ACV Democratic News
The Meals On Wheels Association of America is the oldest and largest national organization composed of and representing local, community-based Senior Nutrition Programs in all 50 U.S. states, as well as the U.S. Territories.
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All told, there are some 5,000 local Senior Nutrition Programs in the United States. These programs provide well over one million meals to seniors who need them each day. Some programs serve meals at congregate locations like senior centers, some programs deliver meals directly to the homes of seniors whose mobility is limited, and many programs provide both services.
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While remarkable, the one million meals per day figure under-estimates the size and shape of our network and its reach and influence in communities across America. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of seniors who receive meals, there are many thousands of professionals employed at the various local Senior Nutrition Programs across the U.S.
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More notable than that is the virtual army of volunteers who also "work" for these programs. It is said that this group, numbering between 800,000 and 1.7 million individuals, is the largest volunteer army in the nation.
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Now enter Paul Ryan and the House Republicans dead set to defund these services to the elderly. This is what Republicans stand for and if You are wasting your vote on Republicans then this is what you stand for also.
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"Let Those Old People Starve." Paul Ryan and the House Republicans
The Republican House voted Thursday to override cuts to the Pentagon’s budget mandated by last summer's debt deal and replace them with spending reductions to food stamps, defunding Meals on Wheels and other mandatory social programs. In essence the Republicans are reneging on the deal they struck on the debt deal and replacing funding for the Pentagon on the backs of the poor and elderly.
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Members approved the Sequester Replacement Reconciliation Act in a party-line 218-199 vote. As expected, the bill was supported by nearly all Republicans — only 16 opposed it, and no Democrats supported it.
Republicans voting against the bill were Reps. Justin Amash (Mich.), Roscoe Bartlett (Md.), Charlie Bass (N.H.), John Duncan (Tenn.), Mike Fitzpatrick (Pa.), Chris Gibson (N.Y.), Louie Gohmert (Texas), Jaime Herrera Beutler (Wash.), Tim Johnson (Ill.), Walter Jones (N.C.), Raul Labrador (Idaho), Steve LaTourette (Ohio), Frank LoBiondo (N.J.), Todd Platts (Pa.), Ed Whitfield (Ky.) and Frank Wolf (Va.). GOP Rep. James Sensenbrenner (Wis.) voted present.
Thank You to the decent Republicans who voted against defunding Meals on Wheels. 16 brave Congressmen floating in a sea of Republican ignorance. Notice please that Bob Goodlatte voted to let the old people starve. In case you don't know Goodlatte is the sorry excuse for a human being that pseudo represents the 6th Congressional District which includes Amherst County.
Republicans cast the bill as a first step back toward controlling federal spending, after years of allowing spending and deficits to balloon. All the money saved by the cuts was moved to the Pentagon's budget for military spending thus negating any savings.
Paul "Ayn Rand" Ryan
“We believe the purpose of the sequester was to replace the fact that Congress isn't governing,” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said during the opening debate on the bill. “Well, let's have Congress govern. That's why we're doing this.” Cutting the social peograms and meals for the elderly fits perfectly in the Ayn Rand philosophy that Paul Ryan is guided by.
Amherst Virginia Democratic News
Luckily Bob Goodlatte has a challenger this time around and we have a chance to change a sorry situation with our vote. Andy Schmookler is anxious to provide the 6th District of Virginia with the kind of representation required for these tough times.
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WHAT ANDY STANDS FOR:
• Government for the People, Not Just the Powerful Few
• Restoring Integrity to American Democracy
• Opportunity for All to Fulfill their God-given Potential
• “One Person, One Vote,” not “One Dollar, One Vote” • Passing on to Our Children a Nation and Planet as Healthy
As The One Given Us.
• Leadership that Brings Out the Best in the American People
• Seeking and Speaking the Truth
• Individual Liberty Combined with Wise and Constructive
Government
Andy Schmookler was born in the spring of 1946 to parents who had grown up in poverty.
