RSS
Using PayPal
What About Us, Mr. President? No Japanese? And We Have Our Troops With You in Iraq. . .
Share / Recommend - Comment - Print - Tuesday, Jan 31 2006, 11:39AM
The State Department website is going to "audio stream" tonight's State of the Union address by President Bush in several languagues.
From a State Department release:
President George W. Bush will deliver the annual State of the Union Address to a Joint Session of Congress, Tuesday, January 31, 2006. The Department of State will provide live audio streams of the State of the Union Address at 9:00 pm EST (0200 GMT) in the following languages:English, Arabic, Farsi, Bahasa Indonesian, Spanish, French, Russian.To access these streams, log onto www.state.gov.
At 1:00 am EST (0600 GMT) Wednesday, February 1, audio files of the following languages will also be available:Portuguese, Swahili and Turkish.At 12:00 pm (1700 GMT) on Wednesday, February 1, an audio file in Hausa will be available.
Additionally, these audio streams will be available as podcasts on Wednesday, February 1 at 12:00 pm (1700 GMT).
I am actually glad that the State Department is reaching out to people across the English language wall, but there are some obvious missing biggies:
Mandarin, Cantonese, Hindi, Korean, Japanese
Asia has some of the densest points of DSL deployment in the world, particularly in South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taipei, and Hong Kong.
Many of the targeted language groups have low internet penetration, though some may tune in anyway.
But a question for State, will the rebuttal also be aired?
To show that America has some belief in "the rights of the political minority" not airing the rebuttal would send all the wrong signals.
-- Steve Clemons
« Previous Article - New PIPA Poll Has Disturbing Message about "Real State of the Union In Iraq": By TWN's Count, 62% of non-Kurdish Iraqis Support Attacks on U.S. Troops» Next Article - Server Errors: What to Do. . .
forget the rebuttal (ha! fat chance)
I'm surprised it didn't occur to you to observe (or perhaps it was just too obvious to remark upon?) that the languages which State will be streaming are all languages spoken in countries where there is a high concentration of MUSLIM citizens. Even in those cases of spanish, french and even Russian, they are all the SECOND languages of countries with huge muslim populations - e.g. they are former colonies/satellites of france, spain and the soviets with high concentrations of muslims. (Morrocco, Algiers, all the 'stans etc.)
What pack of lies do you suppose he's about to broadcast to them? And does he really expect them to believe him?
Perhaps its Mullah Omar or Bin Laden he's addressing and not the "Union" at all?
I didn't bother to see whether it was being broadcast live here on TV. Doubted that it would be and if it was, I doubted that I could take more than a few seconds of it.
But you might want to note who Hong Kong was dealt as the new Consulate General in the last round of State Dept. shuffles. Does the name James Cunningham mean anything to you?
Hello everybody, I ran across the perfect symbol to protest the war in Iraq and yet still show my patriotism and support for the troops. It is the "Love the Troops Hate the War" car magnet. It can be found at
http://www.lovethetroopshatethewar.com. I know for certain that if there were as many of these "X" magnets on cars as there are yellow ribbons, THIS WAR WOULD END NOW!
What do you think? Isn't this the perfect logo to stop this war?
Regards,
Sandra Stammberg.
Reader Comments (3) - post a comment