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Z4 THE GAMECOCK ♦ Monday, April 28, 2003 SOUND OFF ONLINE POLL Create message boards at How will you spend your summer? www.dailygamecock.com or www.dailygamecock.com. send letters to the editor to Results published on Fridays. gamecockviewpoints@hotmail.com i - . — ..- - ... ■ - — IN OUR OPINION Graduates need a hand This time of year always sends seniors scrambling to prepare for the final chapter in their college careers — graduation.. And USC doesn’t exactly make the process any easier. The university sends seniors bits of information in the mail, online, by phone or on listservs, and many students just find things out through word of mouth. Most of the information from USC could help its students prepare for the big day by giving them a source for comprehensive information about graduation. me university concerns commencement, not what students need to do before they reach the big day. There’s also no one single source of information where seniors can get all their graduation questions answered. And some students haven’t received any information at all. USC could help its students prepare by giving them a source for comprehensive information about graduation. The university could establish a temporary graduation office at the end of each semester where students could go for answers. VIP could also feature a special page for seniors that contains graduation information and perhaps a list of obligations such as parking tickets that must be handled before graduation. USC could even make a graduation guide listing everything seniors need to know before they walk. Finding graduation information isn’t something seniors should have to worry about; their thoughts should be on post-graduation plans. College Quote Board L/niLi mnuuivi MANDEE LEE. RUTGERS UNIVERSITY “Beauty can also be found in the male form and is not just limited to the curvaceous womanly body. And yet, men never stuffed themselves into corsets, wore humongous hoop skirts or bound their feet to make them cute and tiny. They didn’t need to. No one was judging them on their appearance.” isniLi iiLunnuiwi LINDSAY TRAPHAGAN “Do any other to-be grads feel like you’re currently dangling over the edge of a steep and rocky cliff, just waiting to let go and plunge into the vast unknown — which could be a rocky gorge that will tear the once-perfect flesh from your body and mangle it into a thousand pieces, or could surprise you and be a blanket of perfect, billowy clouds, just like on the ‘Care Bears?’ ” GAMECOCK CORRECTIONS A caption in Friday’s paper incorrectly identified the cellist for Jump, Little Children as Evan Bivins. Evan Bivins is Jump, Little Children’s drummer. Ward Williams is the cellist in the photo. The Gamecock regrets the error. If you see an error in today’s paper, we want to know. E-mail us at gamecockviewpoints@hotmail.com. 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It is published Monday, Wednesday and Friday during the fall and spring semesters and nine times during the summer, with the exception of university holidays and exam periods. Opinions expressed in The Gamecock are those of the editors or author and not those of the University of South Carolina. The Board of Student Publications and Communications is the publisher of The Gamecock. The Department of Student Media is the newspaper’s parent organization. The Gamecock is supported in part by student-activity fees. One free copy per reader. Additional copies may be purchased for $1 each from the Department of Student Media. IU rLHl/L Hll HU The Gamecock Advertising: 777-3888 1400 Greene St. Classified: 777-1184 Columbia. S.C. 29208 Fax: 777-6482 Xf Evffc'f 5f£ClAL INTERtST <fcsuP QoY | I / ^ | Stale -Mouse Sanford fights uphill battle PATRICK AUGUSTINE GAMECOCKVIEWPOINTS@HOTMAIL.COM Modernizing the state is noble but hard task. A week ago, our khaki-clad ex ecutive, Gov. Mark Sanford, started to make good on his cam paign promises. Two major themes that ran through last November’s campaign and the preceding Republican primary were restructuring state gov ernment and, not surprisingly, lowering taxes. Although the governor’s hands have been tied on the sec ond point by the current budget deficit brought on by his prede cessor’s total lack of leadership, he has thus far successfully po sitioned his restructuring agen da. Both the president pro tem pore, Glenn McConnell, and the speaker of the House, David Wilkins, are sponsors of the bill in their respective chambers of the Legislature, effectively giv ing the bill the blessing of the powers in the legislative branch. This is significant because South Carolina has traditionally had a weak executive and a powerful Legislature, and the senators and house members have been loathe to relinquish any power to the governor. But this created a structure