Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

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QuasarIntheMist: Sep 4, 2011

Rogue Copter Pilot posted:

Has Obama ever been asked if he'd be interested in SCOTUS post-presidency?

He's said he's not interested, that it would be too "monastic" for him.

# ? Feb 15, 2016 06:32

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# ? Apr 28, 2024 21:26

Baloogan: Dec 5, 2004; Fun Shoe

Obama is going to host a new show on HBO about wife swapping.

# ? Feb 15, 2016 06:44

Vox Nihili: May 28, 2008

Cnut the Great posted:

So what angle do you think the Republicans are going to go for to try to claim that he's completely and totally unacceptable?

There's no legitimate argument. They're going to try to say that this election should be a referendum on which party should get to choose the justice and say OBAMA IS UNDEMOCRATIC because he's trying to carry out his Constitutional right & obligation.

# ? Feb 15, 2016 07:07

Hugh G. Rectum: Mar 1, 2011

so are there actually any hard time limits for any part of the nomination process? or is it all just a shame game.

# ? Feb 15, 2016 10:32

ate shit on live tv: Feb 15, 2004; by Azathoth

Sudo Echo posted:

so are there actually any hard time limits for any part of the nomination process? or is it all just a shame game.

Nope! The founders expected senators to be reasonable.

There doesn't even have to be a Supreme Court as far as congress is concerned.

# ? Feb 15, 2016 10:46

Obdicut: May 15, 2012; "What election?"

Cnut the Great posted:

So what angle do you think the Republicans are going to go for to try to claim that he's completely and totally unacceptable?

He worked for Gore.

# ? Feb 15, 2016 12:28

Lastgirl: Sep 7, 1997; Good Morning!
Sunday Morning!

ScrubLeague posted:

Name sounds like a Muslim, will impose Sharia law.

as dumb as the idea is, even from a satirical post like this...

I know they would consider this a legit and valid reason without batting a loving eye

# ? Feb 15, 2016 12:33

Pocky In My Pocket: Jan 27, 2005; Giant robots shouldn't fight!

Scalia was a piece of poo poo!

# ? Feb 15, 2016 12:45

Fritz Coldcockin: Nov 7, 2005

Someone write a thing for Scalia like they wrote for Jesse Helms when he died.

I don't remember who wrote it, but it talked about what a horrible racist and awful person Helms was and it ended by talking about how in 10 years they'd find a bunch of child skeletons buried in his backyard and his neighbors would all swear they just thought he liked collecting tiny shoes.

# ? Feb 15, 2016 15:17

Squizzle: Apr 24, 2008

quote:

This week the shriveled husk of million term United States Senator and malevolent lich Jesse Helms was sealed in a bleak crypt deep beneath the sands of his native Stygia, North Carolina. Flowers placed on his grave by grieving shitheads withered and died within seconds.

Helms, known to friends and slaves alike as an unredeemed racist, was famous in the Senate for his passionate defense of segregation, opposition to the civil and voting rights acts, and his black crusade against the sun and all things which draw life from it.

As one of the first conservative talk radio hosts of the 1960’s Helms pioneered the technique of getting poor stupid whites to vote against their own interests by tricking them into hulking the gently caress out over black people, immigrants, and the betrayal of the Confederacy by Jews, liberals, and the hated abstract concept of literacy. He went on to parley his repulsive backwoods celebrity with the curbstomp set into a long career in government where he played a prominent role in the unbelievably vicious and petty dixiecrat movement. His leadership resulted in a fundamental realignment of the American domestic political scene over the question of just how much we should hate n*ggers (”A whole lot”, contended Helms).

Long considered a strong contender for “worst person in the entire world” Helms in his declining years began to find that limited title constraining. Last summer recess he gathered together all the educated mulattos and wizened negro shaman from the swamps and dungeons of his grim feudal demesne and began a search for the blackest of black tomes, arts, and metal. That search culminated last week in his ascension to lichdom with the completion of a vile phylactery in the form of a fat lipped bejeweled bone sambo, pulsating with false life and the rhythm of hot jungle beats. His triumph over death itself coincides with a departure from this plane of existence for the astral realms, where he will spend the next thousand years pursuing recognition as the “worst person in the entire metaverse.”

Here on Earth Helms will be remembered as a southern gentleman, a family man, and the kind of guy that’ll eventually turn out to have dozens of child sized skeletons buried in his yard and whose family members when interviewed will say they thought he just liked collecting tiny shoes.

# ? Feb 15, 2016 15:40

Pocky In My Pocket: Jan 27, 2005; Giant robots shouldn't fight!

It was autopsy-turvey who wrote it.

Question from a non-american. When was the last time the court had a liberal majority?

# ? Feb 15, 2016 17:07

SNAKES N CAKES: Sep 6, 2005; DAVID GAIDER
Lead Writer

Little_wh0re posted:

It was autopsy-turvey who wrote it.

Question from a non-american. When was the last time the court had a liberal majority?

See that little dip in 05/06 when Sandra Day O'Connor went over to the "liberal" side of the scale before retiring? That's when. And right now, of course.

