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May 27, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:38
May 27, 2011, Friday, Hour #3
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Greetings, my good friends, and welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh on Friday 35 from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open live Friday.
One big exciting broadcast hour remains.
We go to the phones.
The program content's up to you.
Whatever you want to talk about, whatever you want to say.
Telephone number is 800 282-2882.
And the email address, L Rushbow at EIBNet.com.
I am still still thinking about the phone call we had with Vinny from Queens.
I just, I'm sorry, folks, I can't get past.
This is this is not aimed at Vinnie, because it's not just Vinny from whom I've heard this.
I just can't get past this.
Rush, the media's destroyed her.
There's no hope.
She's damaged goods, and average ordinary people who are not even paying attention yet, still think she's an absolute goof.
We don't have a prayer.
We got to move on.
It just crates on me to acknowledge that kind of defeat.
You may think it's just acknowledging reality, but it's defeat.
I was always under the impression here that one of our objectives is to not let the media do this to us.
Thank you.
Now I know that a lot of people think that they're the only ones who know what the media has done to Sarah Palin.
But odds are, if if if Vinny from Queens sees that the media has launched this search and destroy mission under a lot of other people probably have too.
At some point, at some point, the the media smear of anybody peaks.
They either get them out of office or they don't.
In Nixon's case, he was gone.
But Palin is enjoying life.
You know, she's got this bus tour.
That's what I said on Greta's show last night.
Palin has learned to throw it right back at him.
You know, you've heard the old adage is the best revenge is success.
She's earning a good living.
She's living life as she chooses, where she chooses.
They are as angry that they haven't forced her into an insane asylum as anything else.
At some point, folks, the sneer of Palin has to peak.
Smear of anybody has to peak.
And the more people see her in relationship to what they've heard from the media.
The odds are more and more people are going to realize they've been lied to.
You mean this.
It's like when people meet me in person.
Some of them are genuinely shocked.
They're expecting me to be whatever they've heard the media portray me as.
So some point people are going to realize the media's been lying about her.
And I'm not making the case for it.
Because I don't know whether she's running.
And I'm not endorsing anybody right now.
I'm just.
It's and Vinny's not the first guy to say it.
Here people say, media's destroyed rush, we got to move on.
Just bothers me.
I thought that's what we're trying to prevent here.
Along with many other things.
Here's Debbie Blabbermouth Schultz, by the way.
This was uh yesterday at the Christian Science Monitor Breakfast.
Part of her message.
She's she's a runs a Democrat National Committee now.
If it were up to the candidate for president on the Republican side, we would be driving foreign cars.
They would have left the automobile industry in America go down the two.
While she drives a couple of Japanese cars.
She has a Nissan and something else.
Debbie Blabbermouth Schultz.
Left up to the Republican.
She also, at this same breakfast with the uh Christian Science Monitor, she also went on and on about how the Republican Party hates women.
Most anti-woman party, they just despise women.
It was breathtaking.
Okay, finally we are arrived.
At these two stories.
The first one is an op-ed piece in a Los Angeles Times by Megan Daum.
D A U M. Obama is so smart he sounds dumb.
His fast brain so fast his mouth can't keep up with it.
This piece bounces off the fact that Obama has the well known intellectual stutter.
Intellectuals have a speech pattern.
It's almost as though to be an official intellectual and to be accepted as one, you have to perfect this speech pattern.
Where you pause and you are in deep thought, while uh you are thinking.
Speaking.
And in her weekly column here, Megan Daum defends Obama's dialect and the manner in which he addresses an audience.
He says, Consider this.
It's not that Obama can't speak clearly, it's that he employs the intellectual stammer.
Now not to be confused with a stutter, which the president decidedly does not have.
The intellectual stammer signals a brain that's moving so fast the mouth can't keep up.
The stammer is commonly found among university professors, characters in Woody Allen movies, and public thinkers of the sort that might appear on C SPAN, but not CNN.
If you are a member or a fan of that subset, chances are the president's stammer doesn't bother you at all.
In fact, you might even love him for it.
He sounds just like your grad school roommate.
Especially when he drank too much scotch and attempted to expound on the Hegelian dialectic.
Apparently a lot of people consider Obama to be a bumblingly inarticulate guy, guy that can't talk his way out of a paper bag without a prompter.
