And here it is. (Top one, obvs.)

I was wrong.

Check out this thing here. It’s the first family! And a cardboard flag, and a sign that says “America,” in case you were wondering which nation’s great flag you were staring at while waiting for the Silver Line, which is always late, always. And check out Sasha. She looks kind of scared, because AIG is stealing her lunch money, but also safe, because Dad’s pawning anything that’s not nailed down or reposessed already, and now everything’s going to be OK.

Yes we can!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFMLEcWeChM

www.youtube.com/watch?v=01MNZBTt4K4

[via HuffPo, and, really, the rest of the entire internet]

Spotted Friday afternoon, in the South End: The hope-iest pawn shop window in Boston. Freedom, hope and courage, meet usury.

The magazine also spotlights a pol who just might presage the failure of Obama’s wired White House. It’s our own governor, Deval Patrick.

What the magazine saw in Patrick certainly isn’t the type of prime-time press any halfway ambitious pol wants.

In a precursor to My.BarackObama.com, the Patrick campaign placed the state’s voter list on its Web site, allowing its supporters to download phone numbers and call neighbors. “We believed in people’s ability to organize themselves and get involved,” says Charles SteelFisher, who ran the campaign’s Web operation.

After the election, the governor’s team launched DevalPatrick.com to keep supporters engaged. On a MyIssue page, registered commenters could propose, comment on, and vote for legislative ideas. But the administration was immediately blasted when a database feature designed to verify Massachusetts residency was alleged (incorrectly) to reveal unlisted phone numbers. The privacy flap lured a collection of trolls and conspiracy theorists to the site, crowding out earnest discussion on gambling bills and income taxes with 9/11 chatter and religious debates. Critics, meanwhile, said that Patrick’s efforts were less about engaging the public than about running a permanent online campaign.

Eventually Patrick’s Web site recovered, developing a more sophisticated way of moderating comments and creating forums around the governor’s plans to reduce property taxes and add public kindergarten programs. The site also allowed people to create grassroots communities to work on issues they cared about. Still, the public isn’t exactly burning up the site: The leading vote-getter, a bill to promote fathers’ custody rights in divorce cases, had just 1,100 tallies as of mid-December. Offshore wind power, meanwhile, was losing, 16 votes to 15.

Because: One of Hopey’s first official acts as King of Amerika was rolling back restrictive restrictions on FOIA inquiries. That helicoptering ex-dictator of ours had instituted an eight-year crackdown on FOIA disclosures. Because messing with a reporter’s access to TRUTH and JUSTICE is just about the next best thing to shooting a reporter in the head. All that’s over now. Hooray, right?

So, thanks, Mr. President. What I’m going to do now is fire up the magical demand-letter-demanding-machine, get all up in some public documents, and then rain those things down on the public. Or maybe take some Indecent Proposal money-bath in inter-agency memos. The possibilities are limitless.

Or: Conspiratorially: This is just a sneaky play for Obama. Everybody wants what they can’t have, and doubly so when the everybody in question wields pocket-sized notebooks. Guy probably knows that once reporters can actually get their hands on incriminating internal documents, they won’t want them anymore. Damning torture memos will go the way of Appropriations Committee hearings – free for everybody to get at, but boring as hell and a pain in the ass to make sense of, and thus totally, completely undesirable.

But. BUT. Plenty of world leaders can go shirtless. If this Obama character wants to be taken seriously, he’s got to flex his pecs next to some mountains and fishing rods and guns and bullet-riddled bodies of vanquished journalists.

Or, maybe, strip Bernie Madoff naked, pile him into a human pyramid, let the dogs loose, smoke one of those cancer sticks he loves so much, point and laugh, and say, “You’re next, Mahmoud.”

Only then will America’s (shirtless) standing in the world be restored.