by the DB Transcription Service. DB readers - your task is to identify the lies, sources, and note them in the comments.
Bachmann on KSFO 560 AM San Francisco
April 9, 2009
21:19
Lee Rodgers: Frankly, it seems to me, if you were to go looking for someone to stand up for conservative principles in that Washington nuthouse, Minnesota might not be the first place you’d look.
Sidekick: Yeah.
LR: You know, for a list of happy hunting grounds, because the reputation up there is about as liberal as San Francisco, overall, just not as noisy about it. So one of the surprises of the current Congress is Michele Bachmann, who came to national attention when she, ah, got in the face of Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner over his unwillingness to defend the American dollar as the world currency, which it is and has been for many, many years. Congressman, just for starters, explain why that issue is important to you and to all of us.
Michele Bachmann: Well, good morning, and thank you for allowing me to be on your show this morning, This issue is crucial because our economy is soft right now. We, everyone knows we’ve been going through very tough headwinds right now, with our economy, which, by the way was created by the United States government, this wasn’t a natural disaster that came from a hurricane or a famine, this is something that Congress created this problem, but when you look at the value of the dollar, and when you look at our currency, and think about the possibility that currency could be valued by some entity other than the United States, that’s very concerning, because whether or not, ah, the administration decides to move us away from the dollar, and put us in with an international currency, the real issue deals with who gets to decide what the value of our dollar is. And if the value of our dollar, for instance, is comingled with that of Zimbabwe, we’re in big trouble. And that’s what would happen if we would yield our dollar to an international global currency standard.
LR: Ah, that’s pretty worrisome. What was your reaction, overall, to President Obama’s performance last week in Europe and Turkey, not only that G7 time waster, which is all those things ever are, but especially his big speech apologizing for America?
MB: I thought it was shameful, I thought it was it was a very sad reflection, and, and, perhaps a true reflection on what our president feels about these issues, number one. He was apologetic about our country, and our country, after all was the nation that had liberated much of Europe during World War II. We were also there with our doughboys in World War I, bringing about a positive solution in Europe. And, for that matter, many of the Muslim countries, we’ve also been instrumental, as, in bringing freedom to those countries as well, freeing people from tyranny and from slavery. We’ve been the good guy on the block, so to speak, for the last century, in some of these major wars that have occurred across the world. So to see the specter of our president apologizing for American activity, bowing before the king of Saudi Arabia, which to me was highly symbolic, that he did that –
LR: And now denying it, by the way –
MB: And then now denying it, and then lying about it, and then also, our president is saying to the world that we are not a Christian nation, during Holy Week. Saying we are not a Christian nation, that we’re merely citizens with shared values. That is not true, it’s not reflective of our history. If you look at our founders, our founders said clearly that our constitution was meant for a religious people, people who have moral convictions. The founders were very clear in their own beliefs, if you look at their personal back grounds, ah, they were not ashamed of their faith. And I think it’s just very problematic to see the statements, and to hear the statements that our president made during this last week, and especially to look at just as North Caroli—North Korea was lifting off their rocket, here our president was calling for two very strange things. One is unilateral nuclear disarmament. The second being that he wants to put a stop to our missile defense programs. Just when this is occurring? I don’t know how he could be more tone deaf politically, but also, to put the safety of the American citizens at risk.
LR: I don’t know a whole lot about Minnesota. I, uh, well I once came very close to taking a job at KSTP up there, but what I know of Minnesota, and this may not apply to your district at all, is that it’s generally a liberal state. Ah, where, as in many parts of this country as in this last election, the political middle kind of shifted left and voted for Obama. Are you sensing any, uh, any buyer’s remorse now that he’s been in office for a couple of months?
