By Mike Huckabee
December 1, 2023
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BY MIKE HUCKABEE
Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Here are news stories from the past week, you won't want to miss.
Mike Huckabee
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.
Matthew 5:16
What the media won’t tell you about the Fifth National Climate Assessment
You probably heard some of the media hysteria over last month’s Fifth National Climate Assessment, the Biden Administration’s report on “climate change” and the apocalyptic weather catastrophe that awaits us if we don’t scale down our lives and turn all our money and freedom over to the government to “save the planet.” But the Daily Caller has the part that the other media outlets didn’t report:
https://dailycaller.com/2023/11/29/biden-landmark-climate-report-activists/
Nearly two dozen of the listed authors are not objective climate scientists but eco-activists with ties to environmentalist and/or leftwing advocacy groups like the Environmental Defense Fund. That might explain not only the hysterical predictions but also the fact that the media didn’t tell us the report is filled with leftwing buzzwords like “equity” and “climate justice,” which have no place in a legitimate scientific paper. Or that there are accusations that some of its methods were misleading, and that in some cases, it relied on something called “indigenous knowledge,” defined as “experiential knowledges gained over time by Indigenous Peoples,” rather than, you know, research and evidence and stuff like that.
And speaking of the solid decisions about the environment for which the Biden cabal are now famous, it was revealed that they entered a (intended-to-be) secret mediation with environmentalist groups in Washington State that are trying to shut down four hydroelectric dams to protect the declining salmon population in the Snake River.
While I like salmon as much as any red meat eater, it should be noted that these dams supply fully 8 percent of all the power to the state. But don’t worry: the Democrat Governor and Sen. Patty Murray want that to be replaced with “green energy sources.” And what might those be? They’re going to save the salmon by blighting the landscape with a million windmills that will Cuisinart a few billion birds? Oh well, I guess if you’re going to poach a salmon, you have to break a few eggs.
Tweet of the Day:
Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan commenting on Sen. Elizabeth “Buttinski” Warren’s latest campaign to control every aspect of our lives:
“First, they came for your guns. Then, they came for your gas cars. Then, they came for you gas stoves. Then, they came for your heaters. Then, they came for your pizza. Now, they’re coming for your sandwiches. Today’s Left is out of control.”
https://www.westernjournal.com/elizabeth-warren-now-coming-sandwiches-todays-left-control/
What sparked this is that the private equity firm Roark Capital is purchasing Subway. They already own some other sandwich chains, including Jimmy John’s, Schlotzsky's and Arby’s. So Warren is backing an FTC investigation, claiming this will lead to higher prices for consumers due to a “sandwich shop monopoly.”
In an article in the Wall Street Journal, James Freeman pointed out what a meatball Warren is. It’s more needless intrusion by federal regulators into things that don’t require regulation. As he notes, there’s no such thing as a “sandwich monopoly.” Thousands of restaurants, both local and chains, sell sandwiches; and everyone knows how to make a sandwich and can open a sandwich shop.
I’d point out that if anything is going to harm consumers, it’s Warren and her love of taxes and expensive, heavy-handed government regulations. If the price of sandwiches goes up, it will more likely be because of that than because someone somehow cornered the market on hoagies.
This is just Warren's latest counterproductive attempt at micromanagement of industries she doesn't understand. It’s of a piece with her crusade to stop the merger of JetBlue and Spirit Airlines. She also pushed the Biden DOJ to block that, claiming that allowing two relatively small budget airlines to merge would somehow create a monopoly of budget airline tickets and harm consumers. What it’s done has cost both companies a fortune, forcing Spirit to cut costs by offering early buyouts to reduce its workforce, while tanking Spirit’s stock price.
My writer Pat Reeder has a comment on that:
“At the height of the pandemic, when Spirit stock was way down, I bought some with my little day trading account. I figured it had to bounce back at some point, right? Wrong! COVID is long over, but I didn’t count on the Liz Warren pandemic of uninformed government meddling. The stock has come up a little recently, due to optimism that JetBlue will win its court case, finally get the DOJ out of the way and pay the agreed-up rate of $30 a share, but as of this moment, it’s stuck at $15 and my investment of $8501.33 is worth $5212.45.
