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All this talk about Illinois' budget crunch has gotten me to thinking about Jose Padilla.

In case you, like me, immediately zone out whenever the word "budget" is mentioned, the state of Illinois is a little poorer than it expected to be this year. Governor George Ryan has spent the last several weeks pleading with Illinois' legislature to pass his balanced budget, but the legislature is like, "Our constituents hate it when we raise taxes and cut spending," and then the governor is like, "You guys are so lame," and then the legislature is like, "Are not," and Ryan is like, "Are so," and then they shoot spitballs at one another.

The end result of all this is that we're probably either going to borrow a bunch of money, or cut spending on some useless government programs like public schools, and raise taxes on cigarettes and casinos. As a rule, most people are okay with those taxes, since no one's running around singing the praises of cigarettes and casinos. Well, except in Rosemont.

The problem is that the Illinois constitution has this idiotic Article that says we can't spend more money than we have. I call this idiotic because I myself have been a debtor nation of one for several years now, and it's working out just fine. When the credit card companies call me to ask about why I haven't paid my bills, I just tell them, "Look! A purple elephant!" and hang up the phone real fast. I don't see why Illinois can't implement a similar policy.

But since we don't have time to repeal Article VIII of the Illinois constitution and we certainly don't want our leaders to raise taxes or cut spending, maybe we should just ignore the constitution. "But wait," you say. "Illinois can't just ignore its own constitution." Enter Jose Padilla, the alleged would-be dirty bomber with Chicago roots.

The federal government has no intention of charging Jose Padilla with a crime. And since Padilla was born here, they can't keep him in jail on some vague immigration charge the way they have with 150 Arab immigrants living in America. So they're just going to keep Padilla in prison indefinitely. As one congressman told the AP, "He's going to stay in the can until we're through with al-Qaeda." Is that constitutional? Not unless Jose Padilla is a "foreign combatant," which is what the government keeps calling him, even though he is in fact a guy from the West Side of Chicago. But since we can't convict him of a crime, and we don't want him walking the streets, we're just going to make like he's foreign and keep him in jail until we're good and finished with terrorism.

I don't hold Jose Padilla in high regard. He doesn't seem like a very charming or personable individual, and to hear the government tell it, he wants to kill me. And although it would solve most of my financial problems, I don't want to die. So I don't like Jose Padilla. But I also don't like my former girlfriend Karen. Karen is a bad person, and she should be kept separate from society so as to ensure that she does not dump again. But it wouldn't be right to incarcerate Karen until my personal War on Heartbreak is over. Though God knows I'd like to.

If Jose Padilla is guilty of conspiracy and the government wants to keep him in custody, then the constitution requires a trial, even if it would reveal intelligence information. And if they can't convict him of a crime, he must be set free, although the government is welcome to keep him under extremely tight surveillance. But it's not constitutional to lock up an American citizen because he might, at some point in the future, commit a crime.

It's not constitutional, but it is great news for our state government. The message from the federal government to Illinois is clear: when the constitution is inconvenient, ignore it. So lower those taxes! Raise that spending! Do the easy thing rather than the right thing!

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We have a long history of financially supporting terrorist organizations in my family. My father once gave his lunch money to the Black Panthers, even though my Dad is both a white person and a pacifist. He explains it away now by saying that the late 1960s were crazy times, and every radical cause looked pretty good from a distance. In the late 1990s, my little brother, who inherited my father's fondness for hopelessly radical political causes, offered indirect financial support on a couple occasions to the Earth Liberation Front, a loosely knit eco-terrorist organization.
So I cannot say that I was entirely surprised when President Bush froze the assets of the Global Relief Foundation, based in Bridgeview. Just my luck that the only time I engaged in charitable giving last year, I was allegedly buying bombs for al-Qaeda. Try writing that off on your taxes.

I am unconvinced, incidentally, that the Global Relief Foundation aided terrorism, but I will allow that the government might know more about it than me. At the time, I believed what they said, that they seek to provide housing and food to impoverished Muslims throughout the world. As a guy who makes a large part of his living writing reviews of books about the Islamic world, it only seemed fair that I send some of my salary back to the world's poorest Muslims. And as terrorism outfits go, the name Global Relief Foundation is not particularly suspicious. Nonetheless, it remains very possible that I am an accidental sponsor of terrorism. But I'd also like to mention that according to an ongoing series of advertisements sponsored by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, all Americans who buy illegal drugs support terrorist activities as well, so at least I am not alone.

Suffice it to say that when President Bush named the Global Relief Foundation a terrorist organization, I was horrified. I don't know, of course, whether they actually helped al-Qaeda. But if they did, my money helped them, and in some small way, I may be responsible for the September 11 attack, which is about the worst feeling I've ever had. President Bush has promised that the United States will not distinguish between the terrorists and regimes that aid terrorism. This was our logic for destroying the Taliban, and it MAY soon enough be our logic for invading Iraq. But I wonder whether the President is willing to distinguish between the terrorists and the individuals who aid them. If not, I'm really no better than John Walker Lindh or Mullah Omar. The fact is that the Taliban did not seem to know that bin Laden would attack America in such a spectacularly horrific way any more than I did, but they suffered the wrath of a furious and crippling American military campaign nonetheless. Of course, if you don't count the financing of terrorism, I'm a productive and awkwardly handsome American citizen, and Mullah Omar is a one-eyed murderer who jailed men for failing to grow their beards long enough, but still. If you are either with the terrorists or with us, I'm afraid I might have accidentally cast my lot with the terrorists.

This got me to thinking about the other morally questionable causes and individuals I've supported over the years. Until a couple weeks ago, I smoked cigarettes, which helped to pay for the election campaigns of my least favorite senator, Jesse Helms. Now I chew Nicotine gum instead, which puts money in the grubby hands of GlaxoSmithKline, a company that for years fought against the sale of affordable AIDS drugs in Africa. So according to the aiding-terrorism-is-as-bad-as-committing-terrorism logic, I am a homophobic terrorist opposed to treating African people with AIDS. For the record, I also sometimes buy bagels at Starbucks, even though all young liberal people like myself know that Starbucks is evil, although none of us seems to know exactly why.

But of course there is a difference between people who chew Nicorette and people who kill babies, which is part of the reason the government won't be coming after me. Also, my name is John Green, which does not sound like a terrorist name. The Department of Justice can't be bothered with small-time American terrorists like myself, except for those with Arabic names, who have been jailed by the hundreds on trumped up immigration violations. I'm sure some of those people are guilty of awful crimes, but I'm equally sure that some of them are less guilty than me. And as long as we make distinctions between the young white kids who accidentally further the cause of terrorism and the Arab men who do the same, America need not wonder why so many people in the Arab world hate our government.