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During the depression, Andy’s mother, Pauline, had to drop out of school at the age of 15 to support her ill mother and her two younger sisters. Decades later, though she never graduated from high school, she got her college and two masters degrees and became a high school teacher of literature.
His father, Jacob was able to go to college thanks to his own mother’s working 14-hour days at a sewing machine to make it possible. After World War II, Andy’s father earned his doctorate
in economics and began an academic career.
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By the time Andy was 10, his family had a secure footing in the American middle class.
His parents raised him and his brother, Ed. They taught their sons to have passion for justice, a deep commitment to honesty and integrity, and they instilled the value of hard work. For Andy’s father, the honest pursuit of the truth was a paramount value. He taught the discipline of reasoned inquiry. And for his mother, a key value was that human worth does not lie in rank or wealth, but in beauty of soul, and that gems can be found in every group and at every stratum.
Andy and April AVDN
Equipped with these values, and with a love of learning:
•Andy graduated Valedictorian in his high school class in the Twin Cities in Minnesota.
•He graduated with highest honors in the field of Social Relations from Harvard University.
•For his graduate studies he attended the University of Chicago in Social Thought and at Yale in American Studies.
•Andy earned his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union in a program specially created to accommodate his original theory to explain the way that human civilization has developed.
His doctoral work was published The Parable of the Tribes (University of California Press, 1984; second edition from SUNY Press, 1995), which was awarded the Erik H. Erikson prize by the
International Society for Political Psychology.
Amherst Virginia Democratic News
This book led the way to a successful career as the author of many published books, most of them seeking to understand the forces that must be dealt with by our country, and by humankind generally, in order to create a good future for ourselves and for the generations to come.
The books are entitled:
•Out of Weakness: Healing the Wounds that Drive Us to War (Bantam Books, 1988),
•Sowings and Reapings: The Cycling of Good and Evil in the Human System (Knowledge Systems, 1989).
•The Illusion of Choice: How the Market Economy Shapes Our Destiny (SUNY Press, 1993, with translations published subsequently in Japan and Korea)
•Fool’s Gold: The Fate of Values in a World of Goods (Harper Collins, 1993).
•Debating the Good Society: A Quest to Bridge America’s Moral Divide (M.I.T. Press, 1999).
•Serving as an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. He helped with the analysis of possible future challenges for American policy-makers.
•Spearheading a project with the Public Agenda Foundation, in which he interviewed the best minds in the country, in various related fields, on how the United States might best achieve security in an age of weapons of mass destruction.
•Being hired, in the 1990s, by the United States Army to help with a project on the prevention of biological terrorism.
•Teaching at both the college level (Prescott College, Georgetown University) and at the high school level (Albuquerque Academy).
•Speaking at forums across the country such as the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, the Washington Ethical Society, and as Presidential lecturer at the University of Montana.
•Publishing his commentaries in newspapers across the country for the past thirty-five years, and broadcasting them on radio stations nationwide.
•Serving as a consultant to one of America’s premier corporations.
But most of all, Andy Schmookler has followed a sense of calling. His first book was inspired by a visionary experience that proved life-changing. It led him to choose a life dedicated to service. For the great majority of the past forty years, Andy has done the work he senses he is supposed to do. Making money and getting ahead have not dictated his life’s course.
Amherst News
For almost twenty years, Andy appeared regularly on WSVA radio out of Harrisonburg, Virginia in an entirely uncompensated role. He spoke with the people of the Shenandoah Valley about the issues of the day. He discussed questions of meaning and value that we all face in our day to day lives. Andy did this because he believes in the importance of meaningful dialogue in the search for truth and mutual understanding.
Beginning in 2004, Andy perceived something troubling about the dynamics operating within American politics. Believing that the nation was being damaged by a failure to confront the truth about the forces at work before our eyes, Andy devoted himself full-time –again without pay—to investigating and discussing the moral crisis emerging in American society.
It is this same sense of calling, this same dedication to service, and this same sense of America being imperiled, that has led to Andy’s running for Congress in Virginia’s 6th District. He wants to rally his fellow citizens to uphold the ideals of our American democracy.
