Julie Blust, press secretary for the Bush Legacy Tour, showed me around the bio-diesel bus that’s been traveling the country since June 24, highlighting some of the lows of George W. Bush’s presidency. The tour stopped briefly from 11am to 1pm at Elmwood and Bidwell today, en route from Ohio to eastern Pennsylvania.

Blust points out that the bus is not out campaigning for a specific candidate. “The Bush Legacy Tour,” she says, “is not just about President Bush’s failures. It’s about the failed conservative ideology he and his allies in Congress represent.”

The million-dollar bus tour is brought to us by Americans United for Change, a group founded in 2005 for the purpose of fighting Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security. The group was successful. In light of the current financial “credit tsunami” (to use Alan Greenspan’s term), it’s interesting to speculate on the condition of Social Security now had the plan gone through back then.

The Center for American Progress Action Fund, VoteVets.org, MoveOn.org, Healthcare for America Now, American Rights at Work—along with big unions like AFSCME, SEIU, and the AFL-CIO—have sponsored or partnered to send the bus on its five-month, 20,000 mile tour of over forty states.

Here’s a little tidbit for you: In 2001, when Bush took office, gas was $1.37/gallon on national average. Today, that average is $2.91—and much higher in our area. Also, although the Bush Legacy Bus can run on biodiesel, it hasn’t always been able to because the fuel isn’t available everywhere.

Meanwhile, national emissions of greenhouse gases have increased by 316 million tons.

Katrina, education, worker’s rights, healthcare, and Iraq figure prominently in the traveling museum. Learn more about why John McCain is trying to distance himself from Bush by visiting the Legacy Tour Web site.

Where would we be without that imperfect political tool, the poll?

This morning, Artvoice joined the ranks of major news organizations like Reuters, C-SPAN, CNN, FOX, NBC, CBS, ABC, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman (the local paper for Sarah Palin’s home town of Wasilla, AK), by conducting a poll of our own among the big crowd of people who gathered outside our office to claim a free movie preview pass for tonight’s screening of Body of Lies, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe.

Check out the clip below to see what our thrifty cross-section of movie buffs had to say about tonight’s debate and the upcoming Presidential election.

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