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Feb. 24, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:10
February 24, 2009, Tuesday, Hour #3
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The views expressed by the host on this program, now documented to be almost always right, 99% of the time, a new opinion audit in from our opinion auditing firm, the Sullivan Group, I have not been wrong since the Obama election, all the way through the immaculation to the present.
It's great to have you here.
The telephone number is 800-282-2882.
The email address, lrushbo at EIBNet.com.
I want to go to the phones here.
We have a have a guy on the phone who is, well, I'm assuming his Chip from Watertown, New York, and I'm assuming he's optimistic based on the line that Mr. Snurdley has put up on the call screener monitor here.
Achievers will prevail regardless.
Chip, welcome to the EIB network.
A lot of people are in desperate straits here, hoping to hear some optimism.
Am I right?
You are optimistic.
Absolutely, Rush.
Let me start out by saying that I am thrilled and more than a little nervous speaking with you today.
Thank you, sir, very much.
Appreciate that.
I also have no teleprompter, so I'll do the best I can.
Speaking of, I would love it if somebody tripped over the teleprompter cord tonight for Obama's speech.
I as well, sir.
I called yesterday in response to the fact that achievers will prevail in spite and despite of Mr. Obama's plan to drag us down the road to socialism.
After I read and listened to you talk about the Boston Globe article yesterday, I knew even more that conservative entrepreneur capitalists will prevail.
If they don't, then our founding fathers found this nation for nothing, sir.
Well, that's not a reason to suggest they'll prevail.
If they don't, the founding fathers will have founded the nation for nothing.
You've got to have some opinion or empirical thought on why they will overcome the, I know that they always have it.
I had somebody send me a note yesterday, last night, saying, you know, I listened to your show, and you're still laughing about things.
I mean, you get mad about certain things, you're warning us about certain things, but you don't sound like you're thinking it's all over and they're ready to throw in the town.
I'm not.
I have all the faith in the world in enough American people to overcome the obstacles thrown in their way because that's our history.
It's been the case.
But I have to say, I have never seen this many obstacles thrown in people's way in such a short period of time.
And I have never in my life seen the government seek to own and operate as much of the private sector as this government is doing.
And there's nothing to stop them.
There's nobody to stop them, Chip.
No, I agree with you, Rush.
And maybe instead of a fiscal responsibility summit, the president or the Republicans in the Congress should have had a constitutional cognition summit and at least acknowledge that the Constitution still is the law of the land in the United States.
Well, that's see, here's my reason I'm hesitating.
Yeah, and no, the Constitution has been under assault by the left for years.
Liberal judges have been rewriting law, constitutional law, claiming it's constitutional law.
And these people are not elected.
They're appointed for life.
We've been in the midst of an assault on the founding and the American way of life for decades.
And most people have lived under the assumption: well, this is just the way the country is.
We've got leftists, we got us, and there's always going to be a battle with these people.
But I don't think anybody ever saw average Americans didn't see this kind of assault on the basic premise that is the United States of America in their lives.
I think they'd win some, they'd lose some.
We go back and forth with Republican presidents, Democrat presidents, and so forth.
It'd be a constant battle.
I think what's settled in here is a realization among people to make the country work.
There's nothing to stop this.
It's totally up to Obama.
We've got a sycophant, slavish press which is praising all of this.
Newsweek magazine, we're all socialists now, was a cover two issues ago.
We're all socialists now, happily, and giving evidence why.
All we're happy.
We're socialists now.
We're all socialists.
This is an objective that many people have sought.
And it's an assault on freedom.
It's an assault on liberty.
And a lot of people don't see any stopping it.
Let me share with you some excerpts of Thomas Sowell today.
A Fatal Trajectory is the title of his piece.
An increasing number of recent letters and emails from readers strike a note not only of unhappiness with the way things are going in our society, but a note of despair.
Those of us who are pessimists are only a step away from despair ourselves, so we may not be the ones to offer the best antidote to the view that America has seen its best days and is degenerating toward what may well be its worst.
Yet what hope remains is no less precious nor any less worthy of being preserved.
First of all, the day-to-day life of most Americans in these times is nowhere near as dire as that of the band of cold, ragged, and hungry men who gathered around George Washington in the winter at Valley Forge, to which they had been driven by defeat after defeat.
