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July 19, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:39
July 19, 2016, Tuesday, Hour #2
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Hey, right, here we are back at it.
El Rushbo on the cutting edge of societal evolution.
Stay here, and you'll be so far ahead of the game that everything else will sound like they're copying me.
As Joe Biden said, everybody does it.
What's the big deal?
He did.
Well, not to this, but I mean, he's been accused of plagiarism.
Everybody does it.
Everybody steals some of it.
That's my point.
It's almost, it's almost impossible not.
I could tell you stories.
I could tell you stuff.
In fact, I will predict to you right now that after I retire, if the day ever happens, all kinds of people are going to pop up and say they wrote everything I ever said and try to sell a book on it.
It's just the way things, it's the way things go.
And of course, my defense is going to be, well, you had to do a lot of writing out there because I spoke five, three hours a day, 15 hours a week for 35 or 40 years.
So you had to do a lot of writing that I had to see.
And I have had a caller on this press say something and somebody write me and say, that caller stole exactly what I said on television the other night.
I said, you've got to be kidding me.
Do you think the caller heard what you said and it called me?
Yes, damn straight.
As though nobody else said what you said.
Nobody else is saying what.
It's everywhere out there.
Everybody is accusing other people of theft.
Everybody, other people are thieving themselves, stealing themselves, and so forth.
So before we get into the audio soundbite AB side-by-side comparison, have you ever stopped to think of something here?
I don't want you to get mad at me on this.
Have you ever stopped to think that maybe the objective here was to have Melania Trump compared to Michelle Obama?
Well, I mean, in the modern era, I mean, with the drive-by meeting, Michelle Obama's the queen, right?
I mean, Michelle Obama, her approval numbers have to be in the 90s.
Isn't that the case with most first ladies?
She doesn't even do anything.
She's just there.
She's the first African-American first lady.
Who in the world is going to give her bad approval numbers?
My boy, it's not bad company to be in in the political realm if that's how you see things.
I don't happen to see things that way, but maybe the political people, Trump campaigns, you know, it wouldn't be bad.
Hey, I'm throwing out possibility.
I don't know anything, folks.
I'm like you.
I don't know anything here.
Breitbart has an interesting take on this.
And they say, in fact, this is Joel Pollock.
Joel Pollock is a great writer at Breitbart.
And he says that the lines that Melania is accused of stealing, that Michelle Obama actually lifted from Saul Alinsky in the book Rules for Radicals.
Now, we have a bunch of soundbites.
How about when Obama stole the, it's just words from Duval Patrick, who happened to be the governor and mayor for life of Massachusetts and Boston.
I'm joking, he was the mayor for life.
He wasn't also governor.
Melania Trump, the wife of imminent Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and potential first lady, faces accusations of plagiarism after several passages in her speech.
And by the way, here's another thing.
What is so bad about Melania being the focus of the news today?
Forget the plagiarism.
It's not a bad thing.
Melania, she was charming as she could be last night.
She was a huge plus.
I mean, even Cokey Roberts at ABC News said that she came out and humanized Trump.
That's another thing they do.
Conservatives and Republicans, men, they're barbarians.
I mean, they're cavemen.
You know, they're brutes.
They're predators.
And they're women.
Oh, their women can humanize them.
And Koki Roberts at ABC News has come along and said that Melania humanized Trump last night.
So maybe it ain't so bad that the focus of the convention's forest people last night is Melania.
But Rudy deserves his accolades as well, which we'll get to here in due course.
Now, as Mr. Pollack at Breitbart writes, Trump's wife joins Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden as accused plagiarists.
Even Michelle Obama was accused of plagiarizing part of her own 2008 Democrat National Convention speech.
First off, Obama, and let me see.
I have the soundbites here.
Order.
Yeah.
Let's see.
Eight and nine.
Soundbites eight and nine to start with.
This is Obama and Deval Patrick.
First up, DeVal Patrick, June 6, 2006, Worcester, Massachusetts, addressing the Massachusetts State Democrat Convention.
This is fast.
It's just 10 seconds.
I am not asking anybody to take a chance on me.
I'm asking you to take a chance on your own aspirations.
