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In case you missed it, Cindy Sheehan was arrested during the SOTU last night for the crime of wearing a t-shirt that read "2245 Dead. How many more?". That's right, she was arrested for wearing a t-shirt. She didn't disrupt anything, didn't yell fire in a crowded theater, didn't unfurl a huge banner...she wore a t-shirt.

Glenn Greenwald waxes eloquent on the event:

This is nothing more than a naked attempt to stifle dissent and to create a criticism-free bubble around George Bush. Presidents routinely use all sorts of propagandistic imagery at the State of the Union to decorate their speeches with an aura of regal patriotism. We always see weeping widows and military heroes and symbolic guests of all sorts who are used as props and visuals to bolster the President's message both emotionally and psychologically. The State of the Union speech is hardly free of visual messages and propaganda of that sort; quite the contrary.

But we apparently now have a country where the only ideas allowed to be expressed in our Nation's Capitol while the President is speaking are ones which glorify the Government and its Leader and where dissenting views are prohibited and will subject someone to arrest. Message cleansing of that sort belongs at a political rally in North Korea, not in Washington, DC.

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And just think, if the new Patriot Act goes through she could be thrown in jail on a felony charge for up to 5 years for wearing that t-shirt.

Edit: Police have dropped all charges and are issuing an apology, damn straight they'd better. Sure it's mostly spin control, but it's nice to see an obvious miscarriage of justice righted before it went any further.

On a lighter note, check out Homer J. Simpson's response to the SOTU.

This just breaks my heart

via Feministe:
Dying to Avoid Rape

In a startling revelation, the former commander of Abu Ghraib prison testified that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former senior US military commander in Iraq, gave orders to cover up the cause of death for some female American soldiers serving in Iraq.

Last week, Col. Janis Karpinski told a panel of judges at the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York that several women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women’s latrine after dark.

The latrine for female soldiers at Camp Victory wasn’t located near their barracks, so they had to go outside if they needed to use the bathroom. “There were no lights near any of their facilities, so women were doubly easy targets in the dark of the night,” Karpinski told retired US Army Col. David Hackworth in a September 2004 interview.

It was there that male soldiers assaulted and raped women soldiers. So the women took matters into their own hands. They didn’t drink in the late afternoon so they wouldn’t have to urinate at night. They didn’t get raped. But some died of dehydration in the desert heat, Karpinski said.

Olbermann versus O'Reilly, guess who gets the bitch smacking

If you guessed O'Reilly, you're so right! Watch Keith deliver the definitive smackdown here. Just don't drink anything while you do, definite snarf and or spew danger.