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The Beginning of The Self-Destruction of the Ghouliani Presidential Campaign
Websters II New College Dictionary: "ghoul": 1. an evil spirit or demon in Muslim folklore said to plunder graves and feed on corpses. 2. a grave robber. 3. one who delights in the morbid or loathsome.
4. A former NYC Mayor who earns tens of million dollars and catapults to frontrunner status among Republican presidential hopefuls by standing on the corpses of 3,000 dead 9/11 victims and hundreds of dead and thousands of sick first responders.
For anyone who has watched the career of the angry, egomaniacal, authoritarian, thin-skinned, Nixonian, thrice divorced, former Mayor of New York City, it was just a matter of time before the carefully painted facial mask of the hero of 9/11 would start to slip away -- revealing the real face of the ghoul beneath.
Hizzoner, whose popularity ratings among New Yorkers had slipped to a Bushian 30 percent by September 10, 2001, has ridden a single piece of video tape -- Giuliani with his entourage marching uptown from the burning World Trade Center, covered with soot, barking orders from a bull horn -- first to a multi- million dollar fortune, and now to the status of frontrunner among Republican presidential hopefuls, all of the on the corpses of the 3,000 dead in the Twin Towers (including my cousin) and hundreds more dead and thousands more sick rescue workers. Yet it was Ghouliani's own ego-driven decision, against the warning of his own head of Emergency Management, to place the NYC Emergency Command Center in the World Trade Center, that led him to be wandering the streets with no place to go, ironically creating the very video that catapulted him to hero status.
So far, this one trick pony has gotten away with it. The mainstream press has been reluctant to unmask Guiliani's self-proclaimed status of Dear Leader.
Sooner or later, his out-of-control ego and sense of self-aggrandizement would inevitably lead to his unmasking himself and his carefully constructed hero's image would start to collapse.
That deconstruction process started on August 9 at a Cincinnati campaign stop. Mayor Ghouliani proudly proclaimed that he spent more time after the terrorist attacks at Ground Zero than many of the heroic rescue workers and faced the same health risks as they did -- over 10,000 now sick and several hundred already dead from breathing in deadly pollutants while working to dig bodies out of the wreckage without respirators that the Guiliani administration failed to require that they wear.
Ghouliani called himself "one of" the Sept. 11 cleanup workers and said he was "at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers...This is not a mayor or a governor or a president who's sitting in an ivory tower...I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I'm one of them". (You can find Hizzoner's statements here.)
The outrage from former rescue workers was instantaneous. "I found his comment to be disgracefully insulting," said John J. McDonnell, a battalion chief and president of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association of New York. How could the former-mayor, whose presence at Ground Zero was taken up with endless photo ops to draw attention to himself, compare himself to the thousands of police, firefighters, and volunteers who worked 12- and 14-hour days for weeks and months to try to rescue the injured who might still be lying beneath the rubble, and to find the bodies and body-parts of those who didn't make it to give victims' loved ones the chance to give them a decent burial?
According to Michael J. Palladino, President of the Detective's Endowment Association of New York City, many of his members logged 30 hours in the first two days after the attacks, and most averaged more than 400 hours at Ground Zero.
Last Friday, The New York Times reported that exhaustive research of Giuliani's archive shows that in the three month period between Sept. 17, 2001 and Dec. 16, 2001, Hizzoner was in and around ground zero for a total of 29 hours, even as rescue workers put in 12-hour shifts. According to The Times, the 29 hours involved 41 appearances, mostly to give tours to other officials and foreign dignitaries.
On Saturday, Salon.com revealed that between Sept. 25 and Nov. 4, Giuliani spent 58 hours at Yankees games or flying to them, twice as long as as The New York Timesreported he spent at Ground Zero. According to Wayne Barrett, during his administration, Giuliani frequently used a police boat to haul himself and his guests to Yankee Games. The Yankees gave Giuliani diamond and gold Yankee World Series rings for 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000 worth a minimum of $200,000 for which he only paid $16,000, years after he left office. No mayor of any other American city in recent memory has received World Series Rings from their teams. The rings may have been illegal gifts in conflict with New York Conflict of Interest Laws. Shortly before leaving office, Giuliani renegotiated the Yankee's lease on Yankee Stadium to allow the Yankees to break their lease on 60 days notice, instead of five years, if the they determined that the city was unlikely to proceed with a new stadium Giuliani had promised to build them with over $1 billion in taxpayer money. When Mayor Bloomberg took over from Giuliani, he quickly killed Giuliani's plans to subsidize a stadium for the Yankees as unaffordable in the post 9/11 era. As Salon stated "by his own standard, Giuliani was one of the Yankees more than he was one of the rescue workers."