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Andy is a devoted husband and father.
He’s married to April Moore, a writer and lover of the earth, and between them they have three children: Nathaniel, who just
graduated from Harvard and wants to be a writer of fiction; Terra who lives in California and is a licensed clinical psychologist happily engaged to be married; and Aaron, married and a teacher and creator of theater.
Andy is proud of his three children, all continuing the family tradition of working hard in service to the values they hold dear.
After twenty-five years of marriage to April, he is more in love with her than ever.
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Shaun Winkler, White Supremacist Idaho Republican Sheriff Candidate, Hosts Cross Burning Event
Racist Republican Runs For Sherrif
Shaun Winkler, a white supremacist in Idaho running as a Republican for Bonner County sheriff, is defending his recent cross burning ceremony, after having invited members of the media to attend the event last week.
"Mainstream society looks at cross lighting as a symbol of hate, but it predates the Klan by hundreds of years," Winkler told the Bonner County Daily Bee. "We look at it more as a religious symbol."
Winkler went on to claim the ritual has Scottish roots dating back hundreds of years, but his status as a Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard and his candid admissions of racial and religious prejudice suggest that the decision to burn the cross may take inspiration from a more recent and ugly practice.
"Most people don't know that we don't just oppose the Jews and the Negroes," he said, according to the Daily Bee. "We also oppose sexual predators and drugs of any kind."
While Winkler has claimed that he wouldn't allow his personal beliefs to guide the way he would act as sheriff, his position on sexual predators is admittedly more severe.
He has framed his campaign around the message of cracking down on methamphetamine producers and sex offenders, telling people at a candidate forum this week he favors immediate hangings for those convicted of being sexual predators.
Winkler is one of the remaining members of a diminished, but still active, Aryan Nations presence in Idaho.
Democratic state Rep. Cherie Buckner-Webb, the first black woman to serve in Idaho's state legislature, faced numerous racist attacks from the KKK and other white supremacist groups during her campaign.
Brenda Hammond of the Bonner County Human Rights Task Force says Winkler's political presence is an embarrassment to the rest of the county.
"It shows the need for the human rights task force has not gone away," she told the Associated Press. "Many of us on the task force have really regretted Bonner County's reputation for harboring racism when the vast majority of us don't think like that."
Voters in Bonner County will head to the polls on Tuesday to cast their ballots.
It is understandable that wierdos are drawn to the Republican party. The hard to comprehend part is why Republicans willing accept all kinds of nutjobs. Republicans nationwide have a reputation for racism, hate and far worse. They don't condem it. The right wing will start a talk radio attack and circle the wagons and protect the dirtbags they welcome to their ranks. Don't complain about me exposing your business, change it. Take a stand against the kinds of sillyness your ranks are full of.
GOP Lawmakers Call for Defunding of Public Broadcasting
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) are calling for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to be defunded in next year’s federal budget.
In letters sent Thursday to the chairmen of the Senate and House Appropriations committees, DeMint and Lamborn decried the CPB’s request for an “enormous” $445 million in funding for the next fiscal year.
"While so many Americans are making sacrifices around the country to make ends meet, CPB appears unwilling to do the same," they wrote.
They implied the corporation spends irresponsibly, citing compensation amounts for the corporation's president, and argued public broadcasting is obsolete, noting that "we are fortunate that in today’s media landscape, consumers have many news and entertainment choices, unlike when the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act to create and fund CPB was passed."
DeMint and Lamborn decried the increases in CPB funding that have been approved over the past decade. Between 2001 and 2012, they said, the CPB’s appropriated funding increased by nearly 31 percent, from $340 million to $444.1 million.
"Even though media and information have become more accessible than ever, funding for CPB has exploded," they wrote.
CPB is preparing a report for Congress, to be presented next month, about how efficiently it could operate without federal funding.
DeMint and Lamborn said they "look forward" to the report about a privately funded CPB.
