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Aug. 28, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:45
August 28, 2012, Tuesday, Hour #2
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Hi folks, greetings, welcome back.
Great to have you here, Rush Limbaugh, doing what I was born to do, meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
Reforming as your highly trained broadcast specialist behind the golden EIB microphone.
Telephone number you want to be on the program is 800-282-2882, the email address L Rushbow at EIB net.com.
I I literally.
See, I understand it, but then on the other hand, I don't understand.
They had a unified convention.
Everybody showing up in Tampa was unified.
Get rid of Obama.
Let's turn this country around.
And now whoever, Romney, the party, the RNC, whoever's doing it started this rules fight that's going to tear everything apart.
I like I said, on the one hand, I understand it.
On the other hand, it doesn't make any sense.
But if I'm not that I agree with, I know what they're trying to do, folks.
And if you're just joining us, I don't have time to replay or redo the whole first half hour of the program.
Essentially, uh the establishment Republicans, the RNC, the GOP, the Romney campaign, want to change the rules of delegate selection.
They want the presidential nominee in future years to be able to choose the actual delegates to the convention so that he owns them, so they do what he wants.
And what it really is is an effort to eliminate grassroots people from the Republican convention.
That's really what this is all about.
And what that means is that the party has decided it doesn't want to have to put up with a bunch of conservatives showing up, affecting the platform and all other things that happen at the convention, including influencing the party.
One of our sponsors here, Freedom Works, has been all over this rules business.
In fact, they've been, I think at the forefront of this.
And they just posted an update, and I'm going to read it to you.
Just got off the phone with a concerned Florida activist, Laura Noble, who informed me that uh both of Florida's rules committee members, Peter Feeman and Kathleen King, have been removed from the Rules Committee and replaced with Romney appointed delegates.
They're clearly anticipating a grassroots backlash against the compromise on Rule 15.
That's what they fixed yesterday, supposedly.
And the changes on Rule 12 has caused the Romney camp to preemptively replace delegates to ensure they have support on the rules committee for the new vote at 2 o'clock this afternoon.
And then they write, it's enough to make your blood boil.
Please call your state uh rules committee delegates here and ask that they oppose this compromise on Rule 15.
At a unified convention.
And now they've started a war within the ranks at the convention.
Now again, folks, what's going on here is that the party fathers and mothers of the establishment want to get rid of the conservative influence in the party.
And that's what this is really all about.
Even they can't win without us.
They literally can't win without us.
But I'll tell you, I I know why they're they're A, they don't like us much anyway.
But it's really rooted around two issues.
Abortion and immigration.
And they just don't want to hear any more criticism in the media about the party.
These people do not see themselves the way the Republican Party's written about in the media, such as this AP story, again, just a few hits from it.
Republican Party that's showing its face to America this week is a restless institution that relies heavily on the uncompromising passion of Tea Partiers, anti-immigration activists and social conservatives, and plus they're all white in a country that's becoming less so.
Well, the party honchos get up and they read this, ah, hell.
They don't want to be thought of this way by the media.
They don't really thought of this way by the Democrats.
And it's your fault, and my fault that that's the way they're looked at.
You stupid pro-lifers and you close-minded uh anti-illegal immigration fee, you're ruining us.
You're making us look like the hicks that you are.
You're making us look like the hayseed backwater idiots that you are.
And they're fed up with it.
And so even if it means losing elections, they're going to get rid of us.
Because they're just they're just tired of it.
That's the overview.
There's there's another aspect of this.
There's the two rules that they're that they're messing with here.
The second rule problem is that the RNC wants to frontload the primary season with winner-take all primaries.
Now a lot of people object to that, and for illustration purposes, if that were the case now, there would not have been a newt.
There would not have been a Santorum.
That's what they want to eliminate.
They want the nominee chosen early, and they want to determine who the nominee is going to be.
And they want, they don't want any apportioning of delegates based on the vote.
They want winner-take all.
And this is the uh it's a problem in a number of ways.
Now, by changing members of the rules committee right now, before the vote here at 2 o'clock, what they're trying to do is block the minority report from even being considered on the convention floor relating to the rules changes.
They don't want a floor fight, which that's where this would be headed.
And actually be fun to watch.
Actually, something would happen at a convention that's not scripted.