After 9/11, Giuliani showed little concern for the safety of the rescue workers. On September 28, he stated "the air is safe and acceptable." As late as the end of October, only 29 percent of the workers at ground zero were wearing respirators. According to an exhaustive report by investigative reporter Wayne Barrett published in The Village Voice the same week as Giuliani was claiming he was at Ground Zero as much as the rescue workers, New York City had test result showing hazardous levels of asbestos up to seven blocks away from Ground Zero, but decided not the make the results public. Federal EPA official Bruce Sprague sent an October 5 letter to the city complaining about "very inconsistent compliance" with respiratory protection, after unsuccessful conversations with Giuliani aides about the problem.
Republican EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman said that there were "telephone calls, telephone meetings, and meetings with the city" every day, with the EPA repeating the "necessity of wearing respirators." Whitman said she "would call my people at midnight after watching the 11 o'clock news and say, "I'm still seeing them without respirators." She said she "was very frustrated."
Meanwhile, Giuliani himself showed up for most of his short photo ops at Ground Zero with no protection against the toxic pollution, helping to set a macho example, and failing to show the rescue workers how to protect themselves. It was like showing up to a meeting on AIDS prevention without a condom.
An internal memo to a deputy mayor estimated early in the cleanup that there would be 35,000 potential plaintiffs against the city, partly because rescue workers were "provided with faulty or not equipment (i.e. respirators). Some estimate that as many may eventually die from side effects of pollution at the site as died from the bombing. Giuliani wrote a letter to Congress asking Congress to pass a law capping New York's liability for 9/11 health risks at $350 million.
Giuliani was clearly lying when he claimed to have spent as much time at Ground Zero as the rescue workers. Beyond that, Barrett's Village Voice article exposes five big lies Giuliani has told about 9/11. Readers may find it here.
A few tidbits:
--"I think the thing that distinguishes me on terrorism is, I have more experience dealing with it," claims Giuliani. "As a United States Attorney, I investigated the Leon Klinghoffer murder by Yasir Arafat," Giuliani claimed at a July appearance in a Maryland Synagogue. Republican Reagan appointee Deputy Assistant Attorney General Victoria Toensing, who headed the first Justice Department "terrorism unit" and who filed the criminal complaint in the Klinghoffer murder says no one in Giuliani's federal prosecuter's office "was involved at all." In the only terrorism case Giuiliani worked on as a U.S. Prosecuter, the judge threw out 46 of the 55 counts because of errors by Giuliani's office and Giuliani personally filed papers terminating the case in his last month in office.
--Giuliani's claims that, unlike Democrats, the first World Trade Center Bombing in 2003 woke him up to the dangers of Islamic Terrorism. "I assumed from the moment I came into office that NYC would be the subject of a terrorist attack," in told Time magazine in 2001 when it made him "Person of the Year". In fact, Giuliani didn't create the NYC Office of Emergency Management until 27 months into his term and he didn't open the OEM's emergency command center until six years later.
--The terrorist who engineered the 1993 WTC bombing told the FBI they were coming back to finish the job. Against the advice of Giuliani's handpicked head of OEM, who recommended that the OEM Command Center be located in Brooklyn in a neighborhood less likely to be attacked, Giuliani insisted it had to be walking distance from City Hall and put it a #7 World Trade Center. Lou Anemone, the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the NYPD wrote memos slamming the site, saying later "I've never seen in my life 'walking distance' as some kind of standard for crisis management...But you don't want to confuse Giuliani with the facts...I guess you had to be there in 1993 to know how strongly we felt it was the wrong place."
In fact, the only reason that Giuliani was captured on video tape marching uptown covered in dust -- the tape that catapulted Giuliani into a national hero, a multi-millionaire, and a presidential frontrunner -- is that the Command Center had to be evacuated and Giuliani had nowhere to go.
