. But one is tempted, as I was, to joke. "But," you say, "we are liberal, we are freethinking, so of course we are atheists!"

I'm not an atheist. I'm just not yet convinced.