An A/V follow-up on Rob’s post to give you a sense of how things are going. There’s no hard sales data yet, just anecdotal accounts of big crowds, but the photos are impressive. Twitchy has a nice gallery; this one, from Fox Atlanta, is local but also solid. And as for the lone CFA in the Chicago, Legal Insurrection’s got that covered. A reminder to Rahm and that dumb alderman who wanted Chick-fil-A banned from his ward: Gay-marriage opponents turn out. If you’re going to take them on and risk galvanizing them, at least avoid doing it via tactics that are obviously unconstitutional and therefore destined to fail. Good lord.

There are lots of videos of crowds at CFA franchises on YouTube today but the quickie clip below is the best I’ve seen at capturing the volume. If you’ve got a better one, e-mail it to us and I’ll update. One footnote on the timeline here: Huckabee’s initial Facebook post on July 22 calling for Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day didn’t mention any threats by government officials to ban the company from their districts. Unless I’ve missed something, the only pol to that point who had warned the company was Mumbles in Boston; the Chicago alderman’s ultimatums didn’t make a splash nationally until two days later. This didn’t start out as a protest of government overreach, in other words, but I think it’s become one in part, in addition to the basic statement being made in support of traditional values. I wonder how much extra money Rahm made for the Cathy family today.

The company itself has apparently had enough of being a cultural lightning rod, doing nothing whatsoever to promote Huckabee’s idea. Exit quotation from a Chick-fil-A customer: “He (Dan Cathy) said the exact same thing that President Obama said. And he gets negativity, and Obama gets positivity.” Yes, because Obama’s a cynical, self-interested liar and literally everyone knows it.

Update: Good question from John McCormack: “Just to be clear: Obama’s former chief of staff wants to trample on the rights of religious business owners, and Obama said nothing, right?”