--Giuliani had his private office in the $61 million Command Center equipped with a humidor of cigars, monogrammed towels in the bathroom, and a private elevator so he could come and go without being noticed. He visited his office there often, even on weekends, bringing girlfriend Judi Nathan there long before he announced their relationship in a press conference before telling his own wife.
--New York City Police and Fireman used different radio frequencies so they could not communicate with each other in the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center attack. Despite the federal government giving New York City the radio frequencies to make the radios inter-operable 1995, Giuliani did nothing to make that happen. In fact on 9/11, firefighters were still using the same radios that "we knew didn't work" in the 1993 attack. The International Association of Fire Fighters claims that as many as 121 firefighters may lost their lives because they couldn't hear evacuation orders to get out of the North Tower, after police helicopters warned that it was about to collapse.
Thus, Giuliani, the man The Onion says is "running for President of 9/11" did little to prepare for a terrorist attack before 9/11, may have led to the deaths of over 100 firefighters on 9/11, and may have taken few steps to protect hundreds or thousands of rescue workers from sickness and death from lung disease in the aftermath of 9/11. Far from showing "Leadership," as Giuliani's best-selling book is entitled, Giuliani's performance both before and after 9/11 reveals incompetence, lack of compassion, and extraordinay egotism.
Ghoul: a grave robber, an evil spirit who plunders graves and feeds on corpses. After leaving office a few months after 9/11, Ghouliani began a speaking tour based on his 9/11 heroism, charging as much as $200,000 an engagement. In 2002 he reported $8 million in speaking income; this past year it was more than $11 million. He started a security firm with his ex-Police Commissioner and future convicted felon Bernard Kerik to charge companies and governments millions of dollars for advice on how to protect themselves against terrorism and other security threats. Having spent most of his life on a government salary, Ghouliani used 9/11 to turn himself into a multi-mllionaire
At last, it seems, the cracks in the foundations of Giuliani's carefully built image of 9/11 hero are starting to show, as his own ego-driven words as a "fellow 9/11 rescue worker" betray his hypocricy. As a presidential candidate, Guiliani is one-trick pony--supposed the only candidate who truly understands the threat of Islamic terrorism to the homeland and has the experience, courage and vision to stand up to the terrorists.
Soon, all the kings horses and all the kings men, won't be able to put Rudy Dumpty back together again.
Until now, the mainstream press has used kid gloves in failing to raise questions about Giuliani's self-proclaimed status as anti-terrorist superhero. If the blatant hypocrisy of Rudy's own words and the devastating facts in the Barrett investigative report don't get the mainstream press off their asses to start asking some pointed questions of America's Mayor, then his Republican opponents have all the opposition research they need to take Hizzoner down.
And if the Republicans don't dare to puncture Rudy's balloon, then the eventual Democratic nominee almost certainly will. Where once it seemed that Rudy might be the most dangerous Republican nominee for Democrats -- his supposed moderation on social issues like abortion and gay rights giving him the chance to capture a few normally blue Northeastern and Midwest states -- he now appears as a vulnerable fraud. If Mayor Ghouliani is the best that the Republicans have to offer, bring him on.
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Wow, I once thought vitriol, invective and self-righteous diatribe were the exclusive domain of the far right.
I have learned more ways to deny, demean, dehumanize, and destroy in this one posting plus comments than I ever thought possible.
If this is the Democratic Party, I want nothing to do with it.
To continue...
And sent all the Louisiana National Guard men and other resources, which would have come in handy when the levees broke for lack of maintenance, to invade and occupy a foreign land which hadn't attacked us and wasn't posing any danger to us.
So, nothing to keep the problem from happening, and nothing to stop it from getting worse once it began.
"il Rudi," former mayor of NYC, is blaming the governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans for the disaster.
Because they are Democrats, and in spite of the fact that the Senators and Representatives from Louisiana, predominately Republican, completely failed to fight for their constituents safety and the safety and welfare of one of the most strategically valuable port cities is America.
Since it was asked, somebody seems to want to deflect attention from il rudi mishandling New York by bringing in the REPUBLICAN mishandling that led to the Katrina tragedy, so here goes:
Disaster For Dummies (tm)
People need fresh water to survive.