Somebody sent Megan Baum a note recently.
Sarah Palin, brilliant speaker, it's the president whose sentences are undiagrammable, said another in response to a column she wrote about payments.
Not just my readers, nor is it exclusively conservatives who hold this view.
A Google search of does Obama have a speech impediment turns up several pages of discussion among the president's supporters and critics alike.
Admittedly, the president is given to a lot of pauses.
Us and sputtering starts to his sentences.
As polished as he often is before large crowds where he uses a prompter, the adjective is soaring.
His impromptu speaking frequently calls to mind a doctoral candidate delivering a wobbly dissertation defense.
But consider this.
It's not that Obama can't speak clearly.
It's that he employs the intellectual stammer.
Not to be confused with the stutter, which the president decidedly does not have.
The intellectual stammer signals a brain moving so fast the mouth can't keep up with it.
Stammer is commonly found among university professors, characters, Woody Allen movies, blah, blah, blah.
If you're not a member of this club, chances are you find yourself yelling at Obama, get to the point already.
Okay.
Thanks to um its echoes of the college lecture hall, you may think it comes across as ever so slightly left wing, the reverb and so forth.
By speaking as though he hails from everywhere, he ends up being from nowhere.
The result is that people look at Obama and see not a Hawaiian or a Chicagoan or even a black man.
They see a university man.
Of course, the president enables that stigma by stammering his way through town hall meetings and other public dialogues as though they were philosophy lectures.
Irritating, sure.
Inarticulate, sorry, Folks, but you'll have to find another adjective and take your time.
The right word is usually worth waiting for.
So he doesn't stutter, he just has this intellectual stammer.
He's so smart.
So smart his brain.
His mouth can't keep up with his brain.
This is the same Obama, so smart he doesn't know what year it is.
When he's dating his greeting.
In the Westminster date book.
Anyway, I this is just this is classic.
It's okay to lie.
It's okay, you know, having sex outside of America.
Sometimes is it yeah, yeah, those things they actually can aid society and our culture a lot more than people think.
Sarah Palin, on the other hand, a just total blithering idiot.
100% total blittering idiot.
Okay, when we come back, Stephen Carter, a professor at Yale.
Economic stagnation explained to him at thirty thousand feet.
Ha.
How are you and welcome back, Rush Limboy?
Half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair, straight from the horse's mouth.
A businessman in the heartland explains why he and others like him are not hiring.
Stephen L. Carter is a professor of law at Yale.
He found himself on an airplane recently.
The man in the aisle seat trying to tell me why he refuses to hire anybody.
His business is successful, he says as the 737 cruises smoothly eastward.
Demand for his product is up, but he still won't hire.
Why not?
I say.
Because I don't know how much it'll cost, he explains.
How can I hire new workers today when I don't know how much they'll cost me tomorrow?
He's not referring to wages but to regulation.
He has no way of telling what new rules will go into effect and when.
His business, although it covers several states, operates on low profit margins.
He can't afford to take the chance of losing what little profit there is to the next round of regulatory changes, and so he's hiring nobody until he has some certainty about cost.
It's a little odd, writes Mr. Carter, the Yale law professor.
It's a little odd to be having this conversation as the news media keep insisting that private employment's picking up.
But as economists have pointed out to all who will listen, the only real change is that the rate of layoffs is slowed down.
Fewer than one out of six small businesses added jobs last year, and not many more expect to do so this year.
The private sector's creating no more new jobs than it was a year ago.
The man in the aisle seat is trying to tell me why.
He's trim, white haired, bursting with energy, proud of his business that he's built.
He's not large.
Business isn't large by the way things are measured these days, but certainly it's successful.
He shows me sales figures, award citations, stories and trade magazines, and I congratulate him.
I then turn to the window and enjoy the view for a bit.
We're flying over the Midwest, away from the setting sun and toward the darkness.
America stretches beneath us in every direction, flat and broad and beautiful.
My seat mate then discovers I'm a law professor.
That's the reason for his discourse.
He says, you know, I don't I don't understand why Washington does this to us, and by us he means people who run businesses of less than Fortune five hundred size.
He tells me that it doesn't much matter which party is in office.
