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Courtesy of Fark, and my apologies for all the political posts:

You’ll need to click for bigness and readablefulness.

The thing is – and I know that he may not end up being the nominee – but really, there’s no denying how COOL this all is. You should see what Boise is like right now. I just got back from a caucus that pulled over ten times the number of voters who attended last time – and they were all there for Obama. It’s all pretty exciting.

On Tuesday, February 5…

…if you are an American citizen and eligible to vote, and if there is a primary or caucus in your state, please participate.

I don’t have the time or energy to say everything I would like to say about this, or about the candidate I’ve (finally) selected to support. But on the off chance that it will help anyone make their decision, one way or another, I will say this:

The title of Barack Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope, says it all.

Yes, I know hope is a leisure of the naive, that skepticism is a trademark of intellectual maturity. And there’s certainly a chance – some would say, I’m sure, a certainty – that my naivete will come back to haunt me. Friends, I’m ready and willing to risk that.

Why?

As I just told a friend of mine, for me it boils down to something I’ve been wrestling with for some time now. I look at our nation’s leadership for the past several years – and no, I’m not just referring to G.W. – and I’m disappointed. Discouraged. Even embarrassed. I’ve always been a vehement supporter of the idea that you might not like the President, but by golly you should respect the office. Recent years have challenged my ability to do so, and I hate that. The President of the United States should be someone we can respect, even if we disagree with him (or her). How, though, are we to feel respect toward someone who hasn’t earned it? From a PR perspective (avoiding political analysis) G.W. is a joke. Bill Clinton is still, and will probably always be, a punchline. Bush the First avoided much worse than jokes about lip reading and broccoli, and before him we have the Gipper…

I found myself wondering if the age of the heroic leader was over. Were we ever going to have a President again who would make his or her country proud? A President who inspired hope for the future and not just one-liners for the late night TV shows? A President who got people excited? A uniter? A dreamer? A philosopher king? A President who would be beloved in history, who could actually change the status quo and finally start the next chapter in American history?

I am not so naive that I believe that Obama is that person. But for the first time in my lifetime, I have found a candidate that I hope is that person.

I know that we need to change (and that’s not an anti-Bush or an anti-war or an anti-Republican statement). Obama agrees with me that yes we can. No, he’s not the most experienced person on the campaign trail. But he is someone who I can believe in.

It takes a lot of courage, a lot of audacity, to hope. You have to be willing to put it on the line. But if we all step to the line together, we are stronger…

Get informed. Vote. Change the world.

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I thought this was a cute picture from Barack Obama’s visit to Boise. Wish I knew who the subjects were; I’d email them a copy.

Barack does Boise

I was not one of the people who got there at 5 AM, but I did get up at 6 on my Saturday. Why?

We weren’t close enough to get to the rope line…

But we were close enough to make it into this shot, running on the Boston Globe’s website. I’m inside the little red circle, which you won’t be able to see very much unless you zoom in a bit.

This was pretty much an intensely big deal. Before Mitt Romney swung by Boise last June, the area hadn’t seen a visit from a major presidential candidate since the 1970s. Why waste the time and energy coming to Idaho? It’s the reddest of the red states. You kind of understand Romney swinging by; this is, in many ways, Salt Lake North, and he has his fair share of support here. But a Democratic candidate? A rock star candidate like Obama? In Boise?

Then again, Obama has had a very active headquarters and campaign staff in Boise for months now. He’s not giving up on Idaho just because it looks like a foregone conclusion.I’m not going to talk about Obama in this post; I may in a while, though. But there are plenty of people across the country talking about the fact that he took the time out of his busy pre-Super Tuesday schedule to come to Boise State’s campus and talk for a standing-room-only, hundreds-of-people-turned-away-at-the-door crowd.

• Boston Globe
• Baltimore Sun
• Associated Press
• Spokesman Review
• New York Times
• MSNBC (this article’s headline makes us sound like a Communist state… poor copywriting, or just funny?)
• Washington Post
• CNN
• New York Daily News
• Eastern Idaho
• The Oregonian
• Boise, Boise, Boise
• more popping up all the time…

(Just read this: “The Obama campaign organizers are estimating that the crowd reached 14,161 –- which would be a record crowd in the 25-year-old arena.” Damn.)

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This picture is from teh intrawebz. Am posting in honor of the SOTU address. Hey, did you know that had the entire SOTU been blown up by aliens, our very own Dirkhead Kempthorne would have ascended to the throne?

Okay, back to work. Not that I’m being very productive.

“Daily” JPG

Today’s Daily Image JPG is brought to us by Phil & Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius, which was brought to my attention by the esteemed comicsseur Silverfoot. It was selected in honor of the beginning of the 2008 Presidential Election, which looks to be gearing up to be rather entertaining. Click to enlarge as needed.

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The idea is that the Daily Image will be daily, and that it will usually – or at least a majority of the time – be images created by me rather than found by me. So how better to start than with doubt about the dailiness and someone else’s art!