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Feb. 9, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:36
February 9, 2009, Monday, Hour #2
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And greetings to you, music lovers, thrill seekers, conversationalists all across.
The fruited plane.
It's the award-winning, thrill-packed, ever exciting, gallop polled.
Rush Limbaugh program.
On the EIB.
On the EIB network.
Great to have you here.
Telephone number 800-282-2882.
And the email address.
Here's that sound bite that I heard during the break.
Obama during his uh this it's it the can't it's exactly as I predicted.
Campaign mode is back.
It's just like he's on the campaign.
He's not even really talking about the stimulus bill here.
He's talking about appropriations.
He's talking about why we need to spend money and so forth.
He's just now ramping it up.
But this is the sound bite uh where where he tells people how they are going to be his eyes and ears to see if the money is spent correctly.
The uh bite opens with an unidentified woman wanting to know when the money is going to get to Elkart.
My question to you is, sir, when you allocate the money for Elkart, Indiana, will it come directly into El Cart or is it going to have to go around somewhere else?
That's a good question.
We've got to get the bill passed, but we also have to make sure that the money's well spent.
Which means we're doing some things that are unprecedented to make sure that the money gets out quickly, but it gets out wisely.
We're actually going to set up something called recovery.gov.
This is going to be a special website that we set up that gives you a report on where the money's going in your community, how it's being spent, how many jobs it's being created, so that all of you can be the eyes and ears.
And if you see that a project is not working the way it's supposed to, you'll be able to get on that website and say, you know, I thought this was supposed to be going to school construction, but uh all I haven't noticed uh any changes being made.
Now there was no reaction to that.
Uh people sitting around sort of scratching their heads, you mean we're gonna have to work for this.
You mean we're gonna have to run around and make sure the money's being spent right.
I got I don't have any time to run around second they're doing something in the school.
But you know, this website that is setting up, jobs created, they can lie all they want on this website.
They can just make it up, they can just slamp it up against the walls and you this amount of money is going to this area or this many jobs have been created so far.
I am but but make sure, and if you if you're not one of those jobs, make sure you send us a note here at recovery.gov.
Uh you can be uh our eyes and ears.
This inspires a song, ladies and gentlemen.
Remember the old prince tune.
We're gonna party like it's 1999 wrong, folks.
We're heading down the road.
We're gonna party like a 1929.
Paul Shank, a well-known white comedian, uh, doing the voices there of Obama, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Bonnie Planck.
And the song 1929.
By the way, the telephone number, if you want to appear on the program, is 800-282-2882.
From the weekly Standard Blogs, this is from uh, I guess what is this February 6th.
Barack Obama not making sense.
The White House has its signals crossed.
President Obama flew to Williamsburg, Virginia last week to address House Democrats.
Originally the speech supposed to be off the record.
The White House decided to let the cameras in so that the president's appeal could be heard around the world.
And what an appeal.
Obama lambasted Republican critics of the stimulus.
He heaped scorn on the Bush administration for piling up the national debt.
He said the stimulus bill could end the tyranny of oil, whatever that means.
He made fun of Republicans for questioning whether some of the spending in the bill is actually stimulative.
He said, What do you think stimulus is?
He says it's spending.
That's a whole point.
Seriously.
Uh Obama's wrong about that.
Stimulus is short-term spending to increase aggregate demand during an economic downturn when the economy recovers.
Stimulus spending Is supposed to stop.
The problem is that Obama's plan doesn't stop after the economy recovers.
Most of the spending is long term.
It doesn't start till 2010 and 2011.
And it is going to prevent the kind of private sector recovery that is genuinely needed here for a genuine recovery.
Now, this report says that Obama's performance was fiery, went way off script.
He seemed very genuinely angry.
He's already blaming Republicans for holding up the bill, even though the Republican leader in the Senate says he has no intention of filibuster.
The Republicans haven't held up anything here.
The Republic Republicans can't stop any of this.
Republicans can't do one thing to stop this, folks.
The sooner everybody understands that, the better off we're going to be in understanding what's certainly happening here.
The uh the speech to the House Democrats, just part of Obama's stimulus counter-offensive.
He then had an op-ed in the Washington Post on Sunday with the equally strong remarks at the Department of Energy later on.