While public broadcasters have traditionally have to rely partially on donations from the public to operate, a recent federal appeals court decision opened the door to allowing them to air political advertisements — a decision that could provide public stations with a lucrative revenue stream.
But Free Press public media campaign director Josh Stearns defended federal funding of CPB and said DeMint, Lamborn and their colleagues "who consider this an ‘enormous’ expense need to spend more time with ‘the Count’ on Sesame Street."
“Sen. DeMint and Rep. Lamborn have either lost their calculators or are trying to score political points," Stearns said, adding that based on public opinion, "they’re not representing their constituents or serving their country well by playing political games with public broadcasting."
"Members of Congress should take time to recall how last year’s defunding threats met with an extraordinary public backlash," Stearns said.
“The majority of Americans strongly support federal funding for public broadcasting,” he said, regardless of political party.
Do Republicans ever do anything positive, anything that helps anyone? Republicans are doing to the country what our enemies could never do. Republicans are the cancer that is destroying the country.
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How Did a Federal Inmate Get on the West Virginia Ballot?
Keith Judd, The Man Who Would Be President
Who filed the paperwork? Who paid the $2,500 fee to be listed on the ballot? Is this a dirty trick? Are the ballot officials in West Virginia lax with their duties? Read on as I try to answer those and more questions.
Keith Judd, a.k.a. Beaumont Federal Correctional Institution Inmate No. 11593-051 from Texarkana, Texas, won 41 percent of the vote in the Democratic presidential primary in West Virginia against incumbent President Obama.
This begs many questions, from why Obama fared so poorly in the state -- the short answer is coal -- to his ongoing issues with Appalachia but chief among them is a more prosaic and technical concern: How does a federal inmate and convicted felon wind up on a ballot?
West Virginia law clearly bars any person "currently under conviction for a felony, including probation or parole, or a court ruling of mental incompetence" from voting, running for or holding office, according to the Secretary of State's office. Judd is serving a sentence of 17 and a half years following a 1999 conviction for extortion involving the University of New Mexico.
So how did Judd position himself to potentially collect delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C. -- as would accrue to anyone who won more than 15 percent of the Democratic vote and filled out the appropriate paperwork?
"He filled out the certificate of announcement. I don't mean to sound flip or anything," explained Jack Glance, a spokesman for the West Virginia Secretary of State's Office. Judd also paid a $2,500 ballot-access filing fee. Where did a prison inmate get $2,500 from?
"We do not have the authority to determine eligibility of candidates," he said. "That is up to the courts, so somebody has to challenge somebody's eligibility to hold office."
Whether or not someone is under conviction "is not part of the form that you fill out to run for office.
Now if it comes out that you are under conviction, someone can challenge the candidacy. But no one challenged this candidacy," he said.
That doesn't mean Judd is going all the way to Charlotte. The Democratic Party of West Virginia is pretty certain he'll still be ruled ineligible, thanks to a failure to file the appropriate paperwork on behalf of delegates before party deadlines.
"It's not likely that Mr. Judd will earn any delegates to the national convention," said Derek Scarbro, executive director of the West Virginia Democratic Party. "First and foremost no one filed to run as a delegate for him" before the filing deadline of 5pm Tuesday. "And there's no fee or anything," he added.
"And then there's also some question of whether he would have been eligible to earn any delegates any way," Scarbro continued, as Judd appears not to have made the required filings with the state and national parties naming a delegation chair for his campaign. And that deadline is long past.
Scarbro blamed Judd's appearance on the ballot on the state, saying, "The ballot access rules in West Virginia are governed by the state, so that's really a question for the Secretary of State's office and they will tell you that the law in West Virgina does not prohibit people in his situation from getting on the ballot. " Or, as West Virginia Democratic Party chair -- a volunteer position -- Larry Puccio put it: "I do not know how he would be able to participate on the ballot... that's not my field of expertise."
But that doesn't answer the question of why the Obama reelection campaign did not challenge Judd's ballot eligibility; this wasn't even the first time he's faced off against Obama, having also appeared on the Idaho Democratic primary ballot in 2008. An email to the campaign asking why it did not seek to get him tossed before the primary was not immediately returned.