Barack Obama, November 2nd, 2007, during a campaign speech in South Carolina.
I'm not just asking you to take a chance on me.
I'm also asking you to take a chance on your own aspirations.
Whoa!
I mean, that was word for word.
You want to hear it again?
Deval Patrick, audio soundbites eight and nine here.
Deval Patrick, June 6th, 2006, Worcester Mass.
I am not asking anybody to take a chance on me.
I'm asking you to take a chance on your own aspirations.
Obama, seven months later.
I'm not just asking you to take a chance on me.
I'm also asking you to take a chance on your own aspirations.
It took Deval Patrick 10 seconds to say it.
Obama got it in in nine.
But that is word for word.
Another one.
Then Senator Obama surpassed Hillary Clinton in the Democrat primary largely on the strength of his oratory.
Clinton said that Obama's record was just words.
Obama responded in a speech whose refrain was lifted from DeValpatrick again.
The Obama campaign did not even bother to refute the claim when they were accused of plagiarism.
Instead, it circulated examples of lines that it said Clinton herself had borrowed from Obama.
The left drive-by media defended Obama, saying he had not committed plagiarism, but merely at worst, poor footnoting.
And that's how it works, even though he had.
And you know, the Obama, the famous Obama sounds, it's words.
It's just words.
It's just words.
DeValpatrick.
Hillary Clinton, no bank can be too big to fail.
No executive too powerful to jail.
After the Obama campaign accused Clinton of stealing lines in 2008, a claim, by the way, supplemented by the New Republic, which accused her of stealing lines from then-Senator John Edwards, she ought to have learned her lesson.
But in 2016, Hillary stole lines from Bernie Sanders, who responded by telling NBC News Meet the Press, we're looking into the copyright issues here.
Clinton was accused of lifting other lines, too.
Sanders supporters responded on Twitter with the very wry hashtag at StealTheBurn.
You haven't heard much about this because on the Democrat side, and they're not into highlighting negatives on the Democrats when it comes to Hillary.
But Hillary Clinton, you want to talk about plagiarism?
How many just out and out lies, such as she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, who hadn't even climbed the mountain until she was six years old.
Nobody knew who he was when she was born.
She couldn't possibly have been named after Sir Edmund Hillary.
And her career is filled with little lies like that, such as landing in Afghanistan or Bosnia somewhere and dodging sniper fire.
And then, of course, they had actual pictures of her landing, and she got off the plane and was greeted by young children and was seen embracing them.
There were no snipers anywhere.
And the plane she was on did not have to corkscrew land to avoid terrorist fire.
And then Joe Biden famously lifted words from the British member of parliament, Neil Kennock.
Michelle Obama, the world as it should be.
In 2008, Michelle Obama was accused by bloggers of lifting lines for her Democrat National Committee speech from Saul Alinsky, who wrote the following in his book, Rules for Radicals: Quote, the standards of judgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.
Michelle Obama said, and Barack stood up that day and he spoke words that have stayed with me ever since.
Talked about the world as it is and the world as it should be.
So, who is she actually lifting from, Sololinsky or her own husband?
It's understandable her husband would have lifted from Alinsky.
Now, the Trump campaign is denying the plagiarism.
The Trump campaign is denying that they borrowed any lines from Michelle Obama.
They said, you work hard for what you want in life.
Your word is your bond.
Jason Miller, the senior communications advisor, said in writing her beautiful speech, Melania's team took notes on her life's inspirations and, in some instances, included fragments that reflected her own thinking.
Her immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech, which made it such a success.
Okay, so let's start.
Here is the Michelle and Melania comparison.
The first passage that's similar to Michelle is all contained here in Cut Two.
So Cut Two is contained Cut Three.
Here we go.
From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life.
That your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise.
That you treat people with respect.
Brock and I were raised with so many of the same values.
Like you work hard for what you want in life.
That your word is your bond, that you do what you say you're going to do.
That you treat people with dignity and respect.
Here is the second instance.
Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.
Because we want our children and all children in this nation to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work hard for them.
And they can obsess all they want about those two similar paragraphs, but see if you can imagine Michelle Obama saying this.