The White House has recognized the debate over the stimulus is spinning out of control.
The bill is in serious danger, so they've retooled their message to make it uh more aggressive.
Confusion is the order of the day.
The stimulus polling, the polling data for the stimulus shows now support for it is uh is at 37%.
And Obama's approval numbers are down from close to eighty to sixty percent.
Well, sixty percent is nothing to sneeze at.
But the uh the rapid rate at which his approval number is falling uh is uh well it's not a good sign for the BAMster.
Uh not a good sign for those who have suspended disbelief, who are extending the benefit of the doubt.
Not a good sign here.
And from uh from the Washington Times last Thursday, Joseph Curl.
President Obama, fresh off his first Washington apology tour, grew combative Wednesday, asserting that uh America voted for him, not the other guy, and demanded that lawmakers put aside policy well, Republican lawmakers put aside politics.
I won.
I won.
You lost.
So you put aside your politics and agree with me, is basically what Obama is saying.
And I the it has to be said again and again.
I don't know why he well, no, that's not true.
I do know why.
He wants Republicans.
I still I still find it extremely laughable and humorous that they want Republican support for this bill.
Folks, if this bill is the panacea that he says it is, he ought to want to hog all the credit for his party, use the fact that Republicans don't support this as a way to kill him off politically in 2010 and 2012.
But they know this bill is not what it's purported to be.
It's not a stimulus bill, it's not a jobs bill, it's not an economic recovery bill.
And they want uh they want Republican cover on this so that both parties take heat for it when and it will happen.
The majority of the American people get fed up with this, that it's not what was promised, that it's not what they were led to believe is gonna happen.
They're gonna get mad at all of Washington again.
Obama wants the Republicans on board so that they can take the heat.
And if they're smart, they will continue to oppose this on principled grounds.
They will oppose this just on principle alone.
It'll set them up for success later on down the road, and who knows, it might have some effect in actually stopping some of this at some point, uh, not stopping all of it, but maybe in conference committees, remedying some of the outrageousness here.
But it's worth opposing.
It's worth opposing simply for the uh for the fact of being honest to yourself and remaining true to your core beliefs and your principles, because that's gonna come back and be rewarded much later on down in the road in uh in future elections.
Brief time out.
We'll get some more audio sound bites in your phone calls added into the mix after this.
Back to the phones we go, Rush Limbaugh.
America's real anchor man meeting and surpassing all audience expectations daily.
We go to Milwaukee.
Jerry, nice to have you, sir.
Welcome.
Hi, Rush.
Um, for one, I I support your your your position in opposing a Barack Obama when you think he's wrong.
Anytime a president's wrong, you should oppose him, and it doesn't matter what the policy is.
But on the stimulus plan, I believe this is a good plan because the problem is simply people aren't buying, and companies are afraid to say build factories because of lack of consumer demand.
So that's why you need the government to create stimulus in economy.
I don't agree with all these programs, a lot of them might disagree with, but this recession or even maybe a depression in the future, it's gonna cost us trillions of dollars to lost productability, and we're not gonna get anything from that.
This this plan would cost about 40 billion dollars a year on interest on the debt.
This recession is gonna cost us trillions of dollars over the next few years.
So we have to take immediate action.
Yeah, we should take immediate action.
Unfortunately, this isn't it.
Uh what do you mean when you say that people aren't buying companies?
Well, companies obviously when a recession happens, demand, the aggregate demand goes down.
Now, if there's less consumers buying, even if it's like three to four percent, that affects companies.
That affects your choice decision if you're going to build something like build a factory uh to uh produce a product because if if you see that demand going down, and you see what's going on.
Wait a second.
Would you tell me how in the world this stimulus is going to get Americans to start buying companies?
Well, what it does is this there aren't gonna be any companies left to buy, the government's gonna own them all.
Well, it gets money through the economy.
For example, you have private contractors who are paid by the government.
They go out and they buy a car, or they go buy something else.
That gets more money flowing through the private economy, too, because it's a guarantee that money split.
Nothing in your first scenario is gonna be changed by this.
The people who are not spending money are still not going to be spending money.
Obama had it right.
He said if how can people spend money if they don't have it?
This is not gonna put money in people's pockets.