Every change of power means a whole new set of rules, to which he and those like him must respond.
I don't understand, he continues, why Washington won't just get out of our way and let us hire people.
Now there are a lot of responses I could offer at this point, but I'm interested now.
I prefer to let him talk.
It isn't just hiring that's too unpredictable, he says.
He feels the same way about investing.
He's never liked stock markets.
He prefers to put cash directly into businesses that he likes in return for a small stake, acting in short as a small time venture capitalist.
I can't do that now, he says.
For people like him, people who are not filthy rich, it's become too hard to pick winners.
But he doesn't blame the great information advantages enjoyed by insiders.
He blames Washington once more for creating a climate of uncertainty.
So I ask him, well, why not sell?
If the climate's so terrible, just sell your company.
And he smiles.
He says, I think about retirement a lot, but I can't.
So I wait to hear about how much he loves the business he founded, or about his responsibilities to his employees.
Or perhaps to the town, somewhere the Dakotas where his factory's located.
In other words, the professor waits for all the cliches.
Instead, the guy tells me it's impossible to make a sensible decision about even winding down his firm when he doesn't even know from one year to the next what the capital gains rate's gonna be.
I argue with him a bit.
Surely government isn't all bad.
I mean it protects property, the environment, civil rights.
My seat mate seems to think I'm still missing his point.
He's not anti-government.
He's not anti-regulation.
He just needs to know, as he makes his plans, that the rules are not going to change radically all the time.
He says big businesses do not face my problem.
They have lots of customers to spread costs over.
They have installed base.
Now remember here, small business is the primary job creator in the private sector, not the big guys.
But for medium-sized firms like his, there's little wiggle room to absorb the costs of regulatory change.
He doesn't have lobbyists.
Therefore he has no clout.
So Washington doesn't even care whether he hires more people or closes up shop.
We'll be landing shortly, Minneapolis.
I ask him what precisely he thinks is the proper role of government as it relates to business.
Invisible, he says.
I know there are things government has to do, but they need to find a way to do them without people like me having to bump into a new regulation every time we turn a corner.
He reflects for a moment.
And then finds the analogy he needs.
Government should act like my assistant, not my boss.
We're at the gate.
We've landed.
We exchange business cards.
On the way to my connection, I ponder.
As an academic with an interest in policy, I tend to see businesses as abstractions, fitting into a theory or a data set.
Most policymakers do the same thing.
We rarely encounter the simple human face of the less than giant businesses we constantly extoll or regulate.
And when they refuse to hire, we would often rather go on TV and call them greedy than sit and talk to them about their challenges.
Recessions have complex causes, but as the man on the plane reminded me, we do nothing to make things better when the companies on which we rely see Washington as adversary rather than partner.
Now Mr. Carter, I'm assuming it's a great guy, and I don't know how old he is, but he's a professor of law at Yale, and he had an epiphany.
This late, he had an epiphany, and what was and God bless him for writing this piece, this piece appears at Bloomberg.com.
God bless him for writing the piece.
God bless him for admitting this.
What was it that constitutes the epiphany?
That there are human beings affected by these regulations.
That these businesses are not abstract.
That these are not automatons or robots who are blindly following every regulation as it's passed.
The hubrist that's involved in the regulator.
We're doing this for you.
We're doing this to help.
We're doing because we know more than you do when the regulators don't.
And so these small business people are just up against it each and every day.
And Mr. Carter here learns at whatever stage in life he is that government's adversarial.
And this seat mate of his across the aisle on the plane was non-ideological.
It wasn't about left or right, or maybe the seat mate was just saying so so as to be unprovocative, nonprovocative.
Start making this left versus right, it would take the conversation a whole different area that he wanted it to go.
I mean, I would have to assume this guy is not a liberal if he's got this view of government getting his way all the time.
But regardless.
It's what we always talk about here.
These people in Washington, they come up with taxes, regulations, laws, and they don't score them dynamically.
They score them statically.
Without any concern that human beings on the other end of the regulation and have to live by them or get around them somehow.
We'll be back.
You know, one thing I remember after the midterm elections.
Look at me.
Look at me.
After the midterm elections, the Republicans called in business leaders.
Asked them what they could do to help them.
Get out of their way.
