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Feb. 3, 2017 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:21
February 3, 2017, Friday, Hour #2
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And greetings to you music lovers, thrill seekers, conversationalists all across the fruited planned Rush Limboy here at the EIB Network on Friday.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida, it's open live Friday.
Great to have you with us.
Telephone numbers 800-282-2882 and the email address, lrushbow at EIBNet.com.
EIBNet.us.
Sorry, I caught myself.
It's a brand new domain.
EIBNet.us.
Do you see where Vanity Fair and what's it?
the New Yorker have pulled out of the White House Correspondents' Dinner?
Yeah, they're still...
Oh, are they still gonna have it?
Ha!
You bet they're going to have it.
They can't wait to have it.
If I were Trump, I wouldn't go.
I don't know if they're going to have by the time this thing, you know, it's usually late April or early May, the White House correspondence dinner.
And with Vanity Fair pulling out, that's a big party pulling out.
Forget the dinner.
I mean, that's a giant pre- and post-party.
Well, I don't know.
They might, nah, I guess if they're pulling out, they're pulling out.
They're not going to do the parties either.
New Yorker, big whoop.
But if others come along and pull, no concern of mine.
Ladies and gentlemen, remember during the Obama years when the economy was foundering and there wasn't any economic growth.
And we were being told that, well, this is the new norm.
We really never deserved our previous superpower status because it was achieved in an immoral and unjust way.
We must learn to adjust to life like most in the world live life.
And our economy, for the longest time, will be in a state of decline.
And the objective here is to manage that decline.
I mean, these were not word-for-word utterances from the Obama administration, but this was the point.
And we kept losing jobs.
And then Obamacare came along, and not only were we losing more jobs, then the job classifications were changing.
More and more people began more businesses, small and large, firing people and replacing them with part-timers, working less than 30 hours a week because under the Obamacare rules, you didn't have to provide anybody health insurance if they only worked 29 hours a week.
So it was a bad situation.
There were new jobs that were not being created.
The labor force participation.
I remember talking about this confidently.
The number of able-bodied Americans that were not working was in the 93 to 94 million range.
And there was no good economic news.
And the Obama administration continued to monkey around with the unemployment rate.
And they would claim that the unemployment rate was declining, even though we were only creating 125,000 new jobs a month or 77,000 new jobs.
And the reason for that is that after you stopped looking for work and were still unemployed, you were no longer counted as unemployed in the category of unemployment that they always reported.
And that was called the U3, the letter U-3.
The Labor Department has six different categories to express unemployment.
And the U3 is what is always reported.
The U6 number includes the people who are out of work and have been out of work so long, they're no longer looking.
The U3 number is designed to only measure employment among people who are unemployed but want to work and those who are working.
The U6 number is always going to be a much higher percentage because it includes the people who've been out of work so long, they've exhausted their unemployment benefits.
They still haven't found work and they've given up looking, meaning they're not showing up to register for benefits.
They're not following any requirements to report where they've looked for jobs.
They've just fallen off the charts, and they are part of that 94 million not working.
And during those years, we here at the EIB network always reported the U6 number because the U6 number was a more accurate portrayal of the employment and unemployment situation in the country.
The drive-by media would never even acknowledge the U6 number.
The drive-by media stuck with the U3 number because it was that number that allowed them to report the unemployment rate, which is utterly meaningless, was falling.
I think it ended up at around 4.9%.
The last number in the last quarter or two of the Obama presence, it was an absolute joke.
How can you have an unemployment at 4.9% with 94 million Americans not working?
Anyway, lo and behold, now the January employment numbers have been released.
And all of a sudden, guess who has discovered the U6 unemployment number?
Why, no less than the drive-by media and CNBC.
Unemployment rose slightly in January, but a more realistic rate is even higher.
So here is the acknowledgement that during the entire eight years of Obama, they knew that there was a more realistic portrayal of the employment and unemployment situation in America, and they ignored it.
Now that Trump is in office, not only are they going to report it, they're going to acknowledge that it is more realistic.
The national unemployment rate rose slightly to 4.8% in January, Labor Department announced.
However, says CNBC, relying on that one headline number as an indicator of the economy overall ignores important information just below the surface, really.
Isn't it amazing how this happens?