There'd be a floor fight on these rules changes, and they're trying to prevent that by stacking the vote this afternoon.
See, the conservative influence in the party comes from the grassroots.
It's an oft-used term, but let me let me substitute a term for it.
Conservative influence in the Republican Party comes from average people.
Tea Party activists, just the non-professional people.
The conservative influence in the party comes from the people who have other jobs, other businesses.
They're the people that make the country work.
They are the ones that look at this as about ideas.
We're the ones that look at this about the future of the country.
The Republican Party and the Democrat Party too.
To correctly understand them, look at them as a business.
The way they see it, the grassroots, the conservative activist Tea Party, rank amateurs.
Don't know what you're doing.
You don't know the business.
You think you do because you think it's about ideas, but it isn't.
It's about money.
It's about being in charge of the money.
It's about committee chairmanships, it's about winning elections, it's about making sure that we don't lose various positions of power.
It would be no different than if oh a group of citizens thought they knew better than Apple how to make iPhones.
That is how the RNC looks at you.
You're the consumer.
You're gonna take what they give you.
And if you like it, fine.
If you don't, you don't buy it.
But you haven't the slightest idea how to design one.
You don't have the slightest idea what it should be or do or accomplish.
That's what we do.
In that sense, the Republican Party's a business.
They have then they are the professionals.
And you not.
You're rank amateurs, and you do not understand.
This isn't about, as far as they're concerned, it's not a uh uh turning point here in the country's future.
This is this is not a uh crisis point.
This is just another election in the cycle of many elections.
It's about people who have positions of power, want to hold on to them.
And it really has been this way for many, many years, decades, in fact.
So the conservative influence in the Republican Party comes from you, a grassroots, Tea Party people.
You went to your first town hall meeting two years ago.
So the objective here at the party level is to obstruct the ability of people in the grassroots to mount challenges, to elect delegates, to run the business.
It's an effort to make sure that you, us, we rank amateurs don't run the business.
And they want to frontload the primaries with winner-take all states, which makes it very difficult to challenge any insider candidates that they would put up.
So if you look at it strictly as a business, this is the CEO and the board of directors trying to maintain control for what they would view as a hostile takeover.
Now you throw the politics in the two issues that just embarrass the heck out of them, immigration and pro-life pro-choice.
All that does is just anger them even more.
Because they see this AP story, they watch television news, they listen to Chris Matthews go nuts on how we're all racist, and they hate that.
They don't want to be thought of as racist.
And they think the only reason they're called racists is because you see to it.
You're the ones that end up being called racists because they're in the same party, they end up by association also being called racist.
They don't want, they want to stop this.
They want to stop all this criticism.
They want to stop all this impugning of conservatives and Republicans, and the way they think to do it is to get the conservatives out of the party.
But you see, you can't really look at this as a business as they are, because if it were this is a business trying to succeed with our customers.
And that will never fly.
And this Republican Party doesn't know how to win elections.
This Republican Party doesn't know how to win.
They think they do, but they can't win without conservative votes.
Thanks.
Which they know.
They're just they're just so conflicted over this.
So that's basically where we are.
That's what's happening today.
The next vote on all this is at 2 o'clock.
Now, again, what has me appalled is that everybody showed up in Tampa.
They had a united convention.
Everybody showing up there was at least united around a singular proposition, and that is we've got to get rid of Obama.
The disagreements are in how you carry the message.
But there was unity of purpose here.
There was not unity in strategy, but there was unity of purpose.
Now they've started this war within the ranks, get this uh get through this messy process here of finally marginalizing the conservatives, then you go out and you try to beat Obama, and then when that happens, you're free of any conservative strings.
Because you have disempowered the conservative influence in the uh in the party.
But it really, you know, to try to explain to you why what it is that is causing all this, it's multifaceted.
Usually the simple explanation often suffices, and it's often the best.
From my own experience, they just when I talk about the established Republican, the Republican, the GOP, the professionals, the people paid by the Republican Party to do their jobs, the establishment.
They just are embarrassed like they can't believe over the positions conservatives take regarding abortion and immigration.
They're just embarrassed and they want to get rid of it.
They just want to get rid of it.
And by the way, they don't folks, if I may be blunt, I could be wrong about this, and I certainly hope I am wrong about it.
