To: Assignment Desk, Daybook Editor
Contact: David Swanson, 202 329-7847 or 301 772-7264 or david@davidswanson.org
News Advisory:
Cindy Sheehan, co-founder of Gold Star Families for Peace, will hold a “Newsmaker” News Conference on Friday, Oct. 28 at 9 a.m. in the National Press Club, located at 14th and F Streets, N.W., Washington, D.C. (13th Floor).

Sheehan will discuss the milestone reached this week with the announced death of the 2,000th U.S. soldier in Iraq. That total includes Sheehan’s son, Casey, whose death led her to camp outside President George W. Bush’s Texas ranch this past summer, where she sought an explanation from the president regarding his reasons for continuing the war.

Rumor has it she’s planning to DIE at the White House. I’ll help her out if she needs it.

“I’ll be laying down and not getting up,” Sheehan said Tuesday to a small crowd in which the number of journalists exceeded the number of protesters. “When they let me out, I’ll do the same thing if I get arrested.” She said she hoped 2,000 people would attend the vigil throughout the week to represent each American death. Each participant was to receive a wrist bracelet with the name of a fallen soldier.

She also had this to say:

You’re going to the White House this week. What’s the message you want to bring?
We have to invest everything we have right now to ensure our children and their children have a future. I believe what the Bush administration is doing is harmful to our present but it will be more harmful to our future. It’s contaminating a region with depleted uranium. It’s depleting our treasury. And if it has its way, it’ll wage an eternal war in the Middle East…

She is stark crazy mad, this woman. To go around saying these things should really embarrass even the most avid liberal anti war freaks. If they choose to place Cindy Sheehan upon a Queen’s pedestal, then they deserve what they get. These people are in effect celebrating and mocking the deaths of the men and women of the American military. They’re truly disgusting people.

And from the world news reports, things look even more somber:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Protesters across the United States took part in hundreds of vigils and rallies on Wednesday to mark the 2,000th U.S. military death in Iraq, hoping to increase pressure on President George W. Bush to start bringing troops home.

Anti-war activists said their movement was rapidly growing in strength and now spoke for a majority of Americans who now thought Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was a mistake.
—SNIP—
The anti-war MoveOn.org said it was organising more than a thousand vigils involving tens of thousands of people across the country and it appealed to supporters to donate $150,000 (84,000 pounds) to air an anti-war TV ad.
Its Web site listed 23 events in the Los Angeles area alone, mostly small groups of people gathering for candlelight vigils in parks, public places, in people’s homes or on street corners, to read poetry, sing songs and observe a moment of silence to remember the fallen.

Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry, who lost to Bush in last year’s presidential election, called for 20,000 troops to be brought home over the Christmas holidays.
—SNIP—
Polls show the war has become steadily more unpopular over the past year. In an NBC/Wall Street Journal survey earlier this month, 34 percent favoured maintaining current troop levels in Iraq while 58 percent wanted them reduced.

A CNN/USA Today poll published on Wednesday found 57 percent of Americans saying that the war was going badly.

2000 Deaths is a sad thing. No one likes war. No one wanted this to happen. We did ask Saddam to stop doing the things he was doing. We did warn him. The world warned him. But the world got wobbly knees under the direction of the UN and France…We didn’t ask to be attacked on 9-11-01…but we got hit, and hit hard. The Islamafreakoids who did that were no different than Saddam. They’re all madmen, just like these people who are staging these protest events all over the country.