You get a Democrat out of office and a Republican in office, and all of a sudden the drive-bys note what they claim, and it's true, is a more realistic number.
But we've been with Trump here in office for one month, and you might be able to make a case that some of the uptick in economic activity beginning in November and December.
You can also partially credit to Trump just because of the attitudinal improvement that had no doubt come over a majority of the country based on votes and Trump's promises and his transition making it very clear that he was going to keep all of these promises.
But nevertheless, in fact, Trump was not even in office for 10 days of January, and they're already associating the U6 unemployment number to him and his policies.
Here's what CNB says: Each month on Jobs Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out a treasure trove of economic data, each of which provides its own perspective on the labor market and the employment situation.
Economists look past the official unemployment rate, also known as the U3, to other metrics that give their own view of jobs in the country.
And one of those figures is called the U6 rate.
We need to do a LexisNexis survey and find out how many drive-by media outlets ever talked about U6 from 2009 through 2016.
And I'll bet you we can put it on one hand.
One of those figures is called the U6 rate, which has a broader definition of unemployment than the U3.
In January, that number ticked up from 9.2% to 9.4%.
The official unemployment rate is defined as total unemployed.
Meaning the unemployed, the underemployed, the discouraged, the hopeless, the having given up.
But all of a sudden, after Trump's in office for 10 days of the reporting month, all of a sudden, the U6 is going to be reported.
It's a travesty.
It is another glaring example of journalistic malpractice.
And it isn't just CNBC.
They're all going to do it.
Because the purpose here is to make Trump's policies look ineffective.
And if they can, to make Trump's policies look like failures.
Which takes me to Peggy Noonan's piece, and I'm not going to get into the piece.
I just, I want to bounce off the headline here.
She has her Friday Wall Street Journal column and the headline, in Trump's Washington, nothing feels stable.
Well, it isn't Trump's Washington yet by any measure.
The establishment is still in charge of this town, folks.
It's one of the things that's wrong with it.
This is still, Washington, D.C. is still Obama's town.
It's still Obama's Washington.
That's the problem that has to be fixed.
And it's not going to be pretty.
Obama's Washington is openly insubordinate.
Obama's Washington is leaking like a sieve.
Obama's Washington is passive-aggressive.
Obama's Washington is unhinged because Washington was never intended to belong to a political party, but it does now.
It belongs to the Democrats, and they are fit to be tied.
Whose fault is it that nothing feels stable?
What is stability?
Let's define stability.
What does Peggy Noonan actually mean by stability?
When she says, in Trump's Washington, nothing seems stable.
What?
Stable.
Anybody want to take a stab?
What stable means?
Snartly said the usual process is what they use.
No, stability in Washington means the liberals are in clear control.
The liberals are in charge.
It means liberalism and the Democrat Party are operating it and owning and running it.
That's what stability means in Washington.
Whenever the liberals are defeated at the ballot box, whenever the Republicans hold positions of power, that's when it automatically becomes unstable in Washington.
The only time Washington is stable is when there's a Democrat in the White House.
And when that doesn't happen, then here come the stories about how everything's unstable.
We're feeling nervous.
We don't know what's going to happen from one day to the next, and maybe even one hour to the next.
It's so unsettling.
It's so unsettling.
And I just want things to be stable again.
Whose fault is it that nothing is stable?
Who is it that's standing in the way of everything that wants to be done?
Who is it?
It's the Democrat Party that's creating the instability.
It's the American left creating the instability.
It's not Trump supporters blowing up college campuses.
It's not Trump supporters openly violating executive orders and trying to undermine the sitting president.
It's not Trump's people doing this.
But I keep saying this is what it looks like.
Washington, Hollywood, academia have been under the control of Washington and under the control of Democrats and leftists for generations.
And any serious effort to take it back to rest control is going to cause circumstances and situations exactly like we're in.
And here's the thing.
You can't quit 25% of the way through it, halfway through it.
Once a serious concerted effort is made to reassert control over our nation and the government, of course they're going to act like stuck pigs.
Of course they're going to protest march and threaten damage and threaten violence and threaten assassination.
That's who they are.
Of course they're going to destroy private property.
Of course they're going to politicize everything.