where little change was possible. Our state made great strides toward changing this Reconstruction-era holdover both in the 1970s with the revi sion of South Carolina’s consti tution and during the 1990s when Carroll Campbell made efforts to consolidate the governor’s holdover appointments. Much ancient history, how ever, is still embedded within the constitution, and Sanford can rest on his laurels if he man ages to get the restructuring bill passed, as it will be what defines his governorship. The main thrust of the bill is to make many of the constitutional of fices appointed instead of elect ed positions, giving the execu tive broader powers over setting his agenda through a unified Cabinet. Currently, as is the case with Inez Tenenbaum, it is possible for an elected member of the governor’s cabinet to advance personal political fortunes at the expense of a broader public agenda. Also, giving Sanford and subsequent leaders reorga nization and appointment pow ers within the executive branch helps to erode the power of in dividuals who hold progress hostage to their narrow person al beliefs, like Sen. Jake Knotts, who has kept the state’s tattoo ing ban in effect because he thinks the ban is biblical. Although government re structuring would go far in help ing South Carolina to modernize in an effort to compete with other states, Gov. Sanford’s plan to re duce income taxes in the state could have a disastrous effect in a time of fiscal crisis. The budget deficit in state government can clearly be seen on USC’s campus through the elimination of many programs and the paring away of nonessential staff. South Carolina needs a di verse stream of income if we are to be able to pay for essential services, and elimination of the income tax would cause too heavy of a reliance on property and sales-tax revenues. Increasing the cigarette tax is a good move from a public-health standpoint, but it cannot be off set by even a gradual cancella tion of income taxes. Gov. Sanford says he wants to spur economic growth in the state by getting rid of income taxes, but clearly, the best method would be to re-evaluate the current structure and low er, not eliminate, the high in come taxes on industry. USC needs a reliable funding source from the state if we are to grow and build a reputation of excel lence, and the only way to achieve it is through sound lead ership on the state level. Augustine is a third-year political-science student. IN YOUR OPINION Protests are really acts against Bush Clint Bergenson and J. Alan Herschaft said many things in their retorts to Bryan Cox’s let ter (“War protesters have been proven wrong,” April 14). Bergenson commented on America’s “arrogant compla cency” while doling out many 50-cent words that are sure proof that he’s getting his money’s worth for his English degree. Of all the things Bergenson and Herschaft said, there’s one thing they noticeably didn’t do: They never answered Cox’s question. Where did all those campus protesters go? Did they just pack up to go protest somewhere else? I don’t think so because I haven’t seen any good anti-war protests anywhere lately. But then again, I only get my info from cable news, particularly the great Satan Fox News. Who wants “fair and balanced” when you can get “skewed and anti-Bush” from “reliable news sources” that Bergenson gives a “curso ry glance” to? Maybe that’s why Bergenson’s argument is so weak; he only gives a cursory glance to the facts and lets his visceral anti-Bush Administra tion reactions get the better of him. More so than Bergenson, Herschaft gives us good insight on the fallacy that is the anti war movement. The war is over and the postwar era has begun. Seeing as anti-war protest is now antiquated, our avant garde Herschaft is now direct ing his criticism at all things regarding postwar Iraq and postwar U.S. policy. With rhetorical talent only a legal ed ucation can provide, Herschaft responds to Cox’s simple ques tion with more questions fea turing hyperbolic doom and gloom for the administration and open-ended “what if’ sce narios about whom should we conquer next. A conservative Republican president is liberating an op pressed people and promoting democracy. And it’s liberal Democrats fighting tooth and nail to stop him. Here’s the skinny: Right now', the anti-war protesters are regrouping. The war is over, so there’s no use protest ing that. It never was about the war, anyway. It’s about protest ing this administration. Where were these liberal anti-war protesters when a Democratic president, moved by the geno cide of oppressed peoples, sent the American military into harm’s way in Bosnia in 1994 and Kosovo in 1999? Why is it different now? Because there’s a conservative Republican president in charge. I’ll answer your question, Cox. The anti-Bush protesters are re grouping. Their hatred of this