Water flows along hills.
And hills are along fault lines.
That's why the ground is pointing up instead of laying flat.
The Mississippi is along a huge fault line where the North American continent is splitting straight up the middle.
On the next part of the equation, explaining why exactly people stay in dangerous places, along with water there has to be some sort of road, in this case the Mississippi, or coastline. Or some really really good farmland.
In South Louisiana and all along the coast, the money comes from ocean traffic.
No money, no town.
No town to collect the money toward, the money would go elsewhere.
The sea and river deltas have inherent dangers, hurricanes for one, and a shifting course for the river.
The levees keep the river out of your backyard or out of your business interest, and it's a time-tested method of dealing with that problem.
If the levees were maintained, that is.
They've been there as long as there's been European trade-based civilization there.
George W comes off the wall with some true cowboy shit about "People who live below sea level and behind seawalls and levees are just asking for it" and cut the funding for the levee maintenance.
Guiliani will be the republican nominee. The GOP is full of neocons just aching to see Clinton become president.
But it is pleasant to see the Right Wing Troll Patrol coming out in defense of "il Rudi".
Sure, he has supporters. So did Hitler and his other other hero, Mussolini. I know I'm not supposed to use terms like fascist to describe him, but that's his rule, not mine.
And get this straight, if you can. "il Rudi" isn't ever going to be able to compel me to obey his will... ever... and neither are his followers.
What a riveting article!!! I could live on 300,000 dollars the rest of my life fairly comfortable. Don't think I'm from the same planet as politicians.
JJ
http://natureshows.blogspot.com/
Ummm...his polling numbers keep getting stronger and he keeps raising more money. How exactly are the wheels coming off?
Whose polls? and compared to whom, exactly? About New Orleans, why was the levee system essentially abandoned by the Federal government, even while the Federal Government, including FEMA and Homeland Insecurity, were claiming that New Orleans was a very strategic location and a major target for terrorism?
The idea tha a levee system wasn't practical over the long term ignores the fact that the technology has been proven effective over the past 800 years and more in the Netherlands. The reason the BigPigs in Washington ignored the levees was, in the words of George Bush, "people can't build and sustain a city below sea level". Ok not an exact quote.
He got all the Right wing liars like Bull Oh,Really? and Ann and Rush to echo the sentiment time and again. Then did the one thing that would make the prophecy fulfill itself: he constantly cut funding to repair and maintain the levees, AND constantly cut funding for FEMA in favor of funding his illegal invasion of Iraq.
Clue: The funding for emergency evacuation, emergency cleanup, is effectively the in the same sorry shape for ALL American cities great and small.
The town in Kansas just this summer which got hit by a mile-wide tornado, and there was no remedial apparatus... and why?
Because the National Guard, with the equipment that would have been needed, were in Iraq, trying desperately to undo the damage to that nation wrought by Herr Bush and his supporters, like "il Rudi".
On Real Clear Politics Giuliani is leading for the Republican nomination by an average of 11.2% and in a general election he is in a statistical tie with either Clinton, Obama, or Edwards. Please.
There is only candidate that the people in the caves of Afghanistan are absolutely mortiifed of. Guess who?
Anyone wishing to see how Democratic politicians would have handled 9/11 have only to look at the behavior of Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin at Katrina. Bitch, whine, moan, blame everybody else, point fingers. I am so sick of "He was just doing what any mayor would have done," when there is such a blatant counterexample from real life available.
So from two people you can extrapolate to the entire party? Well, then, let's look at how Bush and FEMA handled their end of Katrina, how Bush and Cheney lied us into Iraq, how Bush and Cheney left bin Laden at Tora Bora - to lie us into Iraq, and that's just the very first three that come to mind.
Your own party's track record is nothing whatsoever to be very proud of - then again, I think you probably really know that and are just blowing smoke.
Now for Giuliani, there's the misplacement of his love-nest "command center", his spending twice as much time at Yankee games as at Ground Zero, his "family values" (well, marrying your cousin has to count as something!) and...well, the whole sordid mess Bernard Kerik represents, ahh, that's enough, you get the idea - or at least some of the other readers will...