Of course the career Democrats and the bureaucracy are going to try to undermine the new Republican president every day, multiple times a day.
That's when it is most important to hang in, to stick with it and see it through.
This is no time for anybody to go wobbly, especially since it's all been predictable.
I understand the peer pressure and the public pressure brought to bear of what looks to be a media that represents a majority.
All it takes is a single story claiming that Trump is the first president to fall below 50% approval in his first month in the history of the country.
Oh no!
Oh no, they're starting to hate Trump already.
All of this stuff is mind control.
It's all designed, as it always has been, to depress you, to dispirit you, to convince you that what you believe is wrong and in the minority, to convince you that what happened in November really didn't happen, that it was a quirk, that it was the Russians, that it was cheating, that it was not real.
Anything they can do to upset the massive support base that Trump has, and it's an ongoing effort, and it's taking many different shapes and sizes in every day.
And this headline on Peggy Newman's column is just the latest example.
In Trump's Washington, nothing seems stable.
Is Berkeley stable?
Is Berkeley where they're blowing up things and throwing bricks and potentially injuring people?
Is that stability?
Was the women's march on Washington after Trump's inaugural, is that what is meant by stability?
Where Madonna's up there making a fool of herself, talking about wanting to blow up the White House and Ashley Judge making an even bigger fool of herself.
I'm a nasty woman.
And then Meryl Streep talking about the power of her vagina or whatever.
That's stability.
I haven't read Peggy's column, but the instability is not Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is executing and implementing the mandate that he achieved by winning the election.
If there's any instability, then we're seeing it on the part of the left.
The entire Democrat agenda, if you ask me, is to promote instability.
And the definition of stability is when the Democrats are controlling beings.
It is purposefully destabilizing.
And now, my friends, a brief obscene profit time out here in the EIB network.
We'll be right back.
Don't go away.
Open Line Friday, Rush Limbaugh.
I think what's happening out there, I think what Peggy Noonan's piece, I haven't read the piece.
I'm just bouncing off the headline.
The headline's all I needed.
This business in Trump's Washington, nothing feels stable.
I think Trump is responsible for one part of it.
He's just racing through things.
I don't think they can keep up.
Did you hear the South Park guys, the guys who do the TV show, South Park, they've said we are stopping involving Trump in our show.
We can't keep up because it takes so long to do animations.
By the time we get something prepared, Trump's long gone from it.
And the drive-bys can't keep up.
They prepare these hit pieces ready to go, and Trump's off to something else.
And they're off balance, and that equals unstable.
I hope Trump doesn't fall prey to any of this.
No indication yet that he is inclined to, but I hope he's not in this to be loved because that is never going to happen.
You want to see the cover of the latest German Magnetor Spiegel.
It's an animation.
It's a cartoon.
Trump having chopped off the head of the Statue of Liberty, which is bleeding.
Got a knife in his left hand.
He's holding the head of the Statue of Liberty in his right hand, and it's bleeding.
He's decapitated it.
It's just sick.
Just sick, sick stuff.
Here's John in Vero Beach, Florida, right up the road here.
Great to have you, John.
What's happening?
What's up?
What's going on?
Rush, what an honor and privilege to be speaking with you, sir.
Thank you very much, sir.
Great to have you on the program.
What's happening?
What's up?
You know, yesterday, my wife and I were talking about the news yesterday at the prayer meeting when Donald Trump, and I'm sure it was all tongue-in-cheek, but made reference about the apprentice ratings dropping and asked for prayer for Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But, you know, as media savvy as President Trump is, I'm wondering, since President Trump and Mark Burdett are friends, is this might be just a way of saying, hey, Mark, here's a little bit of a ratings boost for you.
And, you know, again, it's one of those things that President Trump is very savvy with the media.
And I just would like to get your thought on that, sir.
Let me ask you a question.
Are you a religious person?
And if so, did that comment at the prayer breakfast offend you as being this is not the time to start making jokes about people here.
This is not the time to start throwing the word hell around.
This is not the time to start asking people to pray for Arnold Schwartz.
Did it bother you or not?
Sir, I tell you what.
I've been in the Air Force for over 30 years.
I'm freshly retired, and my faith is as strong as ever.
And there are times for levity, and I'm telling you what, President Trump, he can use it whenever he wants.