I don't think they look at winning elections on the basis of superior ideas best presented.
I think they look at winning elections the same way Democrats do, buying votes.
What else is this Hispanic stuff about?
They know the Democrats are buying those votes.
They don't think they can compete with that with ideas, obviously.
So they want to go out and try to buy them in a different way.
They want to buy the Hispanic vote by saying, hey, we love you too, we care about you.
Look at look at all the Hispanics in our convention here.
Don't believe what the Democrats are telling you about us.
When the frustrating thing is you and I know that the way to win the votes of a majority of human beings is with conservatism which is simply Americanism.
The America of our founding.
Anyway, that's where we are in a nutshell I take a brief time out.
We'll come back and continue we've got folks a great audio soundbite roster with the media just going nuts and celebrating the fact that there's a hurricane it's going to wipe out more Democrats in Louisiana.
Because they think it's going to destroy the Republican convention.
They're so happy about this a lot still on tap.
Can't wait for you to hear it all.
Don't go away cutting edge societal evolution Elizabeth and Fort Myers great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hey Rush how you doing fine thank you.
Great.
Listen, I'm just learning about what you're talking about with the Romney campaign is doing with the delegate vote.
And I've got to say, I'm conservative.
I'm psyched for the election.
But I feel like I'm being pushed and pushed and pushed by the Romney campaign, by the RNC, away from voting for Romney.
And Romney did it to me as well when he was undergoing attack after attack, and he wasn't answering.
Finally, when Obama makes that statement, you didn't build that, and I'm thinking, my God, if that doesn't ignite a fire, nothing will.
And sure enough, Romney came out fighting back against that, and I was like, okay, great, we're back in there, we're fighting against that.
then then Andrew makes that statement you know in trying to defend Romney makes that statement and it just it totally hit me in the gut and I'm like what am I what am I doing?
I'm giving money to this man, and he's not fighting.
Look at what's coming out of here.
Well, but look, this was known.
You shouldn't really be surprised by any of this.
The objective hasn't changed here, getting rid of Obama.
The Andrea Saul reference she's making, that's when the guy, the steelworker, Obama runs a steelworker ad where he says Romney killed his wife, and Andrea Saul went out there, and her reaction was, well, if they'd lived in Massachusetts, they wouldn't have died, would have had health care, and they said, wait a minute.
Is that your response to the allegation you just committed murder?
What's happening here, folks?
It's been going on for years.
The Republican Party is trying to de-emphasize conservative influence within the party.
There's nothing new here in terms of the objective.
It's just that they're doing this at the convention, which everybody arrived at unified.
Now, this whole thing came to a head yesterday.
and it was beaten back there was a compromise on the um uh uh on the rules and at the end of the day yesterday everybody thought okay everything's cool now we we successfully beat back the efforts to change the rules on delegates.
But they're back with a new rule proposed change today.
There's actually two.
One is the front loading of con of of uh primaries, the primary elections.
Uh that the second thing going on is there's a new rule that would allow for changing of delegate selection rules between conventions.
The rule that was compromised on yesterday was the rule that said only at the convention can the rules be changed on delegate selection.
There's a proposal that's now being voted on at two o'clock this afternoon that would make that moot.
And if this one passes, it means that the party can change delegate selection rules between conventions, i.e., when nobody's paying attention.
They can do it without consulting the state parties.
That's what's being voted on in a half hour.
And that's what's got everybody all revved up now.
So the what was thought to have been a compromise yesterday turns out to be a head fake, but that's been caught as well.
And so now people are gearing up to try to beat that one back.
I mean, this is this is uh politics.
It happens.
It is a business in a sense.
The the thing here i is is uh that's puzzling.
I mean, w you and I know for I don't know for how long that that mainstream Republicans, the leaders, the established, whatever you want to call them, don't really get their jollies by having conservatives in their midst.
That's nothing new.
But to take a unified convention and tear it apart like this is just that's that's to me what what is the stupid idiotic thing.
Make no sense to do this now.
Folks, I just have to share with you, I'm a little uncomfortable talking about this uh all this rules stuff because it's so inside baseball.
And I I do not want to play a role here in creating a rift.
That that that is already happening.
This this this it's just it's maddening that this is happening while the convention's going on.