MB: Oh, I do. I know I’ve gone out publically speaking across my district, and have asked, uh, people in the audience, do you know people who have voted for President Obama, do they have buyer’s remorse now? And, uh, hands go up all across the audience. I think people are shocked at what they’re seeing. We are, as you said, a very liberal state, and we have been for a long time. I grew up a Democrat, in a Democrat family. If you were in Minnesota, by and large, you were a Democrat. We’re the state of Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Eugene McCarthy, Paul Wellstone. We have a long Democrat tradition, and a fairly far left Democrat tradition, as well. And we were no different, we’re the only state that has gone Democrat longer than any other state in the country. And we did so in this last election as well. But I think people are going to see that our president’s ah, proposal – cure – for our current economic crisis being socialism, and being moving in that direction, people recognize that that is not what has established our country’s greatness, that’s not how we became the most prosperous nation in the world. And I think people will begin to reject the formula that President Obama is putting forward.
LR: Minnesota is the first state to have elected an openly, avowed Muslim to Congress, Mr. Ellison. The word is, he is heavily involved in what amounts to a talent search for Muslims to fill jobs of some importance in the Obama administration. What’s the reaction to that back in Minnesota?
MB: You know, I think our, our news media hasn’t, hasn’t put that message out. We have a very liberal new media here in the state of Minnesota and that message hasn’t gone out. I think that most people probably aren’t aware of that.
LR: I, I, I’m gonna ask you about some things that are probably old news to you, but to, uh, to the rest of the country, especially here in the western part of the country, uh, there, there are still some mystery attached. For example, that uh, airport taxi driver controversy at, uh, the major airport, Minneapolis airport, did that ever get sorted out?
MB: Ah, yes, ah, the, the taxi drivers were required to go ahead and give people rides even if they carried alcohol, so that was sorted out. And we also were the site of the six flying imams, I don’t know if you remember that-
LR: Oh yes.
MB: The imams, the imams were actually attending, ah, Congressman Keith Ellison’s victory celebration, when he won as a member of Congress. [Ed: This is a lie.] And the imams went to the Minneapolis airport to leave and go home. While they were there, they were shouting phrases anti-Bush, anti-America and they laid their prayer shawls—er, their prayer rugs out on the floor in the airport terminal, were having their prayers, and um, were making these statements and when they got aboard the airplane, they switched seats, they didn’t go to their proper seats, and they went in the pattern of the nine-one-one uh, um, terrorists who were on the airplanes, and they all asked for seatbelt extenders on their seats, in the airplane, and these weren’t large people. So, uh, there were people on the airplane that became very nervous about these public displays and they alerted the airplane authorities, and so, these six imams were taken off of the airplane. Well, the imams ended up suing everyone on the plane, the whistleblowers, and they said that their civil rights were violated. So that’s been a big mess, that case, and I don’t, I’m not sure, but I don’t believe that that’s been resolved yet.
LR: Didn’t you also have taxi drivers there, Muslim taxi drivers, who wouldn’t even allow blind people to bring seeing eye dogs into their cabs because –
MB: That’s right—
LR: --they regarded dogs as unclean?
MB: That’s right. We had that. We al—[laughs] –we also had, um, the situation, of Muslims working in Target and, uh, at the Target store, and they would not ring up pork products, um, at the register. Um, there’s about, oh, thirty-thousand Somalis that were relocated as refugees to the Minneapolis area, and um, that’s where a lot of these controversies have come out of. We, we’ve also more recently been in the news because some of, some young Somalis have been recruited, ah, taken, apparently to, ah, training camps, and, ah, one of the Somalis, ah, became a suicide bomber in the Middle East. So there’s some very real concerns about that as well.
LR: So you have young Somali men who have disappeared, believed to have gone back to Somalia for terrorist training with the expectation that since they have passports, they will be coming back into the United States, complete with their training intact.
MB: Well, that’s, that’s obviously a concern for the safety of the American people. And I, and I’m sure that the FBI and the CIA would be, you know, watching all of that.
LR: That raises a question I have wondered about when we first heard about the population of Somalis in Minnesota. I mean, Somalia is up there on the Horn of Africa, up on the northeast corner of Africa. That’s hot weather country. Why would people from there settle in Minnesota, which has been known to get a little bit coolish in winter time?
MB: [laughs] Why, I, I think that was a decision, ah, probably made by the federal government when they brought refugees into our country to locate them. We also have a very large Hmong population, those are people from Laos, and uh, a very large Hmong population was also relocated and settled in the St. Paul, Minnesota area. So, and, and they’re also from a, from a warmer climate, as well. So I think this was a decision on the part of the federal government.