Perhaps no one cared because West Virginia is pretty much a lost cause for Obama this fall.
Republican John McCain won the state in 2008, and Hillary Clinton took it during the Democratic primaries earlier that year. A January 2012 Gallup poll found the president with 33 percent approval rate in the state, and the state's Democratic U.S. Senator has yet to commit to voting for the president's reelection.
What Is Obama's Appeal in Rual America?
In analyzing the returns from last week’s West Virginia Democratic primary, a phalanx of reporters and commentators have explained Hillary Clinton’s landslide victory by pointing out that West Virginians are a special set of Democrats, white, low income and undereducated. Some, like Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Jonathan Tilove of the Newhouse papers, have linked the lackluster performance of Barack Obama in West Virginia to a larger Appalachian problem. These writers connect the presumptive nominee’s defeat in West Virginia, his previous losses in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and an anticipated poor outing in Tuesday’s Kentucky primary, to the historical, geographic and cultural imperatives shared by Appalachian mountain people.
The legions of pseudonym-laden online posters who follow in political punditry’s wake are less restrained in describing the shortcomings of Sen. Clinton’s Appalachian supporters. They suggest it has to do with her voters being racist, toothless, shoeless, and prone to marrying their cousins. In short, they characterize these “special” Democrats in much the same terms they used in quieter times to describe Republicans.
Mountain people have long been considered exotic. The eminent British historian Sir Arnold Toynbee described the residents of Appalachia in 1947 as “the American counterparts of the latter-day white barbarians of the Old World — Rifis, Albanians, Kurds, Pathans, and Hairy Ainus.” They have also served as a sort of Rorschach test for the rest of America. When the country needs iconic war heroes like Alvin York or Jessica Lynch, mountaineers fill the bill. If, periodically, this rich nation needs people to pity, poverty-stricken hillbillies make excellent poster children. And if backers of the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee need
to explain why their preferred candidate is not connecting with downscale, rural voters — a demographic that was once key to Democratic electoral success — Appalachia can again answer the call. Obama supporters and members of the media can place the blame for his poor fortunes not on the candidate or his message, but on the moral failings of those benighted mountain people.
However, the unnerving truth for the erstwhile party of Jefferson may be that Appalachia, for all its legend and lore, is not that different politically from the rest of the small-town and rural parts of the country where 60 million of us live. And that could mean trouble for the fall.
The primary in West Virginia, a very rural state, was a blowout. Clinton won it by 41 percent, and she won all 55 counties. Similarly, in rural Ohio she beat Obama by 33 percent. In Pennsylvania, a much more metropolitan state, she won 56 of the state’s 63 counties, including Allegheny, Appalachia’s most populous county, where Pittsburgh is located. Her margins in the rural Appalachian counties of western Pennsylvania were West
Virginia-size.
Still, when you look at the earlier aggregate rural vote on Super Tuesday, the preference for Clinton is clearly not confined to Appalachia. Combining the results from 22 diverse states in the Northeast, South, Midwest and West on Feb. 5, Clinton beat Obama 55 percent to 38 percent among rural voters, according to an
analysis in DailyYonder.com, the Center for Rural Strategies.
Those aren’t West Virginia margins, but they aren’t close. They shine a light on a vulnerability that Democrats have shared through the last several election cycles.
The reality is that when Democratic candidates run competitively in rural America, they win national elections. And when they get creamed in rural America, they lose. That was Bill Clinton’s reality in winning as it was the reality for Al Gore and John Kerry in narrowly losing.
Nationally prominent Democrats have often come into the mountains of eastern Kentucky to see and to be seen. Perhaps that’s because the idea that government should keep an eye on people who were not prospering was once part of the essence of the Democratic Party. Or perhaps it’s because they know there are
votes here.