This is going to take money out of people's pockets.
Where do you think this money the government's going to spend is coming from?
Who is it that produces the wealth in this country?
It's not the government.
All they can do is redistribute it or print money, which is going to lead to inflation.
This argument that government can promote great economies, folks.
If this were true, the greatest communist countries in the world would be thriving empires today.
The Soviet Union would not have crumbled, China would not be in trouble, Venezuela and Cuba would be ruling the the Western hemisphere.
Uh this there and there's nothing speedy about this.
All this money you're talking about doesn't get spent for two years.
Jerry, it's uh you're being sold a bill of goods and you're buying into it.
But as economic theory, this has been disproved over and over and over again in real life, in real countries by real governments who ended up harming real people by depriving them of the money necessary for this economy to function.
Seventy percent of the U.S. economy I can tax you 75% of the US GDP is the average American engaging in commerce.
Uh and this it's not happening right now because this administration frankly is scaring the hell out of them.
This administration is telling people it's going to get worse.
Even the Obama just said it up in El Cart, Indiana, even with his stimulus package.
It's gonna get worse out there.
It's a catastrophe.
Why we're never gonna recover recessions or recover.
Recessions have an average lifespan of five to eleven months if you leave them alone.
The way to deal with this, Jerry, is to let the failures fail and let the successes prosper.
We are propping up the failures.
We are guaranteeing the failures.
We are going to continue keeping people in debt.
People that can't afford a house should be foreclosed on.
People that can't afford to keep their businesses open should be shut down.
If you artificially prop them up, you are adding more debt into the whole mix and more debt and more debt is what got us in the problem we're in now.
Propping up losers because it'll buy you votes, does nothing more than that.
It does not revive an economy.
It's and it ultimately is a more compassionate thing to do for the losers.
People who are already in problems because of debt, they can't pay their house, they can't pay their mortgage of the business or whatever it is.
If you artificially prop them up, that is still a level of debt that continues to exist throughout the system.
Somebody has to pay for it.
If they're if if the owner of the house, if the occupant of the house isn't paying for it, somebody is, probably you and me.
And that's debt.
And at some point it all gonna come it's what's happened to us now.
And the compound compound what happened to us now with more of the stuff that got us into this trouble is irresponsible.
And that's where we're headed.
There is nothing stimulative about this bill.
After seven years of FDR's new deal, unemployment was still at almost fifteen percent.
It just doesn't work.
There is no time in history where it has worked.
David in Central Ohio, not to uh uh great to have you here on the program uh on the EIB network.
Hello, sir.
Hello, sir.
How are you?
I'm fine, sir.
Yeah, in response to that open letter that you mentioned earlier in your program.
Yes.
I want you to be very careful in replying to it.
Yes, sir.
I I have two reasons that I gave your call screener, and I came up with two more.
If if that's all right.
Sure, fire away.
Okay.
Okay, you've always denied being the leader of the Republican Party in the past.
But but you have said you were a conservative.
Yeah, I'm not conservative boy.
I've not said I'm the leader of the Republican Party.
Now, I know you're everybody else is saying, not me.
I I know, I know.
But by answering it, you kind of put yourself in the position that you're accepting the position.
No, I encourage you to be very careful.
No, no, no.
I'm gonna tell this guy what he needs to do.
Not that I'm gonna do it.
Well, another thing is if you did accept that position as the leader, you'd be responsible for everybody under you, and nobody there is doing what they're supposed to do anyway.
Well, I think Michael Steele's cleaned them all out.
Uh the new head of the Republican National Committee has basically uh wiped the decks clean.
He's getting rid of all the Deadwood bringing in his new people there.
Well, that's good, then.
Hopefully they'll be good people.
Uh another reason was real quick was that uh Obama won, and then he could say that you lost, and so you need to just be quiet also.
Which we don't want to have that happen at all.
I don't understand that last comment at all.
You anyway, I appreciate the call.
Let me take you back a year and a half.
I think it was two thousand, yeah, two thousand and seven, the summer of two thousand seven.
Do you remember when the amnesty bill was being formulated behind closed doors under cover of darkness and ramm through Congress, rammed through the Senate with no hearings, no expert testimony, no nothing.
