Interesting

Today is graduation day at Furman where I graduated 17 years ago on 6/1/91. I believe the commencement speaker then was the vice-president of the local telecable company. The speaker today is supposed to be the president of the country.

There is some understandable opposition to his visit and an eloquent statement of objection on the website below - I have also pasted the text of the statement below the link -

http://www.furman.edu/bushvisit/petition.htm

Under ordinary circumstances it would be an honor for Furman University to be visited by the President of the United States. However, these are not ordinary circumstances. In the spirit of open and critical review that is the hallmark of both a free democracy and an institution of higher learning, we, the undersigned members of the Furman University community, object to the following actions of the Bush administration:

Claiming a linkage between Iraq and 9-11, and exaggerating the threat of weapons of mass destruction, to justify a new and morally questionable strategy of "pre-emptive warfare" against Iraq - a country that did not attack us and posed no immediate international threat;

Classifying war prisoners as "detained nonmilitary combatants" to permit their detention and interrogation in violation of our own laws and standards of human decency;

Sowing fear and using "threat levels" to side-step the Constitution and justify the erosion of individual liberties, such as challenging the Fourth Amendment (wiretapping without authorization of law) and the First Amendment (denying access to information and restricting dissent to "free speech zones");

Suppressing or ignoring empirical evidence that contradicts administration ideology, such as denying global warming and then obstructing progress on reducing greenhouse gases while favoring billions in tax breaks and subsidies to oil companies that are earning record profits;

Installing lobbyists for the coal, timber, and mining industries as the chief officials in charge of managing and protecting our public lands;

Encouraging reckless over-spending (creating the largest deficits in history), expanding the reach of national government into local affairs (No Child Left Behind), and increasing our involvement overseas at the expense of domestic concerns (reconstructing New Orleans).

We are ashamed of these actions of this administration. The war in Iraq has cost the lives of over 4000 brave and honorable U. S. military personnel, wounded more than 13,000 military personnel so severely that they are unable to return to duty, killed tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, will cost more than 2 trillion dollars, and has severely damaged our government's ethical and moral credibility at home and abroad. Because we love this country and the ideals it stands for, we accept our civic responsibility to speak out against these actions that violate American values.