LBJ came to Martin County just before announcing his War on Poverty in 1964. In 1968, Sen. Robert Kennedy made
a fabled tour of small Kentucky coal towns shortly before announcing his own candidacy. In 1988, Jesse Jackson
brought out thousands of mountain people for his presidential campaign rally in Hazard. Sen. Paul Wellstone reprised the RFK tour in 1998 while exploring his own presidential prospects. And last year long before the primaries John Edwards brought his “two Americas” tour to the mountains to attempt to engage the press and the greater public in a conversation about income disparity. He was moved and concerned by what he saw in Kentucky. Edwards tried to discuss Appalachian poverty with several reporters from the national press. They were far more interested in the size of his house and the price of his haircut.
Other than Edwards, there haven’t been many visitors. Maybe the party that once welcomed Appalachian coal miners and hillside farmers has moved on. The national Democratic Party has become younger, richer, hipper and far less interested in preserving an identity forged in the Great Depression. Who really wants a political party full of poor mountaineers? Perhaps, in the minds of some, “Coal Miner’s Daughter” has been supplanted by
“Deliverance.”
That the Democrats have all but abandoned rural America in policy and practice during recent presidential election cycles may have to do with a faulty demographic map — a lack of awareness of what it really takes to win a presidential election — or it just may have to do with their candidates’ comfort level out beyond the sprawl.
Still, it says something about who wins and loses in the fall. Democrats should not be surprised when rural voters drift toward those institutions that stick around, like the churches, which often reinforce socially conservative ideas, and when rural voters prefer those politicians who actually ask for their votes.
A new bipartisan poll of rural voters in battleground states, conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, shows that Barack Obama is in a similar position to that of John Kerry five months before the 2004 election. Obama trailed John McCain by 9 points. Kerry trailed Bush by 9 in the rural battleground in June
2004.
In 2004, Kerry lost the rural battleground by about 20 percent and with it a close election. The rural vote was particularly telling in the pivotal state of Ohio, where a massive Democratic get-out-the-vote effort in cities and suburbs was more than offset by increased Republican success with rural voters. Many of those rural voters
were Appalachian and blue collar, people who back before the name-calling were reliable Democrats. They gave Bush a second term.
Yet there is plenty in the numbers to give Obama heart, starting with the 9-point deficit that he and Kerry have in common five months out from the general election. When Kerry was down 9 in rural counties, he had a commanding lead nationally. And that was before he was Swift-boated and before a campaign that advocated almost nothing for rural communities other than the Democratic Party’s reflexive support for farm subsidies, which
largely benefit corporate farms. (Only 1 percent of rural Americans earn their primary living on farms. Democrats don’t appear know this.)
Surprisingly, Obama has already achieved the same standing in the polls that Kerry enjoyed when things were going well. And for Obama, this comes after weeks of relentless news coverage of his ex-preacher and after the senator’s own costly “those people” moment when he was caught at a private fundraiser using broad stereotypes to characterize small-town and rural voters. (They are bitter. They cling.)
Polling also shows is that rural communities are experiencing measurable economic distress, especially with the out-of-control price of fuel. Rural voters express concern over the mounting cost of healthcare. They are also measurably displeased with the country’s direction. On the issues, there is clearly prime territory for Obama to seize.
Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg says that this year the presidential election could be up for grabs in rural parts of swing states. “This competitiveness reflects the ongoing problems facing the Republican brand, as well as the deep economic anxiety rural voters feel. Concerns about the cost of living are intense, particularly gas prices in a part of the country where many drive long distances to work. Moreover, there is real ambivalence about all the presidential choices — each candidate has a real opportunity to define the race on his terms.”
As of now, it would appear there is a cultural divide between Obama and these voters that resembles what we have seen in the past for a variety of Democratic presidential candidates, including George McGovern and Michael Dukakis.”
How Obama fares in rural America may, in the end, have to do with whether he shows up. In politics not showing up and losing are kissing cousins. Obama made three visits to West Virginia. In Kentucky, he limited himself to appearances in the state’s two biggest cities, Louisville and Lexington.
It is going to be an interesting election.
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