When everybody arrived in Tampa unified with a with uh uh sense of of purpose here to defeat Obama and and for whatever reason.
Some want to defeat Obama just because he's the opponent, others want to defeat Obama to save the country.
That hasn't changed.
All this inside baseball stuff, it's interesting, but it it's not changing anything on the ground, not changing the polling numbers, it's not changing uh uh how how these uh candidates are being perceived.
This is stuff that the vast majority of voters are never gonna know about, care about, never gonna matter to them.
It really is inside baseball stuff.
I just wanted to share it with you so you would know it's just a continuation of what you and I are all aware of, and that is the uncomfortable nature that Republican leaders who are not conservative have with the conservative wing of the party, and it isn't anything new.
This is just the latest manifestation of how the Republican establishment is trying to rid themselves of this nuisance, which is us.
Now we got a guy on the phone from Arlington, Texas.
He's a member of the uh Texas State GOP executive committee, wants to weigh in on this name is Bill.
Bill, welcome to the program, sir.
Thank you so much, Rush Ditto's, and by the way, most early is the best call call screener in the world.
Guy's very professional.
Uh how many call screeners have you spoken to, Bill?
Well, remember, I like to call it Paris Talk Radio.
Uh Rush, you are right on the money on this topic.
You are you have hit the nail on the head.
Here is the thing that uh Republican activists, conservatives, Tea Party people all across the country can do.
If they go to Philly Shafley's Eagle Forum website, just Google Eagle Forum on the right hand side it says, update protect your state's delegates.
There they list the delegates that have signed on to the minority report, and then they have lists of of um of members of the rules committee.
Uh in other words, they list the states where the rules committee members have signed on.
Uh they list the states that haven't signed on.
People can find their own state representative, they can email them or give them a phone call.
Do they really not know what's going on, these state people?
Do they have no why do why does anybody need to call them?
Do they don't they have any idea what's going on?
I I'm telling you, Rush, this story was breaking on Saturday, and the mainstream media wasn't picking it up.
Only on Sunday did the Washington Times have a story.
Most of the rest of it was on blogs.
People aren't really aware of this.
Grassroots people are just now finding out because of you and because of Ben.
And uh you all are doing a great service to the country by doing this.
This is this is the same thing.
This is the same thing that was happening uh back in the 1700s when uh the British government was trying to take away the freedoms that uh that uh American colonists had been used to.
This is they're they're rolling us back 40, 50 years in terms of democracy within our party.
This is uh this is a terrible mistake.
People can people can contact their representatives on the rules committee and urge them not to make this mistake.
This is a party party.
You you say that this could cause a split.
How?
Well, this can cause a split because many of us activists out here, we have many of us vote uh supported other candidates for president other than Mitt Romney, but once he became the nominee, we closed ranks, but we never expected he would have a power grab like this.
It discourages us tremendously.
We were geared up for the campaign, now we're we're having to rethink our commitment.
Uh and it's it's a very frustrating thing.
Um Romney's making a huge mistake here by dispiriting the grassroots people that are going to get out there and knock on the doors and make the phone calls and get out the vote to win the election.
He's not dispiriting anybody, he's firing them up.
That's the that's that's another thing that's that's that's uh a little curious about this.
This is just gonna fire these people up when they hear about what's going on.
They're n they're not fire them up to get ticked off.
This is this is uh uh the establishment's gonna hear about this.
This this is uh uh you know I I know the fear is that this is gonna cause people to get to throw up their hands, ah the hell with it.
Doesn't matter.
I don't party trying to get rid of me, I'm not even gonna vote, not gonna give them my vote.
I I don't think that that's the end result of this because of the uh patriotism of these people and the very nature of what this election's all about.
Nothing this is not going to uh uh change that.
At any rate, Bill, I appreciate the call.
Thanks, uh thanks much.
It really is an inside baseball subject.
Uh it's real, and it is happening.
Uh and it it is an effort by the establishment to to de-emphasize uh conservatives.
And if they're not careful with this, they're gonna end up causing to happen their worst nightmare, which is third party.
If they're not careful, this is where this is all gonna end up.
Albert in San Francisco, you're next in the EIB network.
Hello, sir.
Hi, Rush.
Great to speak with you.
Uh, thanks for taking my call.
You bet.