As a small investor for whom that represents a big, fat loss (at least on paper; I’m still hoping sanity will prevail), I’d like to thank Big Chief Liz for looking out for my interests. Truly, you are the perfect embodiment of Reagan’s dictum that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”
Who Could’ve Predicted This?
DC Judge Tanya Chutkan denied yet another Trump defense team motion, this time seeking materials on January 6th that the Pelosi Kangaroo Kommittee didn’t turn over to the National Archives. Chutkan accused Trump’s attorneys of “going on a fishing expedition,” which I would argue is better than shooting fish in a barrel, which is what she’s letting biased prosecutor Jack Smith get away with.
Reporter Julie Kelly accused Chutkan of acting as Smith’s “rubber stamp,” adding that her denial of Trump’s right to see all the evidence is ironic considering that “Chutkan, a shameless partisan appointed by Obama, wrote the 2021 order piercing Trump’s [executive privilege] claims to force him to produce presidential records to J6 committee.”
To be fair, that was based on the established DC precedent that Donald Trump has no legal rights.
Former US Marine attacked in Russian prison labor camp
Former US Marine Paul Whelan was reportedly attacked by another prisoner in a Russian prison labor camp where he’s serving 16 years on bogus “espionage” charges. He’s the American prisoner that the Biden Administration just couldn't get Russia to agree to throw in when they were trading one of the world’s most notorious arms dealers for the return of unpatriotic WNBA player and cannabis user Britney Griner. But they assured us they would keep working diligently on his release. Yeah, sure...
Very predictable
There’s a very predictable through-line for all bad leftist ideas. First, they come up with some staggeringly stupid idea. Then they claim it’s unquestionably true and shove it down everyone’s throats. When it results in the inevitable disaster, they back away from it, claiming they never advocated for that, it was all a rightwing conspiracy theory, and it’s the Republicans’ fault, really (“TRUUUUMP!!!!”) We saw it with "defunding the police," and again this week, when the Mayor of Chicago claimed that “rightwing extremists” are to blame for his city being overrun with drugs, crime and illegal aliens who entered through Biden’s open border.
Another great example is “wokeness.” The left invented the term and forced it on us, then after everyone realized what it was (a bunch of grifters expanding their own power and money by claiming to be victims of oppressors) and turned against it, they feigned ignorance: “’Woke?’ I don’t even know what that means!” They’re also claiming to be baffled by what “Get woke, go broke” means. As I mentioned yesterday, they always have some other feeble excuse for why woke movies bomb (Disney now has four of the five biggest bombs of all time, two in the past year, and they still refuse to admit the reason.)
Okay, maybe this will open their eyes. Welcome to the wonderful money-losing world of woke books!
The Daily Mail reports that in the wake of the George Floyd riots, publishers did to books what Disney did to movies: they hired a bunch of leftwing activist “editors” who don’t know or care how to identify a book that would sell. These “ideological fanatics” blackballed (sorry for the racist term) white authors, especially white males, even if they’d written good books and had a record of success, and instead paid huge advances to “marginalized” voices to turn out pages of whiny, self-serving propaganda that nobody wanted to read.
Here are a few examples of how that’s worked out for their bosses. They paid a $500,000 advance for a “queer feminist Western” called “Lucky Red” that has unluckily sold about 3500 copies. The rule of thumb is that it’s a good deal for the publisher to pay $7 for each book sold. In “Lucky Red’s” case, they paid the author $142.85 a book. That sounds like the kind of book deal only Hunter Biden could get.
They also paid $250,000 for a novel about three black and biracial girls that’s sold 3,163 copies in two years, and paid a $3 million advance to actor Eliot (formerly Ellen) Page for a memoir about his gender transition. They claim it sold 68,000 copies, which I find dubious, but even so, at $7 a copy sold, they’d have to move over 428,000 just to make the advance back. There are more examples of expensive flops at the link, and I think you’ll really enjoy seeing what some of them are.
I would hope this would teach the publishers a lesson, and that they’ll fire the political parasites and start putting out books people want to read. But I have little hope of that, so to look on the bright side, at least during the cold winter, we’ll all be able to buy lots of cheap fireplace starter paper off our local book store’s clearance shelf.
