Here’s an Associated Press release that just drips with sympathy for Cindy Sheehan, in her latest appearance with another deluded media entity, Sean Penn: Sean Penn, Cindy Sheehan highlight Sacramento peace forum. (Hat tip: Killian Bundy.)

Peace activist Cindy Sheehan said Saturday that America will get out of Iraq when millions of citizens take the simple step she did outside President Bush’s vacation home last summer.

She sat down.

With Academy Award-winning actor Sean Penn in the front row, Sheehan told a Sacramento peace rally that critics of the war need to do more than listen to speeches like hers.

“You have to wash the blood off your hands and get off your apathetic butts and do something,” she told several hundred people crowding a union hall to overflowing. “These people, they’re not going to change unless they see us out in the streets.”

The two-hour town hall-style forum was one of what organizers said were 200 such events across the nation Saturday.

Sheehan, who recently moved from Vacaville to Berkeley, became known as the “Peace Mom” after she attracted hundreds of anti-war protesters to a makeshift camp near Bush’s ranch. She was protesting the death in Iraq of her 24-year-old son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, and seeking to meet with Bush.

“Anybody could do what we did in Crawford, Texas. We just went down and sat down,” Sheehan said. “We have to get so freakin’ fed up with what’s going on that we all go and sit down.”

Penn said he is buoyed by recent efforts in Congress to rein in the president’s powers and bring troops home, and by the outraged response to disclosures the government is listening to citizens’ private communications without obtaining warrants.

“When we said, ‘Listen to us’ — they’re doing it through covert surveillance,” Penn joked. He read his brief remarks from a single crumpled piece of paper he said “probably looks like the administration’s war plan.”

Penn was an early opponent of the war, and visited Iraq in late November 2003 shortly before Saddam Hussein was captured.