I had a quite I had a question for you.
Yesterday you talked a lot about how uh Romney and the GOP uh were going to have the convention to see about uh Obama being a nice guy but incompetent.
Uh in Sunday's paper in the New York Times, I'm not sure if you saw, but it was on the front page.
They specifically talked about uh it was a pretty lengthy article about how Romney is going to have a harsher tone during the next stretch of the campaign.
So I was wondering what you thought about that article in relation to this Obama being nice guy.
I think everything in the in the drive-by media is intended to intimidate Republicans into shutting up.
I think all these charges of racism, uh all these uh stories about Romney adopting a harsher tone that are accompanied by a warning, you'd better not do that.
Look how likable Obama is.
I think what's going on here is the left knows how vulnerable Obama is.
The Democrat Party knows what an absolute disaster they've got on their hands.
The Democrat Party knows they're hanging by a thread here.
They know that the vast majority of the American people do not want any more of this.
The only choice they have is to neuter their opposition.
They cannot pump their own guy.
There's nothing about this guy you can say four more years.
There's nothing in his performance.
There's nothing in his record that anybody wants more of other than the moron vote.
The taker vote.
But that still is not a majority of people in this country.
So there is an all out Effort on the part of the media, the Democrats, it's all the same bunch, to scare, frighten, intimidate all Republicans into shutting up about Obama.
Because that's all they can do.
And they keep going back to that because in their mind it works.
In their mind, they succeed in neutering Republicans.
They look, for example, this fight over delegate selection.
I guarantee you the media's looking at this and thinking, all right, this is exactly what we need.
We've got the Republican Party now doing our bidding for the Republican Party's trying to get rid of our nemesis.
What Carville, what Obama, what Pluff, Axelrod, what all these guys know is their biggest enemy is the conservative population of this country.
So they're embarking on an effort to disenfranchise us from our leadership.
They're trying to get the leadership of the Republican Party to cast us aside by by making them scared to death of what's going to happen to them if they don't.
They are doing everything they can to try to intimidate and silence any criticism of Obama.
Because that's instant death for them.
Again, it's all rooted in the fact that they've got nothing positive they can say.
There's not one thing that's happened in these four years that the Democrats are saying four more years of this, this is what people want.
Not even health care.
They don't even talk about it.
People don't want that.
Pole after poll after poll, majority.
Americans don't like Obamacare, want it repealed.
So they're taking advantage of two things.
They know they can intimidate Republicans.
They know they can silence them.
They know that they can get them to shut up.
And they know they've got a black president.
All they have to do is charge Republican criticism as racism, and that will shut the Republicans up.
Now, meanwhile, while the while you you cite this New York Times story, that's warning a harsher Romney.
Now, what they want to achieve with that, they want Romney's people to read that.
Oh no, we don't want to be harsh.
No, no, we're not going to be harsh.
So they want to, they're hoping that the Romney campaign changes its strategy, so as the New York Times will applaud them for not being harsh.
All the while this is going on, the New York Times is urging Obama to get harsh.
The media is urging Obama to get tougher.
They want Obama to be mean.
They want, they want not just Samuel Jackson and Ellen Barkin running around there hoping Republicans die.
They want Obama running around and saying things that are not specifically that.
But they want harshness.
They want hard-hitting.
They want gloves off fisticuffs from Obama at Romney.
While at the same time they want Romney sheepish and trying to be above the fray by telling what a nice guy Obama is, but he's incompetent or he's in over his head or what have you.
Look at this is everything to these people.
It's their lives and running government, controlling it, having power over people.
That's what they salivate over.
That's what they live for.
And they've got an absolute disaster on their hands in this administration.
It's an abject failure no matter how you slice it.
Look what's happened.
These guys are died in the wool socialists.
They've got pretty much everything they wanted.
They got their nationalized health care.
They got their stimulus spending.
They've got their debt run up like crazy.
They've got tax increases in the pipeline schedule to hit in mass, January 4.
They've got everything they want.
But the problem is, the American people aren't doing tap dances.
The American people aren't celebrating America.
The American people are rejecting them in the midst of their glory, they're being rejected.
The American people don't want what these people are succeeding at doing.
And in that sense, it's a failure.
They're not loved.
They're not universal.
I don't even buy this likability stuff in the polling data.