Quote:
So from two people you can extrapolate to the entire party? Well, then, let's look at how Bush and FEMA handled their end of Katrina, how Bush and Cheney lied us into Iraq, how Bush and Cheney left bin Laden at Tora Bora - to lie us into Iraq, and that's just the very first three that come to mind
Talking specifically about how a mayor has responded to a epic catastrophe, Katrina and 9/11 are the only two that come to mind. Period. The end.
QUOTE:
Your own party's track record is nothing whatsoever to be very proud of - then again, I think you probably really know that and are just blowing smoke
How do you know what party I'm in? Because I criticized Ray Nagin, that means I'm a Republican??????
QUOTE: Now for Giuliani, there's the misplacement of his love-nest "command center", his spending twice as much time at Yankee games as at Ground Zero, his "family values" (well, marrying your cousin has to count as something!) and...well, the whole sordid mess Bernard Kerik represents, ahh, that's enough, you get the idea - or at least some of the other readers will...
There don't seem to be too many people in the world who take Jerry Haeur's criticsms of Giuliani seriously, if then polls are any indication. Secondly, you may not know this, but politicians conduct official business and have meetings at sporting events all the time. Constantly, year round, Democrats and Republicans. You appear to believe that Giuliani sat in a box seat for the whole 9 innings doing nothing but rooting at a ball game, would that be correct?
And when in the world did you ever hear Giuliani in this campaign talk about 'family values"????
Amazing. I lived in New York prior to and during Rudi's being Mayor. I would vote for him in a heart beat. He is a competent, intelligent, passionate, fair minded, tolerant and practical man who can get things done and totally turned NY from being a cess pool of shit like San Francisco and Los Angeles and into one of the truely wonderful cities of the world.
I assume you are blind and deaf? Yeah, NYC is wonderful if you ignore the crumbling infrastructure, insane over-crowding, back-breaking taxes, pathetic school system and a couple million illegal immigrants. Yeah, Rudy's Storm trooper tactics with the police department brought violent crime down, of course during that time period it dropped in most major cities. He got the sex shops and hookers out of Times Square, though it is hardly like they are gone, just less visible. The moment there is an economic recession and Wall Street ceases pumping billions into the municipal budget NYC is going to go bankrupt. There is no plan or money for fixing the roads, bridges, tunnels, water or sewer system. Remember the black-out of 2004? I think all you need to know about Rudy is that his own kids hate him....case closed!
He's also a liar whose own children won't speak to him and who married his cousin, then announced he was divorcing his second wife in a press conference (news to her!) and is now married to a golddigging diva who he skulked around with while on the City of New York's payroll. He's roundly hated by firefighters all over the country as well as his own children. His business associates are shady at best and criminal at worst. His daughter endorses Obama Barack (she must get her intelligence from her mother)! His son hasn't spoken to him in years! If a guy can't even get the support of his own children, what does that say about him being "competent, intelligent, passionate, fair minded, tolerant and practical". The wheels are falling off Giuliani's bus, couldn't happen to a more deserving guy!
Hey, hey, hey why the diss on the CA cities? What'd they ever do to you? Every cities got its problems, but as a Nor. Cal. native, I am proud that many foreigners visiting the US consider that cess pool of s@#$, as you so refered to San Fransisco, as their favorite US city. At any rate, dissing and comparing cities is completely irrelevent. The question is what Rudy Guliani did for New York, not what Willie Brown did for SF. Willie Brown isn't running for President, Rudy Guliani is.
What a dishonest writer you are! Rudy retracted his comment the very next day! If you had a decent bone in your body, you would say so.
From MM: Rudy never apologized. All he said was that he didn't mean to compete with the rescue workers. Anyway, the fact that he could he even begin to compare himself to the rescue workers who spent hundreds of hours pulling bodies out of Ground Zero at the risk to their lives and health, while all he did was show up for photo ops, shows Ghouliani's egomaniacal dishonesty.
He didn't apologize, he simply said he didn't mean what he said.
Seems like there's a lot of that going around, Mitt Romney didn't actually mean what he said about HIS sons not needing to be sent into a war he wants to continue sending OUR sons into.
All these cats saying how they don't actually mean what they say, but you know something? WE ALREADY KNEW THAT!!
