I'm a hobbyist programmer (only in TI-Basic before now), and after much, much, much debating with myself, I've decided to learn Python. I don't have a ton of free time to teach myself a hundred languages and all programming I do will be for personal use or for distributing to people who need them, so I decided that I needed one good, strong language to be good at. My questions:

Is python powerful enough to handle most things that a typical programmer might do in his off-time? I have in mind things like complex stat generators based on user input for tabletop games, making small games, automate install processes, and build interactive websites, but probably a hundred things along those lines
Does python handle networking tasks fairly well?
Can python source be obfuscated, or is it going to be open-source by nature? The reason I ask this is because if I make something cool and distribute it, I don't want some idiot script kiddie to edit his own name in and say he wrote it
And how popular is python, compared to other languages. Ideally, my language would be good and useful with help found online without extreme difficulty, but not so common that every idiot with computer knows python. I like the idea of knowing a slightly obscure language.

Thanks a ton for any help you can provide.
I think that Python is very powerful to do a lot of things, but just like Java and C++, it often depends on good third-party libraries. I come from a Java background but use Python for a lot of things, and it's been a fun ride. I've done things like statistics, and automation, not sure about the UI though that often depends on the toolkit more than the language. 
Python networking works well. I don't know if I'd use it to build a fast algorithmic trading system or a VOIP application, but for most intents and purposes, especially at higher levels of abstraction, it's fine and easy to use. You would need external libraries for things like SSH or FTP.
Python is quite popular and has very good online support, active community, and major corporations (likeGoogle) that use it. I found the official online tutorial and reference to be excellent. 
I have to say that I disagree with the "every idiot with a computer" line. There's a difference between knowing a language and using it right, and that's true about every language, even natural ones :)  Python does have a lot of functional elements that are not as trivial to use for people coming from a procedural background, so there's always room for growth. 
The one problem with Python compared to languages like C and Java is that it is not statically typed. This makes it much faster to write code, but also makes it *much easier) to make mistakes that can be quite nasty to debug. For instance, the same variable can contain a String reference at some point, and a reference to a list of strings at some other point.
Python for a hobbyist programmer ( a few questions)