I arrived in New York City 20 years ago, and I saw both the joys and hardships of daily life.
On July 28, 2006, I was very proud to become citizens of the United States.
The greatest privilege on planet Earth.
Well, now, can you imagine any of that coming out of the mouth of any Democrat today?
Some of them, probably you can, but clearly that wasn't lifted.
The majority of the speech wasn't lifted.
It was her own words.
But there you have the side-by-side comparison.
And so this has now given rise to all the other examples of other politicians committing plagiarism and stealing and so forth.
And now people coming forth saying it's impossible not to.
So many words have been spoken.
So many speeches have been given.
So many things have been said.
It's not possible to be original anymore.
Particularly about tried and true philosophy.
How many ways are there to say work hard, keep your promises, treat people fairly?
How many different ways are we going to say that?
So it comes down to, do you believe people when they say these things?
That's really what this adds up to me.
Do you believe Melania Trump when you heard her speak last night?
Or did you think that it was just a collection of words written by others that she had rehearsed because somebody figured it would sound good?
That's the key in all of this, is the credibility of whoever it is speaking.
Do you believe them?
Do you think they are telling you what they really think and what they really believe?
And when you apply that test, I don't think there's any problem here at all.
Let me take a brief time out.
We'll come back and get back into your phone calls.
And this controversy continues now.
We've got media commentary on all of this and what it means and what it should mean and what should happen and all of that.
So stick with us, my friends.
We are coming right back.
Back to the phones, Riverdale, New Jersey.
Terry, great to have you on the EIB Network.
Hello.
Hello, Raj.
Thanks for taking my call.
Bet.
I just wanted to weigh in on this whole plagiarism thing.
I think it's pretty ridiculous because it's not like Michelle had some kind of big revelation or uncovered some new theory.
It's something that we all as Americans pretty much agree with.
We say it to our kids all the time.
My husband and I have this conversation several times a week, and we talk to our kids about this.
So it sounds familiar because we all say it all the time.
Okay, well, then that's an interesting point.
Why then is it such a big deal when we hear it from politicians?
Why does everybody applaud it?
Why does everybody go, yeah, yeah, you tell them, you say it.
Why is everybody go bananas when they hear what you teach your kids every day?
What seems it's almost so common, you could almost call these things clichés.
Exactly.
I think they all applaud it because I think we feel that we're really losing our moral compass here.
And when people say something really simple and basic, it's ridiculous that we applaud it, but that's what we're going towards.
I mean, we're so far from where we were that even the simplest.
Yeah, but listen to what you just said.
I listen to what people say.
You just said everybody says this.
Everybody tells their kids this.
Everybody raises their kids this.
And yet we see it said during a political convention and we act like, wow, it's a lost philosophy and they've just discovered it again.
All right.
We act like nobody says it anymore.
And when somebody on TV says it, be it on a convention stage or just on a TV show, yeah, right on.
So while everybody thinks that everybody else is raising their kids this way, it still is reacted to like it's a lost philosophy recently discovered when we hear it said in a political event.
Well, you know what?
I think there's one difference.
I think that people, a lot of people, still raise their kids this way, but society is not.
And so that makes us think that nobody is thinking this anymore because society has gone so far from it.
Well, I see, see, that's where I was leading you.
I was hoping you would say because the I bit that hook.
Because the fact is that every parent doesn't raise their kids this way anymore.
And it's probably an increasing number of people who don't even believe it anymore, who think that that is part of the rigged game, this whole bus of working hard and apply yourself and you'll get ahead.
That's rigged.
That isn't ever going to work for me because my daddy doesn't know anybody or my family isn't prominent or whatever.
Or I'm a minority.
You pick it.
A lot of people, this is part of the old traditional institution aspect of America that a lot of people have lost faith in.
And yet, and that's why when somebody in politics, people in politics are presumed to be in positions of power and influence.
So when they utter these things, it makes people feel, right, all right, maybe it's coming back because most people in their hearts think we're losing all of these beliefs.
I agree.
And that's why it stands out.
And that's why it's such a big deal.
And that's why I say, okay, so when you hear it from X, Y, or Z personality, do you believe they mean it?
When you heard Polania say it, everybody in the world has said it before.