And the news media mocked them.
The news media mocked the Republicans, said that that showed that the Republicans are just the party of business.
And what were the Republicans trying to do?
Republicans were trying to do nothing more than get hold of this guy on the airplane with the attorney, the law professor, Stephen Carter.
What can we do to help you hire?
What can we and he's an enemy.
So the media, the left, look at their enemies list.
Their enemies are business, large and small.
And yet the Republicans had committed some kind of a crime almost, a political crime, calling in business leaders.
What can we do to help you?
The ha Republicans.
Just the party of business, as though business is the enemy.
And of totalitarian statists, I guess it could be said that if you don't own the business, if you haven't taken it away from them, they are the enemy.
Larry in Grass Valley, California, we get back to the phones on open line Friday.
Hello, sir.
Well, it's great to talk to you, Rosh.
Thank you.
Years ago, an Air Force general said, I had just gone in the Air Force.
He said, I hate to tell you this, but we're going to lose our country.
And he was very high up in the military.
I thought he cracked up.
Then a few years later, the Vietnam War started.
We had we had no voice.
Uh the civilians had no voice.
The media control the liberals control the media completely.
And I thought, my God, the general's right.
We're gonna lose our country.
And now, today, we've got a voice.
We've got you and others.
We're not gonna lose our country.
He doesn't matter which Republican, as long as we get a sound when gets a nomination.
His own party are sick of him.
We're gonna we're gonna straighten out our country and we're gonna do better than ever.
Well, I appreciate your optimism.
We need more and more of that.
And that's that's um uh that is but was the uh your your uh military superior, you're talking about Curtis LeMay by chance.
No, I'm not.
This man was uh Air Inspector General of the Air Force under Hap Arnold.
When Arnold retired in the Bay Area, they used to talk.
Yeah.
And uh they both came to the conclusion it before the Vietnam War that we were in trouble.
I don't know exactly why.
He mentioned a few things.
People think we're losing the country right.
We are in the process of losing the country.
I mean, it's got to be stopped.
We're in the process.
I appreciate your um uh acknowledgement here that as long as I'm here we can't lose the country.
You're absolutely but I don't think the American people are ready to let go of it anyway.
We're not ready to let go of it.
No way.
And even the Democratic Party are waking up to what we've done.
You know, I uh you it's interesting that you say that because I still have enough naive hope.
There's I can't explain this, folks.
I really you're gonna think I'm nuts.
I'll be watching television and I'll see I can't even think of any names for you right now, but I'll see some Democrats and Democrat Party, members of Congress, members of the Senate.
And I I fantasize about taking them aside.
I said, look, you really you don't support what this guy's doing, do you?
You can't possibly.
You can't possibly now I know the party, the Democrat Party's gone total radical left.
Let me put this another way.
I refuse to believe that every Democrat voter has gone totally to the dark side anti-America.
I just don't think that's the case.
Now maybe I'm rose-colored glasses filled with hope here.
Uh silly dreamer.
What have you.
But my view is reflected simply in...
a belief that the Democrat Party does not hate the country.
They've got leaders who do, and they've got French base that does.
But I say too many people live their lives as conservatives.
They don't vote that way, but there are a lot of people raising their kids as conservatives do, spending their money as conservatives, basically living their lives with conservative values.
They vote Democrat for host of reasons.
But I think I think old Lair here has a uh has a point about that.
That some Democrats are starting to say, wait just a second.
This is not what we signed up for.
I can tell Snerdley's facial expression, he thinks I've lost it.
You probably think that a couple of days off do me good.
I'm not going soft at all.
Audio soundbite time, Carl Rove yesterday, uh actually last night, he was on with Greta before I was.
Well, no, I don't know if he might have been on after I was.
I think he was on after I was.
Yeah, he was on after I was because she she asked him a question.
The fact that the Democrat Party won that seat, New York 26.
And it was seen as a statement about the Ryan budget shows how complicated it is, politically difficult.
Rush Limbaugh hit it.
The woman who won that congressional race, the Democrat who won it got one percent more than Barack Obama received when he lost the district in 2000.
The only reason the Democrats won this thing, the only reason they had a serious candidate in this race was there was a rich third party candidate who'd previously run three times as Democrat who ran as a Tea Party or in this election and spent three million dollars of his own money trash in the Republican.
