This website was born out of a perceived need to centralize efforts to protest the 2008 Graduation Speech at Furman University by President George W. Bush.  We applaud the blog entry, which highlights a letter of protest signed by a number of people within the Furman community, from which these statements are taken. The original blog entry can be seen in its entirety on the history page.

It should be noted however, that this attempt to organize a community protest
is not sanctioned by the Furman community.

WHY ARE WE PROTESTING:

We are protesting because we 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).