LR: Speaking of your climate, by the way, and, uh, in my days as a sportscaster, I used to occasionally broadcast football games out of the University of Minnesota, which by the way has the most beautiful women you’ll ever see on a college campus anywhere, but that’s totally beside the point.
MB: Thank you, it’s absolutely true.
LR: How’s that global warming thing selling up there in snow country?
MB: [laughs] Well, just so your listeners can know, here in Minnesota we had a big snowstorm about a week ago here, and all the ground was covered with snow. I’m happy to report, today it should be about fifty degrees and no snow, so we’re grateful. But we’ve had a very long, very cold winter, and as a matter of fact, today I am sponsoring and bringing in one of the experts, um, in our nation, on this issue of global warming. His name is Chris Horner. He’s written a book called Red Hot Lies and also The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming. He’ll be speaking at St. Cloud, Minnesota today at the heart of the largest university in my district, um, and then he’ll also be speaking down in a suburban area, Woodbury, Minnesota later today, because whether a person believes in global warming or not, President Obama has said that it is non-negotiable: he will get his cap-and-trade new energy tax in this year. Senator Harry Reid said last week that he will pass this, ah, legislation by August. This is important that people understand what the economic impact will be. I know that what we have understood in Minnesota is that our monthly energy bills will double if this goes through. We’ll go back to four and five dollars a gallon for gas. And food prices will increase. All the misery that we went through last, ah, July with the hike in prices in gasoline, would be even worse, because it wouldn’t just be gasoline, oil, that would be impacted, it would be coal, it would be natural gas, um, any fossil fuel would be impacted. And this is a completely bogus tax, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a creation of government and this is something that President Obama has said is his non-negotiable. The average household would have to spend about an additional four thousand dollars a year, not just in Minnesota, across the country, about an additional four thousand dollars a year to be pay for this energy tax, and that’s why it’s imperative that every American gets themselves educated on this issue and fight it, because otherwise this will be the biggest power grab that the federal government has ever taken in our personal lives and it will provide the revenue that will pay for the welfare state that President Obama is trying to put into place.
LR: Yeah, let him run for re-election on that, that’ll be fun to watch. You are in the Republican minority in Congress, you’re a second-term member, yet you are one of the few up front to take on this Obama agenda. Did you just look around at your fellow Republicans and figure, hey! If I don’t do this, who will?
MB: Well, I think it was more-I, I look at the reality of what President Obama is putting into place and it horrifies me because it has nothing to do with our founding Republic and the values that our nation was founded upon. And I see that- I’m a mother – my husband and I have been married 30 years, but we have five biological kids, we’ve had 23 foster children that we’ve raised. And our, our children will never be able to experience the opportunity, the freedom, and the level of prosperity that we’ve had the opportunity to experience if we go down this road of socialized medicine, punishing high tax rates, and the out of control spending that will bankrupt us. Not in our children’s and grandchildren’s time, but in our time. Even President Obama’s budget director, Peter Orszag, said recently that this budget is not sustainable. President Obama is doubling our national debt in five years. He is tripling it in ten years. Within ten years, our debt will eat up 80% of GDP. That’s every dollar earned in the United States would be eaten up by debt. We can’t do that. People won’t get out of bed and go to work if they’re paying 80% tax rates – it’s just not going to work. I’m trained to be a federal tax litigation attorney, that’s what my professional career was dedicated to, was federal tax law. And, and I look what President Obama is putting into place, it’s very clear to me. This, this scheme will never work. And my husband and I started our own business. President Obama, with all due respect, has never run a lemonade stand. And now he has decided that he is competent to remove the president of GM, remove the board of directors, and he’s going to decide which products they’re going to produce? And put his own people into that private business? And do the same – you know, Tim Geithner told us, the Treasury Secretary, that there’s more to come in that vein. This is not what we do in the United States, and if we don’t rise up now, and if we don’t let the American people know now what our president is doing, and how he is turning our country inside out, then shame on us. Because we won’t have freedom to hold onto, in too many years, if we don’t rise up at this point and, and, um, hold him accountable.