Without that, the Democrats would not have a chance.
Democrats misread this.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And then let and let them think.
You know, I got I'm not gonna play the Biden to waste time.
I got Eugene Robinson, Washington Post, who thinks that New York 26 means that the 2012 election's already over.
That if the Republicans can't hold on a Jack Camp seat, it's all academic from here on out.
It's over.
And furthermore, that Paul Ryan is responsible for killing the Republican Party by daring to bring up Medicare and talking about reforming it.
Now he was on, Ryan was with Brett Baer on the uh the Fox News special report last night.
Brett Baer said, here's what Governor Pollenty said today about your uh Medicare plan.
Palency said, I've got my own plan.
If I if I can't have that, and the bill came to my desk and I had to choose between signing or not Congressman Ryan's plan, of course I'd sign Congressman Ryan's.
Baer says that's not exactly an endorsement.
Are you surprised overall that more candidates have not been more supportive or leading the charge on your plan?
What matters to me not that we get an endorsement on every little detail we put out there.
What matters to me is that leaders step up and offer solutions to our country's problems.
And I really do believe if you want to be the president of the United States, you should put up ideas on how to solve this country's massive fiscal and economic problems.
The current president isn't doing that.
Our nominee should do that.
And so I'm excited that they're bringing their ideas to the table, offering their solutions, and that's exactly the kind of debate we ought to be having in the Republican Party.
Okay, so they tried to get uh Ryan and Pollenty going at it.
Ryan wouldn't take bait.
So now they're focusing on Pollenty, because I I did say it's time for somebody stand up here.
The Ryan Medicare plan is under assault.
It's time for somebody to step up and start defending Ryan's plan.
Now, right now there are only two Medicare plans on the table.
There are two.
In the first one, Medicare goes broke in 13 years.
The second plan, Medicare is slightly tweaked to make it more competitive so that it can survive.
The media and the rest of the Democrat Party call the first plan radical and crazy and completely unacceptable.
Or the second plan.
The plan that caused Medicare to go broke in 13 years is what the media supports.
That's Obamacare.
Ryan is crazy nuts all and saves the plan.
That's where we are.
But here's Polenty.
He was at the Cato Institute on Wednesday night QA, an audience member said.
In light of the outcome of the New York special election.
Our Medicare plan, which we'll have out uh shortly in uh not too distant future, will have some differences.
We'll be speaking about payment reform and paying providers, not just for volume, but for quality and results as part of their compensation.
We'll be offering a variety of choices to people where they can choose to stay in the current program or select from other options.
Okay, now here's Polenty.
He's at Cato.
Okay, what do you like?
You like the Ryan plan?
Will you support it?
New York 26.
We might have lost that election.
Because Ryan, what do you think?
So Pollenty.
Gotta walk a tightrope here.
He's running for president.
He's got to have his own ideas.
This is, I mean, if part and parcel of the objective here.
But he can't diss Ryan either.
What?
Well, no, it's I understand Pollenty here.
It's a little bit I don't know.
It wouldn't serve him to say no, I don't support the Ryan plan.
It wouldn't serve him at all.
That's what they want.
They want dissension on the Republicans.
They would they want to create circular firing squads on our side.
So here's what he said about the Ryan plan and whether or not he would sign it.
If I can't have my own plan, as president, I'll have my own plan if I can't have that.
And the bill came to my desk and I had to choose between signing or not Congressman Ryan's plan.
Of course I sign it.
Okay.
Does that satisfy you?
Now to me, it'll actually make total sense.
Here's a guy running for president.
Ryan isn't.
Ryan's plan, everybody's talking about.
They asked the presidential candidate, would you support Ryan's plan?
Well, I'm running for president.
I gotta have my own.
People are going to expect me to have my own plan.
Now, if I'm elected president and I can't get my own plan, something if Ryan's plan is what comes up here, I'll sign it.
That doesn't bother me.
And then he goes on to say there's another question from a TV host this morning on Fox and Friends.
You say if it came to your desk and your plan wasn't there, you would sign this, but yours is a little different.
What's different?
It is.
Well, Congressman Ryan, I give him credit for his leadership.
Where's President Obama on this?