Fact: Sports reporters are not political reporters
Here’s why sports reporters need to stop trying to act like political reporters. If I want Ray Barone spouting off on institutionalized racism, I’ll ask for it.
https://www.westernjournal.com/mom-young-chiefs-fan-crushes-racism-narrative-big-revelation/
I was glad to see that Chiefs fans are backing up this boy who was unjustly attacked by this moron reporter, and they all plan to paint their faces with the team colors for the next game in solidarity with him. I’m also glad to see that at least one other sports reporter had the decency to admit he jumped to false conclusions and declared, “I am an idiot.” Good for him, but when will the idiot who started this admit he’s an idiot?
Related: The Babylon Bee weighs in on the story…
https://babylonbee.com/news/taylor-swift-dumps-travis-kelce-for-face-paint-boy
And just for laughs, here are a few more great Babylon Bee stories…
https://babylonbee.com/news/democrats-nominate-national-christmas-tree-for-presidential-run
Biden attorneys throw “family member” Devon Archer under the bus
The take-no-prisoners approach of Hunter Biden’s legal team now extends even to a former business partner once counted among Biden “family.” In a letter to the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday, Abbe Lowell dismissed Hunter’s former close friend Devon Archer as an “inmate convicted for his involvement in a tribal bond scheme that never involved Hunter.”
It’s true that Hunter was not implicated in that particular enterprise, which appears to have been a separate deal. As reported in the NEW YORK SUN, “Archer was sentenced last year to one year and a day in prison for defrauding a Native American tribe in a scheme involving $60 million in bonds.” This case has been winding through the courts for a long time, as his conviction was overturned on appeal and then reinstated after a challenge by prosecutors. Archer maintains that he lost money on the deal and was guilty only of making “foolish mistakes.” Make of that what you will, but contrary to what the letter states, Archer is not an “inmate,” as he has not reported to prison yet. His case is still under appeal, this time to the Supreme Court.
You’d think a lawyer of Abbe Lowell’s caliber would understand what “inmate” means. And he does.
This past summer, Devon Archer was subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee and ended up providing some damning testimony during a closed-door hearing, specifically about get-togethers Joe Biden had with Hunter’s shady business associates (and later falsely denied having), and a phone call involving Burisma executives that led to Biden’s involvement with prosecutor Viktor Shokin’s firing in Ukraine.
This testimony is consistent with an email found on Hunter’s laptop from one of the Burisma executives at that phone call, Vadym Pozarsky, saying that the “ultimate purpose” of having Hunter on the board was to shut down “any cases/pursuits against Nicolay [Zlochevsky] in Ukrainae.”
Here’s a memory refresher from the WESTERN JOURNAL…
“The request is like, ‘Can DC help?” Archer testified. Instead of specifically asking Hunter to get his father involved, “it was always this amorphous, ‘Can we get help in DC?” Archer did not testify to the contents of the phone call because he was not on it. “I was left out of these, you know, black box DC types of conversations,” he testified.
But then-Vice President Joe Biden hopped a flight on Air Force Two to Ukraine. It was just five days after that phone call that he gave a speech in Ukraine saying, “The office of the general prosecutor [led by Shokin] desperately needs reform.”
And you know the story --- Joe Biden once very publicly bragged about it himself --- about the Vice President threatening to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees for Ukraine unless Shokin was fired. And, lo and behold, Shokin WAS fired. This was while Hunter was still sitting on Burisma’s board, so they got their money’s worth, even though it amounted to $1 million a year.
In trashing Archer the way he did, Hunter’s attorney might have forgotten that this former business partner offered a useful (to Hunter) alternate narrative, testifing that “various [members] of the DC team” had told him the firing of Shokin was actually BAD for Burisma because Shokin was “under control.” (If they did tell him that, it’s certainly not consistent with all the other communications about Shokin’s firing.) And when asked about Zlochevky’s alleged comment regarding “$5 million to one Biden and $5 million to another Biden,” he told the committee he wasn’t aware of any $5 million payments and that Zlochevsky might have just been bragging.
