PICTURE THAT MOST EXEMPLIFIES THE MOOD OF THE CROWD at the Kerry rally in Madison today:

A Madison point of view:

A glimpse of the candidate:

UPDATE: Lots more pictures at my regular blog.

ANOTHER UPDATE: That “Plants Can’t Vote” sign is drawing a lot of email. One reader wrote:

I dunno…  At my place, Rose, Iris, Basil, Ivy, Petunia, Rosemary and Leland are all wanting to register.  As much as their votes for a beautiful Bush would please me, I’m going to lock the garden gate on Tuesday.  Cheating’s not right, and they’ll just have to wait for plants rights to catch on in our animal based society.  I just wish that certain unscrupulous voter registration activists/profiteers felt the same way.

Another wrote:

I don’t get it. Did Kerry come our for legalizing pot or something? Or is it that she was trying to make a point about the environment, but a marijuana leaf was the only handy example of a plant when poster-making time arrived? I mean, you’d think an environmentalist might have a fern, or an aloe plant, or something like that in her dorm room, or might at least be able to recall the appearance of the leaf of one plant besides marijuana.

That’s what I love about it.

ANOTHER “PLANTS CAN’T VOTE” UPDATE: I like this email:

Have you read “The Botany of Desire” by Michael Pollan? To compress an excellent book into one sentence, his theme is that those plants we have domesticated beyond all recognition have actually, in a sense, used us — our peculiar human desires and biological compulsions — to advance their own species far beyond what could be achieved in nature. One of the four plants on which Pollan focuses is — you guessed it — marijuana.

From this perspective, the idea that humans might be compelled by their marijuana plants to vote a certain way is slightly chilling.

I haven’t read the book (yet), but I used Amazon’s “Look Inside The Book” and found these results for “marijuana.” Fascinating! I guess I’m completely ready to read a book that contains the question “How do you tell when a jaguar is hallucinating?” — which was the first thing I read when I clicked on a “results” page.