Where's President Obama's Medicare plan?
And the answer is he doesn't have one.
So at least Congressman Ryan's exerting the leadership to tackle one of the big challenges facing this country, the out-of-control debt and deficit.
We've got an absent president on this issue.
So I've given credit for that.
I'll have my own plan.
It'll have some differences from Congressman Ryan's, but I applaud him for his leadership.
And so they wouldn't let him off the hook here.
Well, what are your differences?
We're going to address Social Security for one.
I've been traveling the country, so we're in Iowa talking about the need to phase out ethanol subsidies.
We were down in Florida to talk about the need to reform Social Security to seniors and others.
And then we'll also be addressing Medicare like he did, but we'll be offering some options rather than having it be a more of a one-size-fits-all system.
Okay.
So you see, and he said that he was on the air with us Monday.
He's got opposites opposed to ethanol subsidies, which told that people in my way says come down here to Florida and tell the seasoned citizens we got to reform Social Security.
So finally said social security reform is going to be part of his Medicare reform.
Now Obama does have a Medicare plan.
There's one thing I would correct Governor Polenti on.
Obama does have a Medicare plan.
It's called Obamacare, and it kills Medicare.
It goes broke in 13 years.
And then we won't have to worry about it anymore.
Welcome back, Rush Limbaugh on Open Line Friday.
You know, the uh the question that I talked about here at the top of the program, the very beginning of the program.
The staff running around asking me if we're working Monday, when we always run a best of show on Monday.
The staff asked you, are we working Monday or what?
Uh it just, you know, to a lot of people, Memorial Day just means they have to remember to take off from work.
But don't forget this.
Memorial Day.
We are supposed to remember all of our brave young men and women who have given their lives in wars to keep our fun our country free.
In addition to not working.
In addition to having barbecues and so forth.
Memorial Day is a day and now a weekend of remembrance.
Brave men and women who gave it all so that we have the opportunity to be stressed out over whether or not we gotta go to work on Monday.
John in uh Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania.
Hey, great to have you on Open Line Friday.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
Thanks for taking my call.
Yes, sir.
I call my talk to Snurdy a little bit.
Uh with Sarah Palin running this stuff, uh, she's stupid and all this other stuff.
I have a tendency to look at when they say that as uh stupid as being honest.
And somebody that's smart is uh Wait, wait, wait, I've already hold it, hold it, hold it, I've lost track.
You did you tell Snerdley that you think uh palin's stupid?
Is that what you No?
I I mean Sarah Pal, the news says she's stupid.
Oh, the news says she's stupid, okay.
The news says she's stupid.
And what I think is she's an honest person.
And I think if you look at the news when they break down who is smart and who is dumb, it seems like the dumb people are the more honest people.
In their view.
In their view, yeah.
And so the media, they like to be as smart, so they go right along with what our president's doing.
He's the smartest man in the room.
Well, he's a smart because he's a liberal and he went to Harvard and Columbia.
He just whether he's he could have an IQ of thirty, and they'd say he's brilliant because he went to Harvard.
Yeah, but what he says and what he does are two different things.
And I think that's the dishonest part.
Well, I think if you're Sarah Palin running or maybe Michelle Bachman, you would see honesty.
You might not like the answers to the questions, but you would see an honest answer.
Meaning you're gonna see real.
Yeah, that's what we're talking about.
Exactly.
You're you're gonna see you're gonna see real.
Uh you know, it's age-old argument.
Uh how do you define smart?
You know, I keep threatening to do a program on that, and I just never move beyond the threat.
What is smart versus you know, how do you define it anymore?
Because it seems there are a lot of really stupid people that have no common sense whatsoever, who have not done one thing, for example, the private sector who said to just be serious and brilliant, and yet you wouldn't want them in your foxhole.
You wouldn't want them if you had a flat tire.
You I mean they'd be useless to you.
Anyway, I gotta thought I had another additional minute.
I don't.
We gotta run.
Be back and close it out in a minute.
Well, that's it, folks.
Another exciting excursion into broadcast excellence finished and over in the can.
Hope you have a memorial day weekend that's memorable.
Wherever your bus might take you.
And don't pay any attention to gas prices.
Remember, Obama killed Osama.
Everything's cool.
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