So Archer was trying to at least include some benefit of the doubt for the Bidens in his testimony. But as part of their attorneys’ scorched-earth legal strategy, the Biden family has thrown him under the bus anyway. As reported in WJ, Archer communicated with Hunter via text in 2019 --- preserved on Hunter’s laptop --- to ask why Joe Biden hadn’t done more to protect him from prosecution. He’d been indicted in May 2016, while Joe was still Vice President.
The tone is frantic: “Why did your dad’s administration appointees arrest me and try to put me in jail? Why would they try and ruin my family and destroy my kids and no one from your family’s side step in and at least try to help me?”
The irony of Hunter’s answer will knock you to the floor: “It’s democracy...every presidents family is held to a higher standard...it’s the price of being the most powerful group.”
Really? Lately, it seems as though being in the most powerful group gets you excused from standards altogether.
Hunter wrote to Archer that his father had no control over such prosecutions, that there are three co-equal branches of government. (Are you laughing yet?) And he went on to speak of Archer as part of the Biden family: “Every great family is persecuted…you are part of a great family --- not a side show, not deserted by them even in your darkest moments. That’s the way Bidens are different, and you are a Biden.”
Well, now he’s been demoted from family member to “inmate.” It does make one wonder if there are circumstances under which even Hunter might be sacrificed by the legal team ostensibly representing him.
https://www.westernjournal.com/hunter-biden-throws-past-friend-bus-demotes-family-member-inmate/
“Twitter Files” journalists back before Weaponization subcommittee
The House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government reconvened Thursday after four long months (full of weaponization) for more testimony from two of the authors recruited by Elon Musk to compile the “Twitter Files,” Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger. We’re already coming up on a year since the first of those blockbuster reports was released.
As you know from reports this week in the newsletter, the government has not let up one bit on efforts to work with “private” entities to monitor and control our messaging. Hang the Constitution.
The hearing was called to focus on the government’s role in social media censorship, specifically concerning the response to the January 6 riot and the subsequent banning of President Trump, and to examine “recent attacks on independent journalism and free expression,” according to the Judiciary Committee press release.
https://judiciary.house.gov/committee-activity/hearings/hearing-weaponization-federal-government-4
FOX NEWS’ Kevin Corke had a wrap-up on the hearing late Thursday night, including a clip from Shellenberger offering an ominous warning: “The scope, power and law-breaking of the ‘censorship industrial complex’ are even worse than we had realized back in March.”
And to those who would call conservative folks like us “deep-staters” and “conspiracy theorists” for being alarmed about this, Matt Taibbi (not a conservative) said, “This isn’t crazy conspiracy theory. We’ve already had four federal judges rule that they believe this activity violates the First Amendment. This is quite serious…”
These journalists testified to the committee about a group called the “Cyber Threat Intelligence League,” which partnered with government agencies (here we go again) such as the FBI to censor American citizens. Whistleblowers have alleged that members of this group have made up fake personas and even used burner phones as a way to counter certain voices on social media.
Democrats, predictably, slammed this hearing as a political stunt, and that surely will be the talking point on all the copycat media today.
….
But here’s something at least one Democrat, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, is concerned about: something called the Hemisphere Project, a White House-backed program in partnership with AT&T to collect phone call records of Americans and provide law enforcement access to the databases. Sen. Wyden calls this “a long-running dragnet surveillance program in which the White House pays AT&T to provide all federal, state, local and Tribal law enforcement agencies the ability to request often-warrantless searches of trillions of domestic phone records.”
A letter from the senator to Attorney General Merrick Garland describes how Hemisphere’s funding it set up to skirt the usually-mandatory federal privacy review, which makes findings public. This system has been metastasizing since its origin in 2013. THE EPOCH TIMES has details...
https://www.ntd.com/white-house-surveillance-program-collecting-trillions-of-domestic-phone-records
Also, the House Judiciary Committee is accusing the Biden administration of collaborating with social media workers at Google and YouTube (owned by Google) in 2021, specifically to suppress “unapproved” information about COVID and vaccines.
As reported by FOX BUSINESS NEWS, “...documents...reveal a level of correspondence previously unknown to the American public, as President Biden and his aides sought to promote coronavirus vaccinations...”
