At least 10 U.S. forces killed on Memorial Day: MSNBC is reporting that ten U.S. soldiers have been killed by roadside bombs and a helicopter crash on Memorial Day. This has raised the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq to 112, "making May the deadliest month of the year for U.S. troops in Iraq."
Bush to nominate Zoellick as World Bank chief: At least that is what MSNBC is claiming. According to MSNBC, President Bush will announce his decision Wednesday to select Robert Zoellick, who is Bush's trade chief and the country’s No. 2 diplomat, to become the next World Bank president after Paul Wolfowitz will step down on June 30. Wolfowitz has been embroiled in a scandal where, in 2005, he arranged a large compensation package to his girlfriend Shaha Riza, a bank employee. Crooks and Liars is reporting that Zoellick has had "a tumultuous relationship with the Bush Administration," although Zoellick is still considered a Bushie. The World Bank presidency is one position that President Bush can nominate without going the Senate confirmation, however Zoellick's nomination will still have to be approved by the Board of Governors. It will be interesting to see if Zoellick's name will be approved by the Bank.
Fitzgerald says Plame was a covert agent: This is off Newsweek. Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald asserts that Valerie Plame Wilson "was a 'covert' CIA officer who repeatedly traveled overseas using a 'cover identity' in order to disguise her relationship with the agency." I'm sure the Bush administration, and the Scooter Libby Legal Defense Trust, will ramp up their own PR-spin in claiming Libby's innocence.
Cindy Sheehan calls it quits: On The Daily Kos, antiwar protester Cindy Sheehan is resigning from being the "face" of the anti-war movement. Sheehan writes:
I have come to some heartbreaking conclusions this Memorial Day Morning. These are not spur of the moment reflections, but things I have been meditating on for about a year now. The conclusions that I have slowly and very reluctantly come to are very heartbreaking to me.
The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a "tool" of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our "two-party" system?
However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the "left" started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of "right or left", but "right and wrong."
I am deemed a radical because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike. It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party. Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on. People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt "two" party system our Representative Republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland. I am demonized because I don’t see party affiliation or nationality when I look at a person, I see that person’s heart. If someone looks, dresses, acts, talks and votes like a Republican, then why do they deserve support just because he/she calls him/herself a Democrat?
[....]
The most devastating conclusion that I reached this morning, however, was that Casey did indeed die for nothing. His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. I have tried every since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.
I have also tried to work within a peace movement that often puts personal egos above peace and human life. This group won’t work with that group; he won’t attend an event if she is going to be there; and why does Cindy Sheehan get all the attention anyway? It is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions.
Our brave young men and women in Iraq have been abandoned there indefinitely by their cowardly leaders who move them around like pawns on a chessboard of destruction and the people of Iraq have been doomed to death and fates worse than death by people worried more about elections than people. However, in five, ten, or fifteen years, our troops will come limping home in another abject defeat and ten or twenty years from then, our children’s children will be seeing their loved ones die for no reason, because their grandparents also bought into this corrupt system. George Bush will never be impeached because if the Democrats dig too deeply, they may unearth a few skeletons in their own graves and the system will perpetuate itself in perpetuity.
I am going to take whatever I have left and go home. I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost. I will try to maintain and nurture some very positive relationships that I have found in the journey that I was forced into when Casey died and try to repair some of the ones that have fallen apart since I began this single-minded crusade to try and change a paradigm that is now, I am afraid, carved in immovable, unbendable and rigidly mendacious marble.
Camp Casey has served its purpose. It’s for sale. Anyone want to buy five beautiful acres in Crawford , Texas ? I will consider any reasonable offer. I hear George Bush will be moving out soon, too...which makes the property even more valuable.
This is my resignation letter as the "face" of the American anti-war movement. This is not my "Checkers" moment, because I will never give up trying to help people in the world who are harmed by the empire of the good old US of A, but I am finished working in, or outside of this system. This system forcefully resists being helped and eats up the people who try to help it. I am getting out before it totally consumes me or anymore people that I love and the rest of my resources.
Good-bye America ...you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.
It’s up to you now.
Cindy Sheehan started this antiwar movement when she camped outside of President Bush's ranch in Crawford Texas, in 2005, demanding that the vacationing President Bush would come out from his ranch and provide an explanation as to why her son Casey died in Iraq. Bush refused to meet with Sheehan, thus creating the sparks for this antiwar movement. Sheehan can now retire, rest, and rejuvenate. The movement will continue on without her.
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