LR: Earlier I was talking with a fine Washington reporter, Jennifer Rubin, who I, I asked her, “What would you ask Congresswoman Bachmann if you had the opportunity this morning?” And she said, “When are the Republicans going to challenge Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner and ask him where he gets the authority, the legal authority for all this stuff he’s doing?” You have an answer to that, yes?
MB: Well, I did that in Financial Services Committee, and asked him where he gets his authority, but I think that we need to continue that drum beat. Every time he comes before our committees, every question should be, upon what basis of authority do you believe you have the right to-- and then go right down the litany of what he’s doing. This last Sunday, our Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was on one of the Sunday morning talk shows saying that he anticipates there will be more private companies where, whereby they will remove CEOs and remove board of directors. That should, that should be a jaw-dropping statement for any freedom-loving American. No president, no administration should have that power, to waltz into a private business and start removing CEOs and board of directors – that’s unheard of. And so that’s why it’s imperative that we the people’s representatives hold this president accountable because he is, he is, he is acting, in the law we call it ultra vires, beyond, beyond the scope, his jurisdiction, he’s acting beyond that, and ah, we need to hold him accountable.
LR: Your grilling of Turbo Tax Timmy is all over YouTube and all over the place, and it’s, it’s great to watch it. Ah, I’m wondering, has anybody from your staff or you perhaps personally sent Turbo Tax Timmy a copy of the Constitution?
MB: Ah, no I haven’t, but I welcome people across the country to do that. I encourage people to attend tea parties that are springing up across our country--
LR: --Yes
MB: And I encourage them to send a copy of the Constitution and ask, and ask him to respond, where in the Constitution does he find he has authority to do these, to take these extraordinary actions. But I would, but I would say that really calls into question President Obama’s judgment. It’s his judgment over who he’s appointing to these positions. And the more people that we see that he’s appointing, uh for instance, Dawn Johnson for the office of Legal Counsel, who’s made outrageous statements about abortion. Also, um, Harold Koh, that’s K-O-H who’s being appointed now to the Department of State, who is a trans-nationalist, who did not believe in American sovereignty—
LR: Yeah, he’s very scary.
MB: He’s very scary. And I, and I encourage your listeners to call upon their local, um, Congressmen and their United States Senators to reject Mr. Koh in that position in the State Department. If we love America and if we love American sovereignty, we don’t want these types in these positions because their goal is to give away our sovereignty. As we saw just last week at the G20, I think we’re still, still finding out what happened during that G20 summit. I think there may have been agreements made behind closed doors that we aren’t even aware of that could be ceding American sovereignty over currency valuations of the United States dollar. That would be, that would be very frightening.
LR: Congresswoman, I know your time is valuable, well, I gotta ask you one more thing thought, because people are, well, they’re naturally curious about this. What in the world inspired you to take on the raising of 23 foster children?
MB: Well, my, my husband and I have always had a heart for teenagers, especially teenagers that are in trouble or at risk. We just had a heart for it, it’s something God put into our hearts. And we figured that we can’t do everything, but we could at least open our home up, and take these children in, and our biological children were real little, they were little babies, and I was home full time at that point, I left my law practice, and I was home full time rearing the children, my husband was working, and um, we brought these foster children in and just – my husband always said if a child knows that at least one person is crazy about them, that they can make it and they’ve got a chance. And so we aren’t a perfect family by any stretch of the imagination but we figured this is something that we could do. This would be our part. And so over the years – we didn’t have them all at once, obviously, we had as many as four foster children at a time, but it was a challenge, but I can tell you, it was also a joy. We received more out of that, I know, than what we gave. These were really great kids. And we were very excited that we could have that opportunity. It was good for our kids, good for our biological, good for my husband and I, and I think it was really good for these foster kids too.
LR: Congresswoman, keep fighting the good fight.
MB: Thank you, thanks for the opportunity. This was fun this morning, thanks.
LR: Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, from Minnesota. It’s Hot Talk 560. |
|