Sample communication, from April ‘21: “Unfortunately, the role of tech in addressing vaccine hesitancy is about to come under a massive spotlight particularly as the supply of the vaccine is soon to outpace demand.” Well, we can’t have THAT.
Never mind that so much of the “information” approved by the government (and, thus, by YouTube) was actually MIS-information. And they suppressed information that turned out to be accurate. They were not “following ‘the science.’” They were not allowing Americans to make informed decisions. Instead, they wanted us to believe that there was research showing the vaccines prevented infection and transmission, which was a lie. Heck, they apparently wanted us to believe whatever we needed to believe in order to get that “jab.” And then the next.
Laura Ingraham featured excellent must-see coverage of the government’s assault on the First Amendment on her Thursday INGRAHAM ANGLE. Watch in fascination as Democrat Rep. Dan Goldman shows (again) how stupid he is, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz suggests that Taibbi would be fine with live-streaming rape and murder online.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6342124610112
Here’s Fox New’s link to continuously-updated news on the war in Israel…
https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/december-1-israel-hamas-war
The weeklong ceasefire ended this morning, and minutes later, Israel resumed jet strikes against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip. Prime Minister Netanyahu said Hamas had "not met its obligation to release all of the women hostages today and has launched rockets at Israeli citizens." Two Hamas-linked terrorists also launched a deadly shooting attack this week at a bus stop in Jerusalem, violating the ceasefire.
Israel also confirmed the deaths of three more hostages, all kidnapped by Hamas from the Kibbutz Nir-Oz. They were the oldest hostage, Aria Zalmanowicz, 85; kindergarten teacher and mother of four May Goren, 56; and photographer and father of three Ronen Engel, 54. Our prayers and deepest sympathies to their families.
The relatives of two Israeli boys aged 12 and 16 who were released this week by Hamas say that the terrorists drugged them, beat them and branded them like cattle with a hot exhaust pipe so they could be identified if they escaped. But please, American leftists, tell me some more about how Hamas are the good guys.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/sandra-day-oconnor-former-supreme-court-justice-dead-93
A “rehearsal”
Since there still seem to be a number of deluded Westerners who really believe that most Palestinians just want to live in peace (despite a recent poll showing about 75% of Gaza residents support both Hamas and the slaughter of Jews on October 7th), here’s a punch of reality in your clueless faces. Hamas' leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, made his first public statement since the initial atrocities, and it was to declare that October 7th was “just a rehearsal.”
I’d explain what this means, but I couldn’t say it better than Bonchie at Redstate.com:
“Hamas, which is the governing authority in Gaza, has no interest in the two-state solution being bandied about by clownish Western politicians. They are not going to suddenly disengage and act like human beings if Israel takes down the border fencing and extends a hand of peace. Instead, they would simply use that as an opportunity to kill more Jews because, and stick with me here, they just want to kill Jews.
American college campuses and newsrooms, among other places, are filled with naive imbeciles who believe that all cultures are the same and ultimately want the same things. They simply can't fathom anyone could think differently than they do. No matter how much evidence emerges, they refuse to believe that Gazans don't want a secular state, living in peace with their Jewish neighbors. Rather than living in reality, they project their own desires onto a group of people who do not share them…
This isn't complicated. Hamas just wants to kill Jews and wipe Israel off the map. There isn't a more complicated geopolitical explanation for their barbarism.”
I think that should make it clear enough for even The Squad to understand it.
The Newsom-DeSantis debate
Before I say anything about the Gavin Newsom-Ron DeSantis debate last night on Fox News, I’d like to talk about an episode of “The Andy Griffith Show,” one of the later, color ones from season 7. Stay with me.
In this episode called “Politics Begin at Home,” there’s an open seat on the Mayberry City Council. Aunt Bee’s garden club ladies convince her to run because she’s so likable and charismatic and full of ideas. She doesn’t know that Andy has already convinced county clerk Howard Sprague to run. When he refuses to back her because he thinks Howard is more qualified, she accuses him of being a male chauvinist (hey, it was the ‘60s.) People see Howard as a nerd and a stiff, and his chances look bleak until the debate.