administration can no longer be expressed under the guise of protesting the war. They’re looking for new, vapid ways to express their hostility toward this administration. I smell something too, Bergenson. It’s a noxious mixture of hypocrisy and b.s. LT. NATHAN WHITE, USAF GRADUATE STUDENT Virus propagators attack USC e-mail It looks like the administration in the Computer Science and Engineering Department has let some sort of attacker use our e mail accounts for purposes of spreading spam and viruses across the Internet. This claim might sound sudden and brash, but in the past three days, I have received three e-mails from random cse.sc.edu accounts that contained little or no content. I was not going to try to investi gate what it was more fully. I originally wrote these e-mails off as random people on the serv er being silly until I had a mes sage returned from a bounced server saying I was trying to send e-mail with the x-wav exploit. I do not even use my cse.sc.edu ac count for outgoing mail. This is a big blunder to let peo ple spoof or possibly even use our mail accounts for spam. I’m sure it won’t look good for the univer sity if and when someone says he got a virus after receiving mail apparently from a computer-sci ence student there. Rather, it’ll probably look bad for the student who didn’t even send it. C. BRANDON BRADLEY EIRST-YEAR COMPUTER-SCIENCE STUDENT Submission Policy Letters to the editor should be less than 300 words and include name, phone number, professional title or year and major, if a student. E-mail letters to gamecockviewpoints@hotmail.com. Letters will be edited. Anonymous letters will not be published. Submissions are limited to two per person per semester. Call the newsroom at 777-7726 for nfore information. What a wacky state we live in TYLER JONES GAMECOCKVIEWPOINTS@HOTMAIL.COM There’s no explaining South Carolina politics. Notes compiled while wonder ing why legislators would consid er building a 6-foot statue of an unborn fetus: ♦ Is there anything better than South Carolina politics? We had a 100-year-old zombie for a sena tor, a monument and flag exalt ing slavery and, for a while, even the possibility of an iron-cast pla centa on the steps of the state Capitol. ♦ And while I’m at it, what are the odds of a rogue band of mili tant feminists fueling up on gra nola and whiskey and driving their Phish-stickered SUVs into the statue at 4 a.m. on some ran dom night? 2-1, no doubt. ♦ At least there is good news in this war-saturated world we live in. i turned to page two oi The State on Thursday and saw that my good friend Orenthal James Simpson will be return ing to the spotlight in his own re ality show, set to air this sum mer. Many people forget that the Juice was a beloved hero in America before he was framed by the Los Angeles Police Department. It is good to see that karma still has an inexorable hold on the world. ♦ Keeping with the reality-tele vision topic, how long until we get political figures doing their own reality shows? I can see it now: “The Donald Rumsfeld Show” on C-SPAN. You know that Slick Willy J- Clinton would be the best show. I could just see it now: “Tune in next week, when the former president visits Las Vegas.” ♦ What is this quote I read in The Gamecock by our new Student Government president, Katie Dreiling? Something about being glad to work with “two at tractive males.” Now, Katie, I could say some dirty things about you, but maybe you’ve just got a sense of humor; either way, gimme a call. ♦ Who’s next? Syria or North Korea? ♦Where is Britney Spears? Has she lost it? Is she pregnant? Has she become a cocaine-addled wretch? I’m ashamed to admit it, but I miss her vacuous stare and her polished abdominal region. ♦ Speaking of the wonderful shallowness of pop culture, my ex girlfriend Brenda Walsh tells me that there is going to be a “90210” reunion show on May 11. She would not tell me whether Dylan McKay would be rich, drug-rid dled, or sweet and sensitive. The suspense is killing me. ♦ Finally, I’ve got to close this semester with a public-service announcement on anal sex. The Supreme Court is about to rule on Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, a case that revolves around the legality of sodomy. This case caused Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania to babble on about his gruesome sex life and get himself in a Trent Lott-ish amount of trouble. But the case does present an interesting fork in the road for those of us in the sex-history business. The case will set a precedent on whether the gov ernment can regulate what goes on in our bedrooms — namely, our right to privacy. So. while von are frolicking at the beach this summer, remem ber to enjoy your ass while it’s still yours and not Uncle Sam’s. Jones is a graduate student in the College of Mass Communications and Information Studies.