Only the most reckless gambler would have bet on them to win.
Only an optimist would have expected them to survive.
Against the background of those in other desperate times that this country has been through, one or we cannot whine today because the stocks in our pension plans have gone down or the inflated value that our houses just had a few years ago has now evaporated.
But in another sense, looming ahead of us and our children and their children are dangers that can utterly destroy American society.
Worse yet, there are moral corrosions within ourselves that weaken our ability to face the challenges ahead.
One of the many symptoms of this decay from within is that we are preoccupied with the pay of corporate executives while the leading terrorist sponsoring nation on earth is moving steadily toward creating nuclear bombs.
Does anyone imagine that we will care what anybody's paycheck is when we see American city in radioactive ruins?
Yet the only serious obstacle to that happening is that the Israelis may disregard the lofty blather coming out of the White House and destroy Iran's nuclear facilities before the Iranian fanatics can destroy Israel.
If by some miracle we manage to avoid the fatal dangers of a nuclear Iran, there will no doubt be others, including a nuclear North Korea.
Although in some sense the United States of America is still militarily the strongest nation on earth, that means absolutely nothing if our enemies are willing to die and we are not.
It took only two nuclear bombs to get Japan to surrender, and the Japanese of that era were far tougher than most Americans today.
Just one bomb dropped on New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles might be enough to get us to surrender.
If we are still made of sterner stuff than it looks like, then it might take two or maybe even three or four nuclear bombs, but we will surrender.
It doesn't matter if we retaliate and kill millions of innocent Iranian civilians.
At least it will not matter to the fanatics in charge of Iran or the fanatics in charge of the international terrorist organizations that Iran supplies.
Ultimately, it all comes down to who is willing to die and who is not.
How do we get here?
How do we get to this point?
Well, it's no single thing.
The dumbing down of our education, the undermining of moral values with the fad of non-judgmental affectations, the denigration of our nation through poisonous propaganda from the movies to the universities.
The list goes on and on.
The trajectory of our course leads to a fate that would fully justify despair.
The only saving grace is that even the trajectory of a bullet can be changed by the wind.
We have been saved by miraculous good fortune before.
The overwhelming military and naval expedition that Britain sent to New York to annihilate George Washington's army was totally immobilized by a vast, impenetrable fog that allowed the Americans to escape.
That's how they ended up at Valley Forge.
In the World War II naval battle of Midway, if things had not happened just the way they did at just the time they did, the American naval force would not only have lost, but could have been wiped out by the far larger Japanese fleet.
Over the years, we've had our share of miraculous deliverances, but that our fate today depends on yet another miracle is what can turn pessimism to despair.
That's Thomas Saul, and it sounds like he's turned to despair.
Sounds like he's admitting that he is in the midst of despair.
Now, I'm like every one of you, I look around and I see these momentous, never dreamed of changes taking place left and right.
And the thing that I don't know about you, but the thing that frightens or angers or frustrates me more than anything is not that there are people who would try it.
Because they've always been there.
They've always been amongst us.
We've always had our totalitarians living amongst us.
We have always had our authoritarians.
And we've always had them making plays and attempts at control.
The thing that we look out and see different today is a complacency among an increasing number of our fellow citizens.
And that is what we look at and say, how the hell do we change that?
We've talked on this program numerous times about how the pop culture has been lost.
That it is just assumed now.
That everything in it is liberal.
And that's just normalcy.
It's not even ideological.
And that people who are not that way are nerds, geeks, kooks, freaks, people to be laughed at and made fun of.
We have a significant number of Americans, young, who really don't care, not aware.
Life is too good, life is too happy.
They're just going through things, trying to enjoy the day as best they can, being told to have no morality, no judgmentalism.
There is no right and wrong.
Nobody has the right to say that about anybody else's actions.
And people have been silenced into acquiescence because they fear being labeled racist or sexist or homophobic or bigoted.
Trial lawyers have made entrepreneurism even tougher.
They've reduced the number of entrepreneurs because entrepreneurism is by definition risk-taking.
And the trial lawyers, the tort bar is right out.
They're ready to sue anybody that does anything wrong in the process of trying to innovate.