Okay, so it didn't bother you.
Okay, I'm down to five seconds.
I'm down to five seconds, so I'm going to have to answer your question when we come back.
And I'll remember it because I have a good memory.
Okay, to answer the previous caller's question, do I think that Trump at the prayer breakfast goosing Schwarzenegger was designed to get the ratings of The Apprentice up?
Maybe.
After all, the creator and Trump's partner of the show, Mark Burnett, was there.
Mark Burnett married a Roman Downey.
Mark Burnett introduced him.
Trump, I'm sure, does not want anything bad to happen to Burnett.
I'm sure he loves ragging on Schwarzenegger, his replacement.
I think Trent might, it could well have been an effort to promote the show.
Now that, now that, hey, I want to be honest with you about media performers, he goes, it's totally understandable that Trump would be happy that his replacement doesn't do as well as he does.
Folks, that's entirely normal.
It's in this business, it's perfectly normal.
You're always hoping that the people you compete against don't do well.
That's where journalists are phony.
They try to say, oh, we don't care about our ratings.
We're interested in the news.
It's BS.
Otherwise, they wouldn't be moving from network to network and job to job.
And once it's been demonstrated that the apprentice lost some audience when Trump left, okay, mission accomplished.
And then there's an added bonus.
If he can get the ratings back up by having a little phony feud with Schwarzenegger, then that's even more to his pound.
Now, whether that was going on, I don't know.
I have no idea.
What I can tell you, it wasn't an attempt to disrespect anything.
It wasn't an attempt to insult the prayer breakfast.
It was just Trump being Trump.
And I'm convinced, it's most innocent, it was a joke.
And it could well have been an effort to get people to watch the program, get them interested in it.
I don't know.
But it's not the kind of thing to lose sleep over.
It's not the kind of thing, oh my God, this is so horrible.
Something like this happening.
Oh, my God, I can't believe this happened at the prayer break.
Oh, no.
I mean, has it not been demonstrated?
Did not the evangelical movement vote en masse for Trump?
You go back to the campaign.
Remember, it was Ted Cruz.
Everybody thought Ted Cruz had the evangelical Christian vote all tied up.
Owned them.
And yet, Trump won practically all of them.
And the professional political consultants to this day can't figure it out.
And you know why they can't figure it out?
Because it is they who have a caricatured version of evangelical people.
The Democrats and the left political consultants think that evangelical people are Mennonites.
They are the Amish.
And they're walking around and driving around in little black wagons being pulled by horses.
And they live according to an 1800s code.
I mean, their opinion of evangelicals, you would not believe what they really think of evangelicals.
Backwards, behind the times, they spend every waking moment in prayer asking God for everything.
The last thing, as far as the leftist, evangelicals are in no way, shape, man, or form normal.
They're not natural.
They are old-fashioned and they're stuffed shirts and they're mean-spirited and they're discriminatory and they're bigots.
They hate them.
They're all pro-life.
They all have shotguns in the back of those little black wagons being pulled along by the horses, the Pennsylvania Amish and the Dutch and the Mennonites.
They despise them.
And here Trump?
Trump, after the Axis video with Trump wins a majority of the law?
It doesn't compute.
It doesn't make sense.
And still to this day, so Trump goes to the prayer breakfast and says what he says.
Remember when he didn't say 2 Corinthians at 2 Corinthians?
Oh my God, this is proven that he's not religious.
He doesn't even understand.
It's 2 Corinthians.
Didn't matter.
And in fact, there are, to this day, there are exhaustive opinion pieces in political journals and academic treatises all over.
As the left and these wizards of SMART and all of these academics are going nuts trying to explain to themselves how these people could have supported Trump.
Do you know when he went to the prayer breakfast, he actually said the word hell?
They don't know why Trump wasn't kicked out.
They don't understand why Trump wasn't kicked out because it is they who have a bigoted, caricatured impersonation of religious people, particularly Christians.
When it comes to Muslims, they're the epitome of modernity, the epitome of advanced civilization.
Understand them backwards and forwards, inside out, upside down.
When it comes to Christians, they're the biggest unknown potential enemy under the sun.
Let me tell you a little story.
Way, way back in the early days of this program, I was invited to MC the annual dinner for the Council on National Policy.
