Notes In The Margin

Apparently a bunch of very ill-informed people are filing lawsuits, claiming that Mr. Obama wasn't born in the USA.

What's amazing to me about this entire article is that nowhere in it does it address the actual constitutional issue - that a candidate for president be a "natural born citizen." That means that they were a citizen at birth, rather than naturalized later. Regardless of whether Mr. Obama was born in Kenya or Hawaii, he is a "natural born citizen."

Now, he has provided his birth certificate, and that's a legal document, so there's really no case to begin with. But it bugs me that so much fuss would be made over a non-issue. As it happens, every president so far has been born in the USA, a fact about which I was apparently mistaken. However, the constitution does not require this - merely that they be a US citizen on the day of their birth.

I, for example, was born in Kenya, but I am a "natural born citizen." Not that I'd be crazy enough to want to be president. But the fact that the question even arises is troubling. Are military kids, born overseas, automatically ineligible? The constitution says that they're not. And are we really so terrified of foreign contamination that someone born to USA citizens on foreign soil is automatically suspect in some way?

Xenophobes really, really irritate me.

Gathara's political cartoons are on Flickr now. It's very sad that Zimbabwe, like Kenya, has been allowed by the international community to get away with a blatantly disregarded public poll, and the old men are still in power.

Apparently there's going to be a BarCamp in Nairobi, and it's sponsored by O'Reilly and Ushahidi. I sure wish I'd known about this several months ago.

For those of you who are not geeks, a BarCamp isn't (just) a place where people drink a lot. It's an informal technical conference where the agenda gets arranged as you go along.

While I am, of course, pleased that Kibaki and Odinga reached an agreement, I'm a little disgusted at the way that they are acting like they are great heroes for it.

I hope that, some day, they have the decency to be ashamed of themselves for their shockingly selfish behavior, and the more than 1000 of their country people who lost their lives due to their consuming hubris.

Remember, if you will, that they haggled over this agreement for nearly 2 months, while the people burned, murdered, raped, and generally destroyed the world's image of what has always been the greatest nation on the continent. Remember also that the agreement that they have arrived at is very close to what was proposed in the first week - that Odinga is the PM, and that there be some limited power sharing while they work towards a new election.

So, while you celebrate, Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga, remember that those 1000 lives are on your hands. Also remember that you have a long road ahead of you to heal the wounds that you have caused. I'm sure you'll spend the next 6 years trying to shift the blame, but rest assured that the rest of us won't forget.

Ushahidi is using Maria's pictures.