"common sense tells me" is usually not applicable in a court of law. Unfortunately, or fortunately, the concept of "natural born citizen" is never addressed, let alone defined, in US law anywhere else but that mention in the requirements for President. On the contrary, naturalized citizenship is rigorously defined, and Obama does not meet that definition at all. In fact, having been involved in debates regarding the possibility of children adopted from foreign countries to become President, I can assure you that there seems to be a reasonable case to be made that such children fall under the classification of "natural born citizen", since they definitely do not fall under the definition of naturalized citizens, and instead are provided with American birth certificates after they are adopted by American citizens. That being at least up for argument, being born to an American parent abroad who did not reside in the US quite long enough after age of majority would seem to be not the unbeatable objection some seem to think. On the other side of the question, there are those who hold that the definition of "natural born citizen" in fact excludes all children born to American citizens abroad.

So, even if Obama was born in Kenya; and even if his mother did not live in the US the requisite time after her majority; the worst that would lead to is a legal challenge to a definition which has not in the past been enforced in the most restrictive definitions possible.

Of course, that's what the rightwing extremists are after; if they could get Obama disqualified that would be a nice but unexpected Christmas present for them, but the real tactic is to hamstring the legally elected President of the US with an endless string of legal harassment, as seen in the Clinton presidency, in the belief that although me may be legally elected, he can't possibly be legitimate. The converse being the Bush "victory" in 2000. In the minds of these people, anybody who doesn't buy into their tribal dogma is not a "real" American, and any President who wasn't selected by them isn't legitimate. Of course, if this attitude isn't so intuitively obviously correct to you that you need to have it spelled out like this, you Hate America.

Yes, in a couple of months Obama will put his hand on the Koran and intone "Allahu akhbar" and declare a jihad on Christian America. Oh noes!

Despite the Republican's strenuously objecting to the operation as "wag the dog" to distract from the Whitewater investigation, Clinton came a lot closer before 9/11, the CIA hitting a car in bin Laden's convoy with an RPG in 1998, than Bush ever did even after Osama killed 3000 Americans, and despite Bush's bankrupting the US, getting 4000 more Americans killed, killing a hundred thousand or so innocent people who we are supposed to be "saving", destroying the US' reputation and friends, handing most of Iraq over to Iran, and allowing Iran to become a nuclear power in the process.

pardoning that white house turkey. (adding to the ironies of the bush presidency)

you'll like the truck and trailer races they had on espn the other day. (pickup and suv size truck). Pretty much the same principle as the figure 8 bus races.

same idea as bill maher said the other night; "what other countries call football, we call soccer. and what other countries call war crimes, we call football".

that girl who plays tara (forget her name) is a revelation. i predict big things in store for her. it took a few episodes but she shows more range than anybody else in the cast. i was predicting she was the murderer, based on the "murder she wrote" principle (the murderer is always the best actor on the episode, as he/she has to change from friend to murderer in the last 10 minutes and sell it).

so sad they blew up ed, though. a vampire everyone could like.

it's that intermediate state, where you spend month after month wading through ankle-deep gray-brown slush that makes all the vehicles look like they were made of adobe and you can somehow smell it permeating the air and it chills you worse than anything and you wish for nice cold dry snow that packs down so you can at least walk and drive on top of it.

does an insect have consciousness? doubtful. agency? maybe. does a fly make a decision as to which crumb to land on, or is it all programmed? or is the question meaningless? a computer presumably doesn't make a decision, it's all predictable from programming; even so-called "random number generators" running in programs are in fact predictable programs. but everybody knows that their PC is less predictable than it ought to be. what's the first thing the help desk tells you when you have a problem? reboot and maybe it won't happen again.

so how far up or down the line does it go? is the computer a person because although it ought to be predictable, it doesn't seem so? a fly? a frog? a dog? george bush?

anyway, next topic, kauffman's argument seems less that we should believe in God, than a weakish form of pagan nature worship. his jewish ancestors would be abashed. but in fact, he seems to be calling for nothing more than a little humility on behalf of the human race, which is something more in tune with atheism than with all the beliefs which insist that God made us in his own image, to be the crown of creation and rule over the universe, etc. etc. etc.

maybe they meant "White House Negro"?

or maybe they just don't understand the US system, and the difference between the House and the Senate?