And so the fear of being sued, the fear of losing it all, the fear of litigation, the fear of having to hire a lawyer is causing a lot of entrepreneurs just to shut down.
So there are serious things.
And we've got a president who is the exact opposite of the way he is portrayed.
We have a president who has ambitions that are not being reported on.
We have a president who is not vetted.
We have a president who is purposely not vetted, a man whose associations, voting record, life, all tell us precisely that none of us should be surprised at anything he says, anything he does, anything he's trying to achieve.
Any attempt to be truthful about it is met with, oh, come on, don't be paranoid.
Don't be paranoid.
It's a challenging time.
And again, I think one of the greatest fears that people have is how do you stop it?
We've always thought you stop it at the ballot box.
We look out across the countryside, and we see too many people who don't want to stop it.
They want to get in on it.
We don't have any political leadership on our side of a significant voice, elected political leadership in Washington.
And so it's all up to individuals here to do what best they can.
But people want leaders.
People respond to leadership.
They're desperately crying for some at the elected level in Washington, D.C.
So we're left to hope that something out of our control arrests all this, like Obama overreaching or the media suddenly seeing a light and starting to criticize Obama.
All these things that we really can't make happen, like the fog that stopped the British from wiping out George Washington.
And people don't like having to place hope in things that they have no idea if they'll ever happen, much less when.
So it's left up to individuals now simply to not participate in this.
It's time for entrepreneurs to go ahead and be entrepreneurial.
It's time for people to start accessing the opportunities that still do exist in this country.
It is the people who have always made this country work.
It's the people who will continue to make it work.
And it's the people who will eventually turn this tide.
And it will be turned because these people are going to overreach.
We have been here before.
You think it's bad now.
You should have seen what Republican conservatism was like in 1965 after Goldwater's defeat.
It was bad.
And incidentally, back then at that time, the party's moderates were telling us, the conservatives of that day, the same thing we're hearing, don't be conservative.
Shut up.
We must become a moderate party.
Look at what happened to us with Goldwater.
We just got shellacked.
We can't do it.
You guys, the moderates try to take over the party back then.
History is repeating itself in this party.
As I speak, it's all happened before.
And look what happened.
From 1965 through 1976, we had conservatives made up of our conservative intelligentsia that I often refer to on this program telling us to nominate candidates like McCain to try to work with Obama to go out and get some Democrat votes by being this, to get other Democrat votes by being that.
We've got to broaden our horizons.
Conservatism alone is not enough.
We've got to moderate.
We've got to be moderates.
And they lost every election that mattered.
And when we did have a Republican president win, like Nixon, we created OSHA.
We created the EPA.
We had a president trying to please Democrats because he knew they hated him and he wanted to be loved.
We had wage and price controls when inflation was, when unemployment was 3.6%.
Inflation was hardly anything.
And then we had Watergate.
And it was bad after Watergate.
It was bad.
Now, in 1965, we didn't have the home problem.
We didn't have the mortgage crisis.
But we did have LBJ taking over everything.
We had the great society.
We had it all.
We've been through it.
We went through with a new deal.
It took us decades.
This is what depresses people.
Took us decades to recover from Roosevelt.
Took us decades to recover from Johnson.
Will it take us decades this time?
And will we have the decades?
I'm long.
I have to take a break.
We'll be back.
Stay with us.
Okay, we're back.
It's Rush Limboy.
And this, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Folks, the bottom line here is: yes, there's some despair.
But we have been here before in history, and it's not time to tune out given.
You might want to try an Atlas Shrugged, but you're going to have to feed your family.
You're going to have to do what you have to do to feed your family, to feed yourself.
And really, at this point, the country, whether they know it or not, is depending on us to make the country work.
They may think they're depending on Obama.
Obama will not make the country work.
Obama is a cog in the wheel.
White House people said, put out a statement today to Jake Tapper that Obama has accomplished more in the first 30 days than any president in recent history.
That's true.
But accomplishments are not always positive.
He has wreaked a lot of havoc.
He has sown the seeds of a lot of truly dangerous things lurking down the road.
And we have always had obstacles placed in front of ourselves.
And the obstacles we have today are not, and Thomas Sowell's right, they're not nearly as bad as what George Washington faced.
They're not nearly as bad as what the Donner Party faced.
They're bad in the sense that all history begins when we were born.