And we had people running around elected officials saying we gotta get we can't gotta get the politics out of this.
We need this bill to pass.
This bill's got to pass now.
And the reason that they were trying to do it that way is because they knew what once people found out what was in it, all hell would break loose, and it was nothing more than dressed up amnesty for anywhere from twelve to twenty million illegals.
And do you remember the outpouring of opposition in the form of phone calls and emails and faxes to Capitol Hill?
I'm sure you do because you were involved in the effort.
And remember now, the effort was successful.
The whole thing fell flat, and the members of Congress were then reduced to trying to get incremental parts of amnesty uh in uh in coming months and years, and they are still working on it.
I am told, ladies and gentlemen, by credible sources, that the calls, that the the voter comments, emails, phone calls, faxes, are running pretty close in volume to what they were during this during the uh amnesty bill during illegal immigration.
It's just that nobody's reporting this, at least that I've seen, and therefore nobody really knows the degree to which it's I'm told the calls coming in are 100 to 1 in opposition to the stimulus, and that these calls are voluminous and that they are close.
They are rivaling the volume of calls that happened during that two to three month period uh regarding the uh amnesty bill.
This is not being reported now.
That that that's that's why the BAMster is out there trying to get this thing passed and and trying to get people to think it's something other than what it is, why he's trying to get uh GOP cover on the bill, because the Democrats and Obama know the level of discontent in this bill.
They know they have seen the Rasmussen polling data and others.
And again, the Rasmussen polling data on the stimulus bill is down to 37% support.
And the reason for this is simple.
There has been one element of the media, the new media that is getting the details, the contents of this stimulus bill out to people, and they're realizing it's just another spending bill.
It's nothing different than your average appropriations bill, except this was written 100% by Democrats, led by Nancy Pelosi in her office.
There was no involvement from the Republicans in this, and it has nothing to do with stimulus.
It is pet liberal project after pet liberal project designed to grow government, create dependence, and by votes.
Pure and simple.
There has been no responsible analysis of this legislation from the drive-by media.
Everybody is existing in this whole mode of give him the benefit of the doubt.
He's president.
He ought to get a honeymoon.
They ought to let him have what he wants the first hundred days, and let's see if it works.
But that's not going to fly with people who learn what's in this legislation.
These people on Capitol Hill, from what I'm hearing, are getting hammered.
And Democrats on Capitol Hill are letting Obama know they need cover on this, and they're letting Pelosi know they need cover on this.
That is why all of the pressure on Republicans to support this.
If you want to know the truth, if you want to know why Obama keeps harping on the Republicans and ripping them to shreds and saying that they don't know what's good for the country and the same thing other Democrats are doing, it's because they're getting hammered.
The American people by ratios of 100 to 1 are calling Washington and saying, we don't like this.
This isn't what you say it is.
We don't want you voting for it.
So they want Republicans on board for this thing because there's no way they're going to give it up.
They're not going to respond to you on this the way they responded to you on the amnesty bill or on the Dubai Ports deal.
This is too important to Obama.
And by the way, you know, elections do have consequences.
And right now, and I say this from the depth of my sizable beating heart.
Right now, the primary focus of the supporters of this bill has nothing to do with the United States of America and her economy.
This is 100% about the Democrat Party.
These people have been fuming ever since they lost the House in 1994.
They have been fuming since they lost control of the Senate intermittently from 1994 to the president.
They have been fuming.
They've been fuming since Bush won the White House in 2000.
They have been outraged.
You know it, you have seen it.
These were the people invested in defeat in the Iraq War.
These are the people consumed with a bitterness, a rage, and a hatred unlike anything we've seen in American politics since the 60s, and it happens to be the same people grown up.
And this is about getting what they've wanted done that they saw interrupted in 1993, and the 94 campaign with the Republicans winning the House.
So this stimulus bill, if you're listening to me in Elkart, Indiana, you just came out of the Obama rally.
I will always tell you the truth.
You had a town meeting with the president today, and others of you around the country are going to have scheduled town meetings with the president later this week.
I'm just telling you, this piece of legislation is about one thing and one thing only, and that's the Democrat Party and people in power getting their little wish lists, their own bridges to nowhere, their
own leftist, extremist, ideological elements that exist in this bill, like no building on a college campus where students religiously worship will benefit from renovations, from federal funds.