When asked about important issues like building a new bridge or replacing the sewers under Main Street, Aunt Bee’s answers are all the same empty rhetoric designed to get applause (“If it is the will of the people that a bridge be built, then it SHALL be built! The will of the people will always be my guiding star!”) But Howard responds, “Well, that would be a waste of the taxpayers’ money,” and offers detailed alternative solutions that are cheaper and more effective. When there’s time for one more question, Aunt Bee asks it: Why would anyone vote for her when her opponent is obviously far more qualified?
And that was the Newsom-DeSantis debate in a nutshell, minus the fantasy part at the end where the charismatic but terrible candidate had enough integrity and civic mindedness to admit to being obviously unqualified and endorsed the other guy. Again, this was Mayberry in 1966, not the real world in 2023.
I’m not going to recap all the points of the debate, but it mostly amounted to Newsom telling the kind of whoppers that are so at odds with everything you know and everything you’ve seen with your own eyes that you might need help picking your jaw up off the floor. He had the unenviable job (which he voluntarily took on; this debate debacle was his idea) of trying to convince us that Florida is a failing prison state while California is a shining beacon of success and freedom. DeSantis remained more of a stolid Howard Sprague type than a fiery debater, but he batted most of the lies out of the park with the seldom-used debate weapon known as “facts.”
Here are five particularly interesting moments from the debate.
But for many observers, the moment when if it had been a fight, the refs would’ve stopped it came when DeSantis said this:
“I was talking to a fella who had made the move from California to Florida. He was telling me that Florida’s much better governed, safer, better budget, lower taxes. Then he paused and said ‘by the way, I’m Gavin Newsom’s father-in-law.’”
As Bonchie at Redstate observed, “I'm pretty sure Christmas dinner is going to be awkward this year.”
Another highlight was when DeSantis countered Newsom’s claim that California is “the Freedom State” (recall that’s the state where someone was arrested during the pandemic for walking alone on a windy beach without a face mask) by listing all the things you’re free to do there, including defecating in the street. Which he illustrated by taking out a “poop map” that warns people where human feces has been spotted in San Francisco (Spoiler alert: everywhere!)
Newsom was so bereft of actual talking points that at one point, he went off on a diatribe at DeSantis for supposedly mispronouncing Kamala Harris’ name (Is it KAH-ma-la or “Ka-MAH-la”?), which has to rank in the mid-nine digits on anyone’s list of things to give a darn about, and I can’t help suspecting that includes Kamala Harris.
These issues are worth bringing up to illustrate the stark difference between how well red states and blue states are run. But I think all you really need to know is the U-Haul Index, which I believe we invented on my radio show over a decade ago, and now I see it everywhere. As of last night, renting a 20-foot U-Haul moving truck from Los Angeles to Miami for nine days costs $5,139.00. Renting the same truck from Miami to Los Angeles is only $3898.00. U-Haul is so desperate to get anyone to drive one of their trucks back to California that they’ll give you a $1241 discount just to return it for them so they can rent it to the next escapee.
Finally, why should anyone care about a debate between DeSantis, whom, as Newsom taunted, will not be the GOP nominee, and Newsom, who insisted he wasn’t running and backs Joe Biden fully? Because there’s always a chance that due to legal issues or voter second thoughts, Trump might not be the nominee, and this debate gave DeSantis his first real chance to shine instead of being one of a crowd of people shouting at each other.
And there’s a much greater chance that Biden will be pushed – sorry, “convinced” – to drop out at the last minute, and the Dems will need a replacement (that won’t be Kamala, no matter how she pronounces it.) Newsom claims to be uninterested, but like everything else he said last night, that’s a transparent lie. If he didn’t have national ambitions, he’d be trying to fix his own state instead of running around the country badmouthing better-run red states. He wanted to make it known that he’s tanned, hair-gelled and ready to step in the second Joe breaks a hip.
But if this debate was his big chance to show that we should let him do to America what he’s done to California, it was a blunder of epic proportions.
Related: Good analysis of the debate by a Californian who knows Gavin Newsom only too well:
https://www.theblaze.com/columns/opinion/who-really-lost-the-newsom-vs-desantis-debate
Permalink: https://www.mikehuckabee.com/2023/12/huckabee-post-the-newsom-desantis-debate
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