And so the things that are happening to us, who cares what happened to other people, they're bad.
But it always helps to maintain some perspective because people who have been through far worse have emerged and have led the country out of these doldrums.
It can happen again because it must if there is a country as we grew up in suitable to be inherited by your kids and grandkids.
That's totally up to us.
We cannot quit.
Hi, it's the brothers Duncan.
Strawberry letter number 23.
MSNBC just released the results of one of their polls.
The Republicans opposed the stimulus for purely political reasons.
Now, that's an out-and-out lie.
That is an out-and-out lie.
And these people are out taking polling, doing polling with slanted questions like this.
This is designed, put pressure on the Republicans.
Nobody knows what's in this except we know enough to oppose it on substance.
Speaking of polls, there is an outfit in North Carolina, public policy polling.
They have taken a poll on me.
So that means that Rasmussen has polled me, that Gallup has polled me, that Zogby has polled me, and now public policy polling.
They're a bunch of Democrats, a bunch of liberals.
And normally I'm told that their work is contained inside North Carolina.
But now they're branching out with a poll on El Rushbo.
A new national survey from public policy polling finds 46% of Americans have a positive opinion of Rush Limbaugh, while 43% view him unfavorably.
See, we, in politics, that's probably not good, but in broadcasting, we call that perfect.
We call that perfect polarization.
All I'm going to say, well, no, Bill Clinton was in the 50s and 60s when he was president.
He was.
Yes, he would.
Clinton never got into the 40s.
I think he got in the 40s once.
I can say that I have occupied opinion poll areas occupied also by President Clinton.
Anyway, the numbers break down on demographic lines pretty much as one would expect.
The gender gap, however, is one of the largest public policy polling has seen on any issue it's polled in the last year.
I have a plus 19 net favorability among men, 5637, but a minus 12 with women.
I have a 37% approval with women, 49% disapproval.
31-point gender gaps do not come along all that often.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is an opportunity here because this takes us to the age-old question, what do women want?
Not even Freud was ultimately able to answer the question.
Women genuinely, for the most part, can't answer it either.
But it has never stopped people from asking the question, what do women want?
Given this massive gender gap in my personal approval numbers, a 31-point gender gap, it seems reasonable for me to convene a summit,
a summit of all the women in this audience, or as many of them as we can get into breakout groups, and perhaps devote an hour in an upcoming program to calls only from women who genuinely want, it could be liberal, conservative, it could be non-audience members, it could be audience members.
But I want some of these women to start telling me, well, what it is I must do to close the gender gap.
Or if not what it is I must do to close the gender gap, what it is I've done that has caused the gender gap.
Assuming the gender gap is true and that the poll is true, we'll accept it for what it is for the sake of the exercise.
So we'll have a female summit with breakout groups discussing and reporting back to me over several intervals in time as we try to ascertain what I must do to attract women.
Isn't this much the same as what our conservative intelligentsia is asking himself?
What do we do to attract the Hispanic voters?
We have a huge ethnic gap in the Republican Party, they would say.
So we'll do that.
I don't know if we'll do it tomorrow because we got Obama's big speech tonight, but we might.
So you ladies, be on standby.
Be ready at any moment for me to declare the summit officially underway, and we will take calls only from women who want to seriously discuss the proposition, this giant gender gap that I have, what I could do to close it.
In other words, what could I do to attract a more higher, higher favorability rating among more women in America?
I own the men.
And what must I do now to own women?
And who better to ask than women, including some of those who may agree that I'm dis or unfavorable.
So stand by for that.
Jocelyn in Houston, as we go back to the phones, you're next.
And it's great to have you here.
Hello.
Hello.
Hi.
Thank you for taking my call.
Yes, ma'am.
My question, too, is, you know, we're all learning about widespread failure in banking and mortgage practices.
And I'm wondering, where's the focus on state government mismanagement of funds?
You know, Michigan, New York, California, Florida, Ohio.
You know, I read all the time about horrible things they're doing with people's money.
And I saw in RedState.com, Chuck Schumer sent a letter today to the Office of Management and Budget demanding that all states take all aspects of the Porculus bill.
In fact, let's see if they're not.
What are they discovering for them?
Well, yeah, let me play.
We've got those soundbites from Schumer.