It's the point, be it Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, Deval Patrick, me, take your pick.
Do you believe her when she says it?
Do you believe Democrats when they say those things?
That's what it's really going to boil down to.
Yeah, I appreciate the call, Terry.
Very shrewd of you.
We'll be back.
Back to the phones, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hi.
Hey, Rush, how are you doing?
Fucking talk your kittos, Baton Rouge.
Thank you, Cliff.
What's happening?
People struggle.
Okay, we got a bad cell connection.
I'm going to ask Snirdly to get your phone number.
We'll call you back.
How it sounds, and I won't be able to follow you.
So don't hang up, Cliff.
We'll try to get your number and get back to you.
Chris in Charleston, South Carolina.
Hi.
Hey, good afternoon, Rush.
Thanks for taking my call.
You bet, sir.
My thought was about the Melania Trump slap with Michelle Obama.
When I hear Melania Trump speak, I hear someone that's speaking with conviction and believes in what she's saying.
But when I hear Michelle Obama speak similar words, what I hear is a liberal trying to sound as much like a conservative as possible while trying to seek a nomination.
If you listen to speeches that liberals give while they're in the nomination process, it's really striking how much they try and sound like conservatives, but we all really know that that's just a cover.
This is you're exactly right.
And it's something that I have observed my entire time as an adult in politics.
And that's the realization that liberals cannot win elections promising to do what they really are going to do.
They can't win by being who they are.
They have to try to adopt philosophies and agendas and policies that represent mainstream American thought.
And then they get elected and they start in on that agenda that has nothing to do with what they campaigned on.
Sadly, they never get penalized for it.
The Republicans, they run around and they campaign on things and they never do them.
And they get savaged for it.
The Democrats get away with all this lying.
They never do the things they say they're going to do.
They do worse.
But there's a, folks, there's a reality we have to face out there.
And it is that there's a sizable percentage of this country that does not see it the way you see it, Chris.
A lot of us do.
You hear Michelle Obama talking about the American dream and hard work, and we suspect that she really snickers at it in private.
We think she probably really resents it because she doesn't think there's a level playing field out there.
So all this visibility hard work taking me where you want to go probably doesn't apply.
Because in the world of the aggrieved American progressive, America is rotten.
America's never been fair.
America's always been rigged against whatever minority you want to mention.
It's always been the white power structure, probably rooted in Christianity, that's paved the way and rigged it for themselves and penalized and punished and ignored everybody else.
So we are approaching payback time now, which is what the Obama regime and all the issues they are promoting represents.
And there are a lot of people who don't care.
There are a lot of people out there, progressives, will let Michelle Obama, Barack Obama say whatever they have to do to beat us, because that's what gives them their thrill and their satisfaction.
And if they lie in order to get elected and then start implementing a Democrat leftist agenda, fine and dandy, that's even better as far as they're concerned.
I mentioned yesterday, with all of the cultural rot, with all of the compromises that have made, that occurred in American national security, Obama's sitting here with a 56% approval rating.
And you can't just sit there and throw the polls out.
You can't just, you can't selectively, nah, I don't believe that poll.
And then when you get a good poll, believe it.
You can't deal with this sort of thing that way.
So you realize that there are a sizable percentage of Americans who don't think like you do, Chris, and don't think like I do.
And question is, are we outnumbered yet?
Question is, is that number on the other side growing or is it static?
And then even the bigger question is, why do we spend so much time on this?
Because, frankly, we're trying to change minds.
I had somebody ask me over the weekend, knowing that I have been doing this 27, 28 years, why do you still do it?
What do you have left to prove?
They said.
What do you have left to say that you haven't said?
I mean, what would and I said, well, I love it.
Okay, aside from that, why do you keep, you love it, yeah, I understand it, but why are you doing it?
What are you trying to do?
You just preach into the choir?
I said, no, that is not what I'm trying to do.
I am trying to persuade.
I am trying to change minds.
That is part and parcel of what I'm doing.
I've always assumed, you know, I think I've mistaken in this too.
I've always assumed that most people who do commentary, be it spoken word or written print, I've always thought that they were about changing minds.
