Aside from the State of the Union…
Published by Warrior Tang January 31st, 2006 in US PoliticsI didn’t get home today until the speech was largely over, so I have
to content myself with googling and waiting for a transcript.
It turns out there was an interesting and newsworthy occurrence before the speech, and another major world leader’s annual speech took place today with potential repercussions on world affairs. Read below the cut for these and other stories.
My left-leaning Congresscritter Lynn Woolsey invited Cindy Sheehan
of all people to listen to the State of the Union, and Sheehan managed
to get herself arrested. News reports say that she unfurled a
banner in the House chamber which is against House rules, while one
rumour on a Sheehan-friendly part of the Internet has it that she
was just wearing a T-shirt that had the number of soldiers killed
in Iraq on it. Sheehan has deliberately tried to get herself arrested
before, so it wouldn’t surprise me if this was another case of that.
It also wouldn’t surprise me if all the news were lying about what
happened because they get all their information from the Republicans.
Another news item which is more important than the State of the Union
address is that Samuel Alito was confirmed as the newest Supreme Court
justice on a 58-42 vote and sworn in within hours after that.
A larger number of Democrats had earlier voted to end debate on
Alito’s nomination, at a time when more than 50 Senators had publicly
pledged to vote to confirm Alito, so that Bush could have Alito
confirmed before the speech. Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee voted against Alito, the only
Republican to do so.
Also,
today was also the day of President Vladimir Putin’s annual State
of the Whatever They Call Russia These Days address. Actually,
it was an annual unusually-long news conference. Putin cited as his
successes favorable economic indicators, recent elections in Chechnya,
and a new missile that can supposedly get past current missile defenses.
Putin also
proposed that
nuclear club countries form a monopoly over nuclear fuel,
condemned the prospect of revolution in Ukraine
as threatening a “second Afghanistan”, and
described non-governmental organizations as often being
“governed by puppeteers from abroad.” It looks like Putin has his
own Jeff Gannons as the San Diego Union-Tribune report
states “One reporter wished him a Happy Lunar New Year and asked
when he would visit Buryatia; another said that she had come prepared
to ask a serious question but decided instead to inquire, on behalf
of blondes, what he does to keep looking so good.”
More international news: Cartoons in a Norwegian magazine and Danish newspaper which depicted the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist have raised ire in Muslim countries, leading to boycotts and flag burnings and creating an international incident. Denmark and Norway are not the everyday targets of Muslim hatred, so it’s surprising to see them get the Israel treatment. The cartoons were apparently intended as a poke in the eye at the Muslim taboo against depicting Muhammad in artwork.
Update: NYT has Sheehan wearing a T-shirt — and being charged with a crime! “Unlawful conduct,” which sounds very much to me like what you charge somebody with when you want to charge them with something and there are no specific laws that render her conduct unlawful. Checking the House rules, I can find no reference to such attire, only the vaguest of dress codes (”appropriate attire” for women).
One wonders whether she was ham-fisted enough to reveal the T-shirt before the speech began — which doesn’t seem like her — or if she was required to undergo a search for it. If so, it would have been in the gallery — the photos appear to show her being directed to her seat while wearing a covering jacket. NYTimes phrases it as the Capitol police having “discovered her wearing an antiwar T-shirt.” That’s very vague… could this woman actually have been searched for a nonvisible garment, then ejected from a joint session of Congress when found to be wearing something politically inconvenient for the visitor?
And in a further-elaborated news story, it looks like she did indeed take off her jacket herself before the speech started — and a Congresswoman’s wife wearing a “Support the Troops” T-shirt was also ejected. So there was some evenhandedness, at least.