Okay.
And this is an attack on Bobby Jindal.
Schumer is attacking Jindal because Jindal said he didn't want the $100 million or $100 million for unemployment because it would altered the rules of the state.
Now, you hang on.
Okay.
Jocelyn, we're coming right back to this on Scarborough's show today.
Scarborough said we understand that you're going to be sending a letter to the White House urging the administration to stop any governors from having the authority to adopt some parts of the bill while rejecting others.
Is this your way of telling governors to put up or shut up?
Governor Jindahl and others are sort of trying to have it both ways.
They want to oppose the package but take 99% of the money and then to sort of prove their bona fides to the conservative base that they're talking to.
This was never intended by Congress to be an a la carte menu.
You either take it or not.
It's a complete package.
They ought to take it or leave it and stop playing the political games that they seem to be playing, trying to have it both ways.
But, you know, this is, Chuck, you're just wrong.
The governors are going to have no choice.
They're going to all have to take it.
There's a provision that allows the federal government to tell the Congress, the legislatures in these states, that they have to take the money.
And whether the governors want to or not, they can be forced to take the whole thing.
So Scarborough says, look, we've been talking about how you get Wall Street and the investment community more confident in the banking situation.
What would you like the White House and Congress to do the next couple of weeks?
Turn that around.
Well, the first job is to get this stimulus package working, and that's sort of why the games that the governor is playing, Governor Jindahl and others, should stop.
And that's what this letter is intended to do.
You know, the American people want action.
They realize, and Wall Street does too, that we're in uncharted waters.
But they know one thing.
Just saying nothing, saying do nothing, just poking holes at things without trying to do something isn't going to accomplish much.
So here we go.
We've got to try something, whether it works or not.
And the more it doesn't work, the better off.
But also, we have a United States senator sending threatening letters to governors telling them what they have to, a United States senator doing this.
So, Jocelyn, one of your points, where does all this stop, right?
It doesn't make sense.
And the states themselves have mismanaged their own budgets so grotesquely in certain, I mean, certainly in Michigan, certainly in New York and California.
And I don't understand why no one is focused on the details of how they run their states as opposed to the federal government is supposed to just make this all work.
I'll tell you how this works.
Because what happens being a governor or a mayor or a city councilman, they'll come out and they will say, yes, we've got budget problems, but if we don't do something, we're going to have to lay off firemen.
We have to lay off police.
We're going to have to shut down garbage collection to only a day or two a week.
And people don't want to let go of those services.
And so they will accommodate whatever the mayor or the governor or the city councilman wants because it's always, they're threatened.
And well, the fear cycle is used.
We never hear that, well, we can get rid of about 75% of the people in the education department of the state because they're not really needed.
They're not doing anything.
We're wasting money.
There's so much money these states have that they can cut without getting rid of vital services and so forth.
But people never stop to examine how the states are being run because they have the politics is local, and that's where they have direct contact with what the state and local governments do.
And so it's, I know, it is.
It's shocking.
I mean, the half the money that was afforded for rebuilding after Katrina hasn't even been used yet because the local government there is trying to get more money from the federal government.
So over half the money that was awarded for recovery after Katrina hasn't even been used.
It's shocking.
Yeah.
Well, see, this is the thing.
You and I understand what the purpose is, but the people spending the money.
You understand the purpose was never fixing New Orleans.
Yep.
Never.
I don't even understand how Mayor Ray Nagan still has an office or still is employed.
I literally don't understand how people don't realize.
I'm being held up at the state level, sorry.
Intellectually, I don't understand how Obama got elected.
I don't either.
Intellectually, I don't know how Clinton got elected.
I mean, we could really frustrate ourselves if we start asking these.
Intellectually, I don't understand why anybody gives two hoots in hell what Sean Penn says.
I know.
You know, intellectually, I don't understand any of this intellectually.
Intellectually, it makes no sense.
That's why we just frustrate ourselves looking at it intellectually.
About Katrina, it was not about fixing Katrina.
This was simply something the left had been waiting and hoping for to dump on Bush to win the next election.
They don't care about the people of New Orleans.
If they cared about the people of New Orleans, they ran the damn place.
They would have fixed the levies in the first place.
That's right.
Democrats ran the state.
They ran New Orleans.
