Photo: Minnesota Independent

(Photo: Minnesota Independent)

Referring to the 6th District Republican as a “lightning rod for leftist hate,” KTLK’s Chris Baker welcomed Michele Bachmann to his radio show Thursday morning. She accused Barack Obama of using the bank bailout fund as his “slush fund,” said we’re “observing the destruction of… capitalism,” and again borrowed columnist Michael Barone’s term “gangster government” for the administration’s dealings with GM. Vowing to block Obama’s efforts, she said, “This is like Al Capone in Chicago politics. It may work in Chicago, but it won’t work in the state of Minnesota.”

Bachmann began the interview by stating she’ll be part of a “caucus on media bias” — a followup to Baker’s introduction, which had its own sound-effect: a “moonbat alarm” alerting left-wingers to “get your blogs ready!”

Bachmann says conservatives need to mobilize to fight media bias, “because the media picks a target, they demonize them, they drum them off the stage and they do it over and over and over.” Her example? David Letterman telling off-color jokes about Palin’s daughter (here’s Letterman retelling the jokes and responding to Palin’s ire).

“A lot of times conservatives want to be nice and they fold their hands,” she added. “It’s time now, I think, to stand up and call them for what they’re doing.”

When asked whether she’s running for governor, she said, “If I felt the tug to do it, I would do it… I just don’t have that tug.”

She reserved most of her anger for Obama and how he’s managed the bailouts of GM and Chrysler. Stating that she expects the current 9.4 percent unemployment rate to jump to 10 percent, she said of the administration:

They calculate prosperity by increasing the number of government jobs, and you can’t do that. Your barometer of success in a growing economy is how many jobs are created in the private sector without government subsidy. Private business can handle themselves just fine. They can grow just fine. Every day government is doing things to put them out of business. This is the most clear example I can point to, Chris, which is: the federal government overnight purchasing General Motors and then in the course of 100, 150 days choosing to shut down over 3,000 dealerships across the country, throwing thousands of people out of work and destroying people’s capital.

GM originally said it’d close around 1,100 dealerships, but that number has doubled — to 2,059 (See Huffington Post’s interactive map of closures.) She says dealerships will today have to sign an “extortion agreement,” which she says releases GM from liability, and if they don’t sign, they’ll lose the warranties on the remaining GM cars on their lots. Further, she says, “they also have to hand over to the government their customer lists, their customer service lists… The government will turn these lists over to the competitors, the remaining GM dealerships.”

“They have literally shafted these private businessmen,” she said.

A partial transcript of the interview follows:

I’m in the process of looking for legal ways to intervene in stopping the president from doing what he’s doing… I’m not speaking as an attorney right now, but from my point of view, this is not legal… It says they will not protest and they will not contest anything… If they do protest, they have to pay not only their own attorney fees, they have to pay GM’s attorney fees at $1500 an hour. The lawyers for these car dealers told them early this week that it is as though the government has handed the dealers a gun, playing the game of Russian Roulette, and they’ve put a bullet in every chamber. There’s no way out for these dealers.

We need to be outraged by what the federal government is doing, because Michael Barone has called this — he’s a columnist — he’s called this “gangster government.” There couldn’t be a more descriptive term. This is like Al Capone in Chicago politics. It may work in Chicago but it won’t work in the state of Minnesota… I’m going to look for avenue I can to block the administration…

Congress turned that down [the late 2008 bill seeking a bailout for automakers]. We said no to bailing out the car companies. We went home over the weekend, and over the weekend, the Obama administration contacted President Bush and asked President Bush to bail out the car companies. I believe this was in December. I think it was something like $14 or $17 billion dollars, something of that avenue. Unfortunately, President Bush gave that money to the ‘Auto Task Force’ which President Obama set up. That money was given without Congressional approval and taken out of the bank bailout money. I think that was illegal to do that. Congress did not give approval. Since that time there’s been at least another $65 billion that president Obama has dipped into that bank bailout fund and put into these bailouts for Chrysler and GM. That is money that at this point, based on their business plan, GM or Chrysler can never pay back to the taxpayer. They have no plan to ever be able to pay that back. This bank bailout is working as a slush fund for the Obama administration to spend wherever they like…

This is bipartisan. President Bush should not have released the money out of the bailout fund for the banks and given it to President Obama to create an Auto Task Force. There’s no oversight from Congress. This is something unilaterally that was done at the White House level and since that time President Obama has gone to town. And they’ve taken another $65 billion, without congressional approval, and dumped it in GM, and where’s it gone? Here’s Chrysler, which for all intents and purposes is dead, and somehow the White House said, “Now you, Fiat, will own Chrysler.” Fiat didn’t put a dime on the table, but we did, the taxpayer did…. And what is unbelievable is, here you’ve got actual investors in Chrysler – the bondholders – they put money, cash on the barrelhead, into Chrysler to keep Chrysler going. Some of those bondholders were teacher pension funds, cop pension funds, and president Obama said to those people, who are secured creditors, which means this: if anything happened to Chrysler, they were to be made whole, 100 percent, first, before any unsecured creditor got their money. President Obama said, “I don’t like that.” So he turned 150 years of bankruptcy law on its head, defied bankruptcy law and said, “Nuts to you people who are secured creditors. We’re going to put the UAW… first in line, and we’re going to make sure that we pay for their healthcare costs and their retirement costs with your US tax money. And so we’re gonna pay them first and put the secured creditors – which include teacher pension funds and cop pension funds – you’re going to get something less, maybe 26 cents on the dollar.”

…It seems illegal because I believe it is illegal. There has not been any contravening change in the law to make this happen. This is an outright power grab….

This is beyond crazy, because you’ve got the president who’s set up something like 21 czars now. We’ve never seen any thing like that. They’re unaccountable. He is completely bypassing Congress. I mean, you want to talk about an Imperial Presidency? He is bypassing Congress and setting up these czars. He just set up a new one, I think yesterday — the pay czar — to decide compensation limits, for heaven’s sake… That’s why I feel like I need to be in Washington now rather than running for governor of Minnesota. What’s happening here in Washington is nothing short of historic. We’re observing the deconstruction of free market economics and capitalism.

Listen to the interview.