I didn't even know what it was when I was invited.
It turns out the Council on National Policy is a conservative attempt at putting together a counterpart to the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.
And I didn't do enough research to understand exactly who was in this group.
I thought they were all conservatives, and so I thought that permitted certain things.
So at the time, there was a story that I was using in my appearances that was fairly recent, and it had the added benefit of being true.
And remember, this is early on.
They've all heard of me, but they still don't know much about me and where I've come from because I'm not a networker.
I just, I literally, as far as these people in Washington, I came out of nowhere.
I mean, there was nothing, you know, there's a guy in Sacramento and he's really kicking a day's guy, but there was none of that.
I mean, it's like I didn't exist until August 1st, 1988.
So I'm opening the event, telling everybody how happy I am to be there.
They're applauding.
It's a wonderful night.
I've got Paul Weirick had invited me.
Bill Bennett is there.
So I tell this story about Ted Kennedy in a speedboat off the coast of the south of France with a scantily clad young woman less than half his age.
And I said, We know that this is true because there were paparazzi helicopters flying around taking photos, still photos.
And I said, there were three photos.
In the first photo, Senator Kennedy and the young woman in a state of embrace in the boat.
It was a speedboat.
It was not a yacht speedboat.
You could see, in the words.
And in the next photo, the woman is in the water, and Senator Kennedy is jumping off the side to go in and join her in the water.
And I said, we've never seen this.
We have never seen Senator Kennedy dive into a body of water for a woman.
I said, this is the first moderate chuckles.
That should have brought the house down, but it didn't.
And then the third picture showed Senator Kennedy and this new biled young thing in various stages of intimacy in the boat.
And I said, these pictures began to be passed around to Washington.
And they eventually reached Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama.
He was a big old guy, and he had a big, powerful, lumbering voice with a southern accent.
And they showed the pictures of Senator Kennedy to Howell Heflin.
He looked at the picture.
He said, Well, I do declare that it looked to me like Senator Kennedy had done chain hip position on offshore drilling.
And there wasn't a sound in the room.
Not a sound.
And I thought, what, how does this not work in a room full of conservatives?
How does this not work?
So that happened to be the last story before dinner.
So it was a natural exit from the podium to get back to my table.
And when I walked back to the table, I was being stared daggers.
And when I got to my table, a couple people said, you should have cleared that with us.
I said, would you tell me what happened?
Because actually, folks, half the room reacted.
Half the room, the truth, half the room laughed.
The other half of the room was where there was no reaction.
He said, Didn't anybody tell you that half of this club is religious leaders on the right?
I said, Oh, no, you're kidding.
No, nobody told me that.
I said, I wonder what James Dobson was doing here.
He was in the audience, and he had with him Donna Rice.
And I remember they said, when it comes time for you to get back up there, you need to apologize.
You need to apologize.
Because that didn't work with this crowd.
Okay, so I went up there and I apologized.
Everything ended up okay.
So I'm walking out at the end of the evening.
I'm walking through the crowd, and everybody's either having dessert or whatever, getting ready to leave.
And I saw James Dobson, Dr. Dobson, and it looked like it was Donna Rice.
What in the world?
I mean, I just caught hell.
You know, here's Donna Rice.
It was caught actually on a boat with Gary Hart.
I said, what's not right about this picture?
So I walked up, introduced myself.
I said, Dr. Dobson, I'm Rush Limble.
That looked like Donna Rice with you.
Yes, it was.
She has found the Lord.
She's found God.
Something you might want to look into.
Oh, geez.
It still wasn't over.
Anyway, I'm convinced that I have softened that crowd up now to where Trump can go and do what he did.
He asked him to pray for Schwarzenegger.
I've never forgotten it.
Everything ended up fine.
It was one of those learning experiences.
Everybody that was there still laughs about it when it's brought up.
Anyway, I must take a brief time, but it's Open Line Friday.
Your calls continue after this.
Don't go away.
Now, just to be thorough on this, we had a caller ask me if I thought that Trump could have been ragging on Schwarzenegger to get the ratings of the show up.
And I just, and I answered the guy acknowledging his idea because I'm a polite host.
But I don't think there's anything to it.