And I've learned that that's not the case.
Some are just content to get their opinions on record, but what happens after that is of no concern to them because they don't think that it happens that way.
And those are the people that I've always judged not really being in the fight.
Yeah, they're commentators.
They might be right on a lot of things, and they might be really good, and they might have really forceful, breathtaking columns or comments that you, yeah, yeah, man, but when you ask them why they're doing it, are you trying to change?
Oh, no, I could never change anybody's mind.
I'm not going to change their mind.
That's not what I'm doing.
That's not what I'm doing.
Well, it is for me.
Why come here today and spend time on this Melania Trump plagiarism charge?
I mean, what's the point?
There's some people who think the smart thing to do would be to ignore it, Rush.
You're falling into a trap.
They want you talking about this.
They don't want you talking about Baton Rouge.
They don't want you talking about Black Lives Matter.
They don't want you talking about Hillary Clinton.
They don't want you talking about Barack Obama.
They don't want you talking about the Iranian nuke deal.
They don't want you talking about unemployment.
They don't want you talking about Rudy.
They don't want you talking about what a great speech he gave.
They want you to talk about the great things that happened.
They want you talking about Melania, who's not running for anything.
Fully aware that that's an objective.
But I think I can do it all.
I don't have to come here and ignore the Melania controversy in order to make sure the other stuff is discussed because I've got three hours here.
I can do it all.
So the reason you do the Melania stuff, and it's every day, this has been every day we wake up and somebody else on our side is under attack.
Every day, somebody on our side is in somebody's crosshairs, political crosshairs, targeted for ruination or destruction.
And I have always considered one of my responsibilities to be defending those people because that's tantamount to defending what we all believe, which is what really is under assault in these things.
So the assault on Melania Trump is an assault on Trump, which is an assault on the Republican Party, which is an assault on the Republican campaign, which is all oriented toward denying Republican victory.
And a school of thought says, yeah, Rush, just short, ignore that.
You know, focus on the positive.
You're trying to change minds.
Tell people what they ought to know from last night, what really big happened last night.
Which makes sense.
But then there's also the part of me that thinks it's crucially important to deconstruct the left as an educational or informative exercise and to tell people how to recognize what's going on and how to reject it honestly and intellectually and how to not be worried about how to realize what it is and how not to be affected by it.
Look how easily they took out Sarah Palin among people on our side.
It didn't really take them much.
And they had help from people on our side taking Sarah Palin out.
And she was tremendously popular and was in fact the reason many Republicans even voted for John McCain.
And yet they took her out with plenty of aid and assistance from people on our side.
Had people tell me, Rush, the media has destroyed her.
There's no sense.
We're not going to get anywhere defending her.
She's toast.
They've taken her out.
You got to realize, you got to let it go.
And I just, I can't, I can't stomach that.
I can't just sit here and let all that happen.
So that's part and parcel.
They're trying to take what was a great speech Melania Trump gave last night and ruin the whole thing, destroy the whole thing in the minds of people that I call low-information voters or people that didn't watch the convention.
They're doing their level best day in and day out.
They never take us on in our ideas.
They try always to destroy anybody who pops up that may be persuasive, who may be effective.
That is their agenda.
I just can't sit here and twiddle my thumbs while they do that.
It's almost a compulsion with me to mount a defense, as I did with Clarence Thomas over that silly sexual harassment garbage with Anita Hill.
But it seems like that's every day.
It's every day.
And the reason I do it is to change minds or to, in this case, maybe prevent minds from being corrupted by a media who are purposely attempting to do just that.
It may be just a pebble thrown at a battleship when you're given the size of the drive-by media and their focused, unified efforts to destroy people.
But to me, it seems necessary and to arm people such as you with information that would help you refute, because you're going to run into nattering nabobs.
You're going to run into uninformed people who are going to be repeating what they hear in the media about Melania Trump being a thief and whatever.
And if you listen to this program and her arm and information can refute it, then all the better as far as I'm concerned.
So that's why I do it.
I think it's worth it.
I think sadly, it's necessary.
And then you add to all this the fact that the Republican Party institutionally hasn't seen the need to defend itself or to even oppose Obama and his agenda.
