Bush Legacy Tour

ST.PAUL, MN-The people gathered at our St. Paul press conference yesterday gave us a very warm welcome. There was a great group that came out to support the project. The event was a pre-cursor of our visit to St. Paul during the Republican National Convention. A number of the organizers that were at the event shared stories about how frenetic everyone in the city was in getting ready for the RNC. Unsurprisingly, they also said that there was a strict clampdown all around the convention center to keep protesters out. I got to see the site where the bus will be during the convention. It should make for some very interesting stories to come when we bring the “legacy” to tens of thousands of Republicans attending the convention in September! 

Being in the Twin Cities so close to the anniversary (August 1st) of the I35W Bridge collapse was significant.  One of the important points the Bush Legacy Tour emphasisis is the incredible domestic sacrifices we have made to fund the Iraq War. One those sacrifices would most certainly be our infrastructure. Eliot Seide from AFSCME District Council 5 made the connection between two major, recent, disasters. He pointed to a poster we displayed outside the bus that showed a photo from Katrina and from the I35W Bridge collapse. He pointed out how in both disasters people drowned and it could’ve been avoided. He talked about the irony of our government spending money to build bridges in Iraq while ours crumble. It is unfortunate that all of the political leaders representing Minnesotans do not see that irony. Senator Norm Coleman, Representative Michele Bachmann, and  Representative John Kline have voted repeatedly to keep the troops stuck in a civil war in Iraq with no end in sight. All three also voted against another important domestic priority: healthcare for children. They cast their votes against the State Children’s Health Insurance Program which would provide healthcare for 30,000 Minnesota children. All three have priorities that fall in line most of the time with the Bush Administration. Representative Klein voted with the President’s priorities a whopping 92% of the time with Representative Baccman not far behind with 89% and Representative Klein a notable 86%.

It is no wonder that the wrong-headed priorities shared by Kline, Baccman, Coleman, and Bush have led us to spend trillions building infastructure in Iraq while our bridges crumble at home.