It isn't going to happen.
The left has taken control of this bill, and its objective is to just ram as much far-extreme liberalism into our culture and society as quickly as possible.
This is why the Republicans need to continue to stand in total opposition to it.
It is nothing more than a scheme to enrich and to empower the Democrat Party, pure and simple.
This is not about our country.
It's not about our economy being revived.
That's the smokescreen.
That's the cover they are giving it.
But it has nothing to do with that.
All you have to know is that the biggest amount of the spending doesn't begin until the re-election year of 2010.
Here we have a job stimulus bill, and 4% gets spent in the in the next two years.
The CBO said to be nonpartisan, the Congressional Budget Office, and I realize some people not the Congressional Budget Office is uh set up by Congress, nonpartisan, and it analyzes all the legislation that and the impact that the spending and legislation will have on the uh on the economy and on the country.
They have come out and said that the open and by the way, the the notion that this that the Congressional Budget Office is nonpartisan is a joke as well, particularly as in cases now where the Democrats run the show.
President Obama's economic recovery package will actually hurt the economy more in the long run than if he were to do nothing.
Said the Congressional Budget Office last Wednesday.
The official score peeper for legislation, the CBO, said the House and Senate bills will help in the short term term, but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually lending or leading to a lower gross domestic product over the next ten years than if the government had done nothing at all.
The budget office had previously estimated that uh service to debt due to the new spending could add hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost of the bill, forcing the crowd out.
The uh basic assumption is that in the long run, each dollar of additional debt crowds out about a third of a dollar's worth of private domestic capital.
CBO said there is no crowding out in the short term, so the plan would succeed in boosting growth in 2009-2010, but in the end, it'd be better if we did nothing in terms of the economy.
And believe me, Obama knows it, Pelosi knows it, the Democrats know it.
They don't care.
This is about them and the party and political power and is about nothing else.
Elizabeth in Queensbury, New York.
I'm glad you waited.
You're next on the EIB network.
Hello.
Good afternoon, Rush.
Hi.
Uh well welcome back.
We missed you last week.
I missed you terribly.
Thank you very much.
I missed you too.
Oh, thank you.
You're my sanity.
Um, but anyway, my point is that if I look at the Gallup poll correctly, it seems to me like you got a higher approval rating from uh Democrats and Moderates than the Congress actually got from the Democrats when they polled uh how well the Congress was doing.
I believe it was like 19% of the COVID.
You're exactly right.
You're exactly right.
My polling data in this Gallup poll, if you look at the whole thing, is much stronger than any Republican's polling numbers are.
It's much stronger than Congress's numbers are, uh, and they tried to present it as though I'm a marginal figure uh with only support from the choir.
But if you read it carefully, that's uh it can be interpreted in far different ways than uh than that.
You're absolutely right.
That's a brilliant way you've looked at it.
Well, thank you.
I I learned from the master.
You are uh you're an inspiration to many of us, so thank you for everything you do.
We appreciate it.
Well, Elizabeth is very kind of you.
I will.
I have uh I have every intention.
In fact, ladies and gentlemen, just so you know the depth of commitment I have to you, our cause and this country.
This was to be a vacation day.
I was in Hawaii, and I was gonna stay there through Sunday.
I was getting the most out of it I could, and I was gonna use this as a travel day to get back.
But ladies and gentlemen, I arrived at 6 a.m.
And I slept for two hours on the airplane trip from Hawaii.
I arrived at 6 a.m.
I was doing show prep on the flight in.
I did some show prep when I got into the uh into the uh in the house this morning.
I came back a day early.
Because of the depth of my commitment to keep it up.
Well, I don't feel jet lagged now.
Hawaii time around 702 here.
It means it's uh ten till ten till nine in the morning in Hawaii.
I mean I don't I don't know.
I don't feel jet lagged.
I I very seldom get jet lag unless it's a a long, long, long, long, long trip.
Uh but I generally get jet like going west.
Uh and I was coming east, so no, you haven't felt uh I feel fine.
I'm just a little tired, I will admit being a little tired, don't feel jet lagged.
I don't even know what jet lag what's jet lag.