It makes it all the more difficult or challenging.
But yet, to me, it has to be done.
Take a break, folks.
The program just continues to speed by.
We'll be back in a moment.
Okay, we got Cliff back from Baton Rouge.
We had to suspend our call for the rotten cell connection.
Welcome back, Cliff.
How are you doing?
I'm doing pretty good, Rush.
Okay, have at it.
You're back with us now.
I was going to say that most of the agitators during the demonstrations here, the ones that wanted to block traffic, which is no-no in Baton Rouge.
Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold it, hold it, hold it.
Are we talking about what happened in Baton Rouge?
Are we talking about the convention?
No, I'm talking about what happened in Baton Rouge.
Okay.
So here we're switching gears here.
Just wanted to make sure people knew.
Yeah.
During the protest, most of the people, the vast majority that were arrested for doing silly things like blocking traffic, which is, you can't do that in Baton Rouge.
There's no loop around the town.
They went to jail.
That was the vast majority of them were from out of town.
And this shooter was apparently from out of town as well.
So to me, the dominant media, they have blood on their hands.
I mean, they're just getting into a frenzy.
We've had a false narrative for, what, two years now over Ferguson?
Hands up, don't shoot the lie.
Okay.
I'm lost.
You are, you're talking about your focus, the media, how they whip people into a frenzy, and yet it was not Baton Rouge.
It was outsiders who were responsible for all the things that went wrong.
Right.
Well, there were protests in downtown Baton Rouge, and they shut down one surface street in downtown Government Street for a little bit.
They wanted to shut down I-10.
And Baton Rougeans, I don't care who you are, Baton Rouge would hate that.
And I don't care what side of the issue you're on.
This town becomes, if you snarl one point of traffic in this town in the right place, you virtually bring the whole town to a standstill.
You've got I-10, US-61, US-90 all come together at Baton Rouge, and I-12 does as well.
And there's no loop around the city.
And there's also no surface loop around the city.
The city's built around lakes, swamps, and rivers.
And there's just nowhere to go.
So if you snarl traffic in one place, you should virtually shut the city down.
So the people that got arrested for trying to do that, they weren't getting any love from anybody.
And then this out-of-town shooter, this guy comes from Missouri or wherever he is, and kills these three police officers.
He's not from here either.
So no matter what they do, it's not going to tear this town apart.
Because we're together.
And I believe the dominant press has some of the blame for this.
But they have blood on their hands.
Also for the officers that were killed in Dallas.
Oh, I see what you're saying now.
They've driven a false narrative for what?
Ever since Ferguson?
Well, what's the false narrative that you're referring to?
Well, the false narrative is that the police target and kill black people at random almost.
And it's a lie.
Well, it certainly is.
Well, you're right.
The Episode in Baton Rouge didn't have anything to do with anything that happened in Baton Rouge, although they would say Alton Sterling is why they were doing what they were doing.
But who's whipping them into a frenzy is your point.
Look, I'll repeat this again.
I guess it takes it.
The beginning of a lot of this.
Some people think it's Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, and you can't leave that out.
But I'm telling you, I saw Malik Zulu Shabazz last night with Megan Kelly on Fox News.
And all he wanted to talk about was hands up, don't shoot out of St. Louis, out of Ferguson.
That's all it was.
That was the justification for everything they're doing.
A lie.
And he was last night trying to make everybody believe that Michael Brown was an innocent guy walking down the street, shot in the back with his hands up by a cop.
And Megan threw all the facts at him.
He didn't care.
It didn't matter what he ever accused her of making up stuff and lying about the facts.
And then, well, the grand jury, they lied too.
And everybody else lied too.
Everybody knew that that cop went head hunting.
So they're using a lie.
And my whole point, what if Obama had gone on television and instead of sustaining the life of that lie, had called that out for what it was and what it is?
He could have taken the ammunition away.
And he didn't do it.
And these incidents keep happening based on that and this frenzy that's continued to be worked on by Black Lives Matter.
Back in a sec.
Well, Megan Kelly has spoken up and claims that Roger Ailes sexually harassed her 10 years ago when she was a budding young reporter at Fox News.
Just hit.
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