# ? Feb 15, 2016 17:22

Dignity Van Houten: Jul 28, 2006; abcdefghijk
ELLAMENNO-P

Grey Fox posted:

Other reports saying it wasn't a heart attack, but that his heart just stopped.

I'm not sure why it took 30 years for that to impact his health, though.

No love for this? :lol:

# ? Feb 15, 2016 17:51

Aves Maria!: Jul 26, 2008; Maybe I'll drown

SNAKES N CAKES posted:

See that little dip in 05/06 when Sandra Day O'Connor went over to the "liberal" side of the scale before retiring? That's when. And right now, of course.

How does one get a liberal-conservative ideological rating from Martin-Quinn scores, which don't take ideology into account at all to come up with a rating?

# ? Feb 15, 2016 18:40

Vox Nihili: May 28, 2008

SNAKES N CAKES posted:

See that little dip in 05/06 when Sandra Day O'Connor went over to the "liberal" side of the scale before retiring? That's when. And right now, of course.

The court does not have a liberal majority right now.

# ? Feb 15, 2016 19:55

Aves Maria!: Jul 26, 2008; Maybe I'll drown

Vox Nihili posted:

The court does not have a liberal majority right now.

If you look up what a Martin-Quinn score actually is and the methodology behind it, it's actually pretty flawed for determining anything like relative political preference.

Essentially, it assumes that all decisions are either conservative or liberal (mistake no. 1) and then assumes that all decisions are equally conservative or liberal (mistake no. 2). It does a bunch of other poo poo like not actually looking at a decision to determine what would be the conservative or liberal choice, simply going off of past voting patterns of the Court to make that determination.

# ? Feb 15, 2016 20:17

navyjack: Jul 15, 2006

In my view, nothing will ever top the obit of Richard Nixon, written by Dr Gonzo himself. This is long but it is very funny and possibly the meanest thing that has ever been published about the president of the United States.

"Hunter S Thompson posted:

Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."

I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said, "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive -- and he was, all the way to the end -- we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.

That was Nixon's style -- and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.

Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.

These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.

The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable -- some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.

It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern -- but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man -- evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him -- except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values."

Many were incensed about the howitzers -- but they knew there was nothing they could do about it -- not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon's last war, and he won.

The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.

Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for '96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-elected as governor of California in November.

The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments -- most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H. P. Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.

Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University.

It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Nixon's meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy "my dog Checkers" speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an election.

When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a smart young man on the rise -- a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be President. He had won every office he'd run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.

Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him). It was Hoover's shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon's downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director's ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.

Hoover was Nixon's right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee's flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.

For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director -- who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean's relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.

That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that's what Bill Clinton says -- and he is, after all, the President of the United States.

Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can't be illegal."

poo poo. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. He was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon's vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.

Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn't argue. He quit his job and fled in the night to Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S. District Court, which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery and extortion in exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax evasion. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get a Coors distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon again and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him Rude, but he went anyway. It was one of those Biological Imperatives, like salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they die. He knew he was scum, but it didn't bother him.

Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and Hoover was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.

It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that -- but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure. Nixon was one of those, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.

Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.

Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives -- whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man making GBS threads in his own nest. But he also poo poo in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

# ? Feb 15, 2016 20:18

1994 Toyota Celica: Sep 11, 2008; by Nyc_Tattoo

I like to think HST would've found Sanders an appropriate Freak Power nominee for president

# ? Feb 15, 2016 20:20

Bip Roberts: Mar 29, 2005

Lotka Volterra posted:

If you look up what a Martin-Quinn score actually is and the methodology behind it, it's actually pretty flawed for determining anything like relative political preference.

Essentially, it assumes that all decisions are either conservative or liberal (mistake no. 1) and then assumes that all decisions are equally conservative or liberal (mistake no. 2). It does a bunch of other poo poo like not actually looking at a decision to determine what would be the conservative or liberal choice, simply going off of past voting patterns of the Court to make that determination.

I agree it's crude but what is "right" and "left" besides ideological clustering?

# ? Feb 16, 2016 05:08

Aves Maria!: Jul 26, 2008; Maybe I'll drown

That's a fine point, but still problematic if you're using a metric that specifically does not take into account what is considered left or right and then attempts to assign arbitrary right or left ideological scores.

I mean, no one would consider Joe Lieberman to be a leftist, but if the "right" alternative was Dick Cheney you'd be forced to assign him as being "left" while Cheney is "right".

It's an utterly useless measure aside from tracking consistency in voting patterns.

# ? Feb 16, 2016 10:46

ScrubLeague: Feb 11, 2007; Nap Ghost

Lastgirl posted:

as dumb as the idea is, even from a satirical post like this...

I know they would consider this a legit and valid reason without batting a loving eye

That's why Sri is totally the best candidate. Cruz and Rubes have already confirmed him once, he's absolutely qualified to be an objective lawman, and they'd have to figure out how to defend their newfound opposition without also building an argument against them being President.

# ? Feb 16, 2016