I don't trust any polling data on Obama simply because of the racial factor in it.
And that's to me what's frustrating about watching the Republicans.
They do not know the great hand they've been dealt.
Because they get up and they see this AP story and they get scared.
Oh my God, we're racist, we're sexist, oh my god, we hate Hispanics, oh, there's a war on women, oh, we hate women.
Who believes this garbage?
It's asinine to think a majority of people actually believe this garbage of a war on women.
Nobody thinks the Republican Party's got one going except literal morons, whose votes are not going to change anyway.
The Democrats thank God, well, whoever they think that the Republicans don't seem to be able to muster the confidence that they otherwise ought to be feeling out the wazoo.
Obama ought to be ten points down with this kind of performance.
With this record, with the country and the economy and the shape it's been, Obama ought to be ten points down.
And he may well be, if not for these doctored polls.
And I don't mean doctored by the polsters, but rather polls that don't reflect the truth because people are lying to the polsters.
They don't have the guts to tell the pollster the truth for a host of reasons.
The Democrats believe their own press.
That's their biggest problem.
The Republicans' biggest problem is they believe a Democrats press.
And the Republicans' biggest problem is they think, and everybody that reads this AP story agrees with it.
And what are we back to?
We are back to the thing that I tell you that irritates me most about people, and that is giving a damn what people think of you.
That's what that's what frustrates me more than anything here.
All of this is based, all of this, this internacene or internecine war within the Republican Party about conservative.
The only reason the establishment cares about that's because they're worried what people think of them.
And it it's it's to have this opportunity to contrast who we are with what they are, and we don't have to tell people it's right and they're living this disaster.
This should be ours for today.
This is low-hanging fruit.
This is this is a hanging curveball, whatever cliche that you want to offer.
Got to take a break, be back.
Okay, got this New York Times story that the last caller asked about.
And it it makes my point.
Here we go.
New York Times story from Sunday.
Republicans have a message for Mitt Romney.
It's time to go positive.
Notice it says here, Republicans have a message for Mitt Romney.
Not Obama, not Democrats, not the media.
Republicans have a message for Mitt Romney.
Time to go positive.
Prominent party leaders unsettled by the frequently combative tone of Mr. Romney's presidential campaign are pressing the nominee to leaven his harsh criticism of Obama with an optimistic conservative vision that can inspire the party faithful, appeal to swing voters.
When's the last time you ever read anywhere that conservatism appeals to swing voters?
I thought conservatism repelled swing voters.
I thought independents didn't like conservatism.
It's too combative.
This piece doesn't even know what it is.
Well, I'll tell you what this peace is.
This peace is designed to get Romney to shut up.
This piece is designed to neuter Romney and any other Republican who might be thinking of criticizing Obama.
Come on, folks, ask yourselves, just how hard hitting has Romney been?
All they've done is tell the truth.
Obama's cutting $700 billion out of Medicare, not us.
All they've been doing is telling the truth.
And yet the Times has this story.
They better tone it down.
Republican consultants are advising Romney that he would better be inspiringly conservative so as to obtain swing voter support.
Here's another excerpt from that same New York Times story.
Their worry that the angry tenor of the Republican primary season could carry over into the general election, leaving Romney trapped in a punch counterpunch campaign that would limit his ability To define fundamental how in the hell does that limit your ability to define differences by shutting up.
The Republican primary season ended months ago.
What the hell is this carryover business?
And what ugly tone was there in the Republican primary?
Wasn't an ugly tone in the Republican primary season.
So this New York Times story is uh it sounds to me like you got some Republican consultants in there who are talking to the New York Times, who are trying to influence Romney into shutting up and not be hypercritical for whatever reason.
They're wrong, but for whatever reason.
I don't know how you how in the world do you speak positively about Barack Obama and his record without lying?
The only way to speak positively about Obama, the only way to take Obama and talk positively about his records, lie about it.
This is what they know.
Anyway, that's what the guy was asking me about.
And I just wanted to read to you some excerpts to explain my reasoning and reaction to it, which don't doubt me, folks.
I was just looking at the hurricane track.
It may not work out for the Democrats exactly as they want.
The what the death and destruction may not occur when the convention is actually on TV.
Uh I'll explain when we uh when we come back.
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