Cindy Sheehan shines.

Were delighted this month to have an interview with Cindy Sheehan, who more than anyone else in this country has galvanized the peace movement.

We told our ace interviewer David Barsamian that we would send him anywhere in the country to do the story, and for a while there, it looked like he was going to go to Hawaii, where Sheehan finally was taking a vacation. Unfortunately for David, she agreed to meet him in California instead.

As you'll see in the interview, she reveals her increasingly outspoken views on George W. Bush, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the draft.

When I heard that Sheehan had been arrested in the Capitol right before Bush's State of the Union speech for wearing a shirt that said "2,245 Dead. How Many More?" I wondered--for about the hundredth time this year--what is this country coming to?

Sheehan's shirt was expressing the essence of political speech, fully protected under the First Amendment of our Constitution.

But the Capitol Police didn't seem too familiar with that. They dragged Sheehan out of the House gallery, arrested her for "unlawful conduct," and held her for four hours.

The same Capitol Police, as you probably heard, also evicted Beverly Young, the wife of Representative C. W. Bill Young, Republican of Florida. Beverly Young was wearing a shirt that said "Support the Troops," and she, too, was forced to leave--though the police didn't manhandle or arrest her, as they did Sheehan.

The Capitol Police quickly decided to drop charges against Sheehan and apologized to both, but the impulse to repress speech is hyperactive these days.

This wasn't, by any stretch, the first time in the Bush Age that protesters have been shown the door for the shirts they were wearing. Students have been booted from school, shoppers from malls, protesters from Bush rallies.

My favorite, if you can call it that, was when three teachers in Oregon were sent packing from a Bush rally for wearing shirts that said "Protect Our Civil Liberties."

Over the last four years on our website, www.progressive.org, I've been chronicling these infringements. With this issue of The Progressive, we're starting to publish them in a regular monthly column. It's called "McCarthyism Watch."

I hope you enjoy--well, that's not quite the word--this blotter.

When Coretta Scott King died on January 30, much of the mainstream media dwelled on her role first as the supportive wife and then the valiant widow. But as historian Barbara Ransby wrote in a superb column for our affiliate, the Progressive Media Project, "Coretta Scott was a civil rights activist years before she met King."

A Henry Wallace supporter in 1948, she urged King to oppose the Vietnam War when many of his colleagues counseled caution. In recent years, Ransby noted, Coretta Scott King courageously spoke out against homophobia in the black community and supported gay marriage.

"History has unfairly placed women like Coretta Scott King in the margins and the footnotes of its texts," she wrote. "It is time we remember them as more than civil rights movement wives and widows. We should also recognize them as conscious historical actors and activists in their own right."