If Democrats cared about black people, black people wouldn't be in the squalor they're in.
If they cared about Hispanics, other minorities, they wouldn't be in the squalor they're in.
The Democrats don't care about the people they claim to care about.
They care about themselves.
They are about amassing power and using.
Look, I'm getting blue in the face talking about it because everybody in this audience has heard it and knows it.
The frustrating thing for you is you feel alone.
Why are there so many stupid idiots around you who do not understand this and do not have the same curiosity you have and aren't asking the same questions?
It's like New York State passed a law that they were allowed to have a lottery and every penny was supposed to go to education, so they passed it.
Not in the history of the lottery has a penny found its way to education, and no one talks about it.
Oh, okay.
We got a story in the Houston Chronicle today.
You're about to get the shaft again.
Do you know?
Yeah.
You're going to give somebody down there is going to give everybody $3,000 to raise their credit score so they can get $3,000 to wipe out credit card debt so they can go get a mortgage.
The one question no one seems to ask, and thank you so much for talking about this, is how is this going to be paid for?
I'd like to hear Chuck Schumer's answer to that.
How is this going to be paid for?
Nobody wants to talk about that.
No.
How is what Obama going to be paid for?
We're printing the money.
It's an outrage.
I mean, nobody's.
It doesn't have to be.
When the government does it, it doesn't have to be paid for.
All that has to happen, all that has to happen is that the achievers have to get screwed too.
The achievers have to get theirs.
His whole worldview is look at it.
It's a dire circumstance.
It is worse than at any time in my life.
It's not comparable to a war where there's bloodshed, but it is certainly a war.
Anyway, I'm long.
I got to take a brief time out.
When we get back, I will talk about lubrication and liquids.
Man, we're going to need it.
Hey, Jocelyn and Hilson, listen to this.
Senator John Kerry, who served in Vietnam, said he's going to introduce a bill that will end the extravagant spending practices of U.S. banks after reports that Northern Trust Corporation, which got taxpayer bailout money, it did not want the money, by the way, last week through lavish parties around a California golf tournament.
Said Kerry, who served in Vietnam, I'm sick and tired of people picking up the newspaper and reading about another idiotic abuse of taxpayer money while our country is on the brink.
I know, folks, I know.
I know.
Idiotic abuse of taxpayer money defines John Kerry.
Idiotic abuse of taxpayer money defines Barack Obama.
They are the idiotic users of taxpayer money, not Northern Trust.
Everything is out of whack.
I know.
I am here to tell you they are going to get theirs.
It will happen.
They are going to overreach.
Trust me and hang in with me.
It will happen.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is going to hold a Truth Commission hearing.
Meaning, we're going to see if we can come up with war crimes charges on George Bush.
Every Bush administration official should tell them to go to hell under oath if it goes that far.
Lubrication.
That's what saves your automobile engine.
You take your car in for service maintenance.
The main reason is for fluid maintenance.
Fluids keep your car from wearing out.
Which fluids?
Well, the engine oil, the antifreeze, hydraulic fluids in the transmission, the power, steering, and the brake systems.
And a lot of people, you're holding onto your cars.
You want to buy a new one.
You just don't think the time's right.
And you want your car better run.
Here's what you need to know about Fluid Brand.
There's one brand of automotive fluids.
Service managers prefer.
They use more than any other brand, BG Products.
You're not going to find it in a retail store.
You've got to go to a website to find out which service centers and dealerships use BG products and take your car there.
BG Products will keep your car running and you worry-free.
BG Products offers lifetime coverage for your vehicle for all major fluid systems.
Many European dealerships use BG products and say you don't need to change your oil, but once every 5,000 miles.
In my case, in my car, once every 10,000.
They use BG products.
The website is bgfindashop.com.
BGfindashop.com.
In fact, I'm working with them right now, BG Products as the official sponsor of my female summit.
I'll report back.
Gallup poll, Barack Obama, just out today.
Barack Obama approval rating, 59%, lower than Jimmy Carter at this stage of his presidency.
The first unsolicited reports from the upcoming female summit already in.
They're saying it's a waste of time.
Women will not like me any more than the ones who already do.
That you have to be an Oprah today in the media to attract.
Doesn't that mean it's not going to stop us?
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