How does jet lag make you feel?
Hmm.
No, that's not me.
Dopy, tired, lethargic?
No, I don't even know what those mean.
I'm now told by reliable sources, ladies and gentlemen.
The calls in opposition to the stimulus to elected officials in Washington is not just hundred to one, it's hundreds to one in opposition that it rivals the volume of calls against the amnesty bill a year and a half ago, and it's just not being reported.
Uh and this is this is why it it's the same thing.
Have you i they they they keep repeating the technique?
It's a crisis, it's an emergency.
Remember what the first 700 billion.
Uh we may not have a country if we don't get this passed.
I mean, they even had a bunch of anchors on business channels roped in repeating all this.
We gotta get this done.
It's just crucial and it's very crucial at we can't wait.
We just don't have that luxury.
And they're telling us now.
We can't wait.
We've got to get this trillion dollars spent.
Why Pelosi says 500 million Americans a day or a month or whatever a day or whatever to lose five?
No, I think she said a week, a month.
Five there aren't five hundred million Americans.
As everybody knows five hundred million Americans are losing their jobs.
A woman's ignorance.
I just I I uh this is so many people I'm conflicted by, but I do know now, I do know now why Pelosi and Reed had no intention of saying to it Hillary Clinton became a Democrat nominee.
Because they can run this guy around.
They're writing the legislation.
He's farmed it out to them.
This is Pelosi's bill that he's out there trying to sell.
He's going for it because it's got his name on it, and it is what he wants.
It's a bunch of leftist spending, his acorn buddies are gonna get four and a half billion dollars.
It's gonna grow the government, it's gonna repair the Democrat Party, but he let Pelosi and Reed write the bill.
He wouldn't oppose them in anything they had in it.
They know that they can push him around.
They never they knew they would not be able to push Hillary around.
Hillary never had a chance.
The only gave her a ghost's chance was Operation Chaos.
All right, Ronnie, Bergen County in New Jersey.
You're next on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Hi, Mr. Limbaugh.
I've been listening to you for a long time and you've you've converted me completely.
Well.
I now you appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Question I have is I was listening to his speech in Indiana.
Yeah.
And I hate to say it, but my president blatantly lied.
He said there are no earmarks in this bill.
Well, um, I tried to whole thing is an earmark.
Exactly.
The whole thing is pork.
Earmark pork, what have you?
It's all the same stuff.
The question I have to you is what does somebody like me, I'm a nurse, you know, I work in health care, I make a relatively decent living, but how do you get to the point to find out exactly what's in the bill?
I can't find it out.
I can't get to my congressman, I can't get to my senators.
They won't give me any information.
I I uh it to me, it boggles my mind that these people in Indiana, I feel like it's like a cult.
Nobody asked a hard question.
Right.
I'll tell you what you need to do.
You need in fact, uh you you go to my website now and then www.rushlimbaugh.com.
Uh huh.
You do or don't?
Yeah.
We're gonna link to this story this afternoon, and because it's you're a nurse.
I'm a nurse.
You won't believe the health provisions in this bill.
Oh, yeah, I do.
I don't think you do.
I do.
We're gonna lose millions.
Millions.
Betsy McCoy has written a column at Bloomberg detailing some of the most onerous provisions in this stimulus bill on health care.
And there's a new bureaucracy created, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology.
Now listen to this.
The National Coordinator of Health Information Technology will monitor treatments that your doctor gives you to make sure your doctor's doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective.
A rush.
Wait a minute.
The goal is to reduce costs and guide your doctor's decisions, page 442 and 446 of the stimulus bill.
But Rush, wait, I have a comment.
Yeah.
What about all these people that come in right off the boat, right off the plane, to the hospital, and they get millions of dollars of care.
Happens every day where I work.
It will continue every day.
It will continue.
But but I can't get a tooth fixed.
Uh well No, you can, but it's gonna be it's gonna be a laborious uh process.
Look, I I wanna I've got to take a break here, but I want to give you some of the other details of the I'm dead serious about what the health requirements the bureaucracy set up in this so-called stimulus bill.
Be back in a minute.
Everybody expects Obama's health provisions to be in a separate piece of legislation.
They aren't.
National health care is in the stimulus bill.
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