i m victor blackwell. welcome to cnn newsroom. we re hours away from president biden s state of the union address tonight, his first to a divided congress. instead of nancy pelosi over the president s left shoulder, it will be speaker kevin mccarthy. the speech is expected to draw the largest television audience for the president this year. americans will hear biden lay out why he believes the state of the union is strong as he said last week. he s expected to talk about lowering inflation, improving infrastructure and getting past the worst of the pandemic. he s also expected to talk about america s stand against china. of course just days after an american fighter jet shot down one of its supply balloons. the president will likely increase the urgency for congress to act on policing reform and an adult weapons band. all of it will be a test run for his re-election bid. phil mattingly is with us now. what more should we expect from the president tonight? you know, vict
hello, and welcome to inside politics. i m john king in washington. thank you for sharing your day with us. a midair mystery. the united states shoots down more unidentified objects flying over north america. right now, washington knows about as much as you do. not much. what s gone on the last two weeks or so, ten days, has been nothing short of craziness. and the military needs to have a plan to not only determine what s out there but determine the dangers that go with it. plus, the republican house speaker convenes what he calls the heads of the five families of the republican caucus. he wants to forge a consensus and to prove wrong democrats who predict that house republicans in the end will blink and vote to raise the debt limit. and alive under the debris. sniffer dogs, thermal cameras find signs of life in both turkey and syria, but for every miracle, there is mourning. tens of thousands pinned beneath twisted metal destined for mass graves. up first for us, tr
natasha bertrand. there s a lot we don t know. what do we know? we still don t know where these objects came from or what they are, but what we are told is the first and second objects shot down over alaska and northern canada over the weekend, those did have some balloon-like features. and they also had a small metal cylinder underneath them. now, it is unclear, of course, whether those were actual supply balloons or what their purpose was, but those are the preliminary details from officials. those objects were also flying at about 40,000 feet, so they posed a risk to civilian aircraft. we re also told sunday s object, the one shot down over lake huron in michigan, that was flying around 20,000 feet and described by officials as octagonal and had strings hanging off it, and it did, importantly, according to the pentagon, potentially have surveillance capabilities. unclear at this point what these objects actually are or if they were deployed by a nation state or if they were deploy
i m victor blackwell. welcome to cnn newsroom. we re hours away from president biden s state of the union address tonight, his first to a divided congress. instead of nancy pelosi over the president s left shoulder, it will be speaker kevin mccarthy. the speech is expected to draw the largest television audience for the president this year. americans will hear biden lay out why he believes the state of the union is strong as he said last week. he s expected to talk about lowering inflation, improving infrastructure and getting past the worst of the pandemic. he s also expected to talk about america s stand against china. of course just days after an american fighter jet shot down one of its supply balloons. the president will likely increase the urgency for congress to act on policing reform and an adult weapons band. all of it will be a test run for his re-election bid. phil mattingly is with us now. what more should we expect from the president tonight? you know, victor, you la