I think Trump was being who Trump is.
I think Trump, he just can't help himself.
The guy replacing him on that show is not doing as well.
And he just, he wants to point it out.
He was a joking, funny, light-hearted thing at the prayer breakfast.
And the key to it to me is when he asked them to pray for Arnold's ratings.
So I don't think there's anything more to it.
I don't think there's a conspiracy.
I don't think there's any, I don't think there's any conspiracies with Trump.
I think one of the problems people have with Trump is he is who he is.
And most everybody else in politics is trying to hide who they really are.
And from the moment they've wanted to go into politics, they hide who they are.
I mean, they understand certain things about their lives are going to have to make public, like their tax returns and like their financial statements.
So they arrange all that stuff for public disclosure in a way that doesn't hurt them.
Trump never thought he was ever going to do this.
And so aspects of his life that he's lived, he's never ever intended or thought they would be made public.
And in that sense, I think something like Trump is refreshing.
And I think it's one of the reasons, one of the many, why people elected Trump.
They're simply fed up with the way Washington is working.
And the instability is brought to us by the people who you ought to see the latest cover of The Village Voice.
I already described for you the cover of Der Spiegel.
The Village Voice has a cover.
It's a color photo of Donald Trump through sniper crosshairs with the crosshairs at his temple.
And the headline is, Why Not?
So The Village Voice has a cover advocating the assassination of the President of the United States.
Der Spiegel in Germany has a cover of Trump having decapitated the Statue of Liberty and is holding it in his right hand with a knife he used to decapitate it in his left hand.
Statue is bleeding.
Peggy Noonan, the headline to her column, Trump's Washington, nothing seems stable.
Nothing feels stable.
It's not Trump's Washington.
Now, you remember when Gabby Giffords was shot in Arizona, and they try to blame it on Sarah Palin because of Sarah Palin's website.
She had some graphic image of crosshairs at something or other.
They tried to really say that the wacko that shot Gabby Giffords was inspired by Sarah Palin.
Now, here, everything that they've ever held up as a standard not to be done as impolitic and as promoting violence, they are doing.
You can't have something more crystal clear than this village voice cover.
You can see it on Drudge.
We'll link to it at rushlimbaugh.com.
Meantime, Edmund in Lexington, Illinois.
Great to have you, sir.
How are you doing?
All right, Rush.
Robert Rush, he violated three rules that I know of when you report on a riot.
Number one rule is you don't say your students weren't there because you don't know because they were all wearing a mask.
That's number one.
This is becoming fake news.
Number two, Rush.
He made outrageous claim, which people like you and Donald Trump would call Braggadachio or something like that.
He must know all 38,000 students at that university.
I was going to say, he was able, he knew the students.
He knows the students at Berkeley, and then that's not who he saw.
He really knows 38, 40,000 students at Berkeley.
It was absurd.
He knows them.
He knows them.
And even if they're wearing a mask, Rush, the third law that he violated was, and I don't mean this in any disrespectful way, but somebody who's 4'8 can't see what the hell's going on in a riot.
Those are the three rules that I think are violated, and they're very important.
I'm glad you called here.
Edmund, ladies and gentlemen, he's referring to the, we had a couple soundbites in the first hour of the program.
It's how long poor Edmund's been on hold here.
It's one of the dangers when people start talking about things that happened hours ago.
You may not know what he's talking about.
I have to set the table for you.
Robert Reich, two soundbites, claimed that he was at Berkeley, and these weren't students.
He knows the students at Berkeley, and it is not who they were.
These were bright-bart right-wingers that were hired to blow up Berkeley.
And so Edmund is offering here his three different laws that Reich violated in making these claims.
And his third one is, not to be disrespectful, but Labor Secretary Reich is 4.8, 4 foot 8 inches.
And Edmund was making the point that when you're 4'8, you can't see what's going on in a riot.
And if you think that's making fun of Labor Secretary Reich, you should know that Bill Clinton was the first to do it.
Standing next to a giant dollhouse at a Christmas display, and Clinton said, hey, you know what?
Labor Secretary Rice could live in that little thing, don't you know?
One big exciting broadcast hour remains on Open Line Friday.
And we'll be up to it sooner than you believe.
Right back at you, folks.
Hang in there.
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