And this "Apology" is always after somebody on the Angry Left points it out to them that they've once again applied foot to mouth.
Wow, GREAT! It is wonderful to see someone have the guts to call Rudy out. It has killed me since this bastard announced his run on the Presidency that the mainstream media have simply ignored the fact that until 9/11/01 this jerk was HATED in NYC, the place where they knew him best. Yes, he showed leadership on 9/11, he didn't panic, he wasn't Ray Nagel, he was exactly what we needed on that day. He was calm, he was defiant, but he was NOT a hero!!! Heroes are the rescue workers who went into a burning tower. The Republican Party is in sad shape when the best they can offer us are liars and guys who are slightly right of Attila the Hun (see Fred Thompson). Is Mitt going to do for the US what he did for Massachusetts? Collapsing tunnels, shrinking economy and gay marriage? (I actually approve of the last - but I don't think most Republicans do!) John McCain has turned himself into a walking punchline. Thompson has read the situation correctly to the extent that Republicans are desperate for a candidate they can believe in, but he is NOT it. One could always excuse Reagan for the more barbaric of his comments because, well, he just wasn't that bright. Fred knows the difference, he just doesn't care. Enough, thanks for the column.
Gay marriage? When pigs fly!
Guiliani isn't going after the Black vote, nor is he going after the Firemen's vote, nor the policemen's vote, nor the minority vote, nor the school teachers' vote; he's going after the Bush vote. The folks who voted Bush into office, twice.
I await similar pieces on Democratic candidates Clinton, Obama, and Edwards that I have seen of late on HuffPo about Rudy, McCain, and Thompson.
When you see any of the above named conducting themselves in the same appalling manner, perhaps.
Until then, hold your water, Republiqueen.
Maybe you won't see similar pieces on Clinton, Obama and Edwards because they aren't as loathsome? And if we thought they were, we probably would be watching Fox News right now.
Fox Nudes?
The DumFox Noose Nutwerx do that routinely and often. And tell their viewers and listeners to post the wonderful news on the Lefty side of the internet, just so we poor deprived liberals don't miss out on the rantings of Bull-o and Hannity. But thank you very much for your concerns.
We appreciate all the help, cause Lord knows we're too stupid to figure out how to turn on DumFox Noose.
McCain is dead and Rudy is dying. Big surprise. It was looking like Romney from the start. The big money social conservative who could talk his way out of flipping on abortion by faking sincerity and old-fashioned family values. He's slick as teflon and even looks vaguely Reagan-ish.
You have to be a calculating triangulator to rise in the Democratic ranks, and you have to be an elusively slippery slime-ball to get the Republican nomination. McCain, Giuliani, and even Thompson all lack that thin layer of slime that allows Republicans to go about their business without calling attention to their nefarious intentions.
Romney is the presumptive GOP nominee. Let's focus on exposing the ruthless corporatist behind the slimy coating of throwback values.
The Republican candidates, save for McCain, who unfortunately for them happens to be a racist lunatic, are all for sending other people to kill and die in their never ending war.
Other people meaning not them, and not their families.
Although "il Rudi" might want to send his kids off to Iraq just to shut them up.
Mitt with his lame comment that he "really wanted to go to VietNam" and conveniently forgetting that even if he wasn't drafted, he could easily have volunteered and put in a request to actually be sent to Southeast Asia, maybe thinks he's pulled a truly slick move.
But those of us who DO remember that he could have volunteered can remind him, and everybody else, frequently and often.
"il Rudi" is shark bait. The writer got it wrong, the beginning of the end for him wasn't this year, it was when he and his Mob buddies scored all that scrap metal, including and especially all those gold and silver ingots, plundered them, and the next day started the Scoop and Dump method of cleanup rather than search for the bodies of fallen heroes anymore.
Then, when the Firefighters Union marched on City Hall, he sicked the police on them.
People who had heard him and every politician who could benefit from the association praising the heroism of the FDNY and then watching the sorry sight of New York police beating up on New York firemen,...
Then see him at every Yankees game with that stupid FDNY cap on, like he's really going to fool somebody with it...
BAM !
Outstanding post! Words of a real pundit.
What planet is Romney the front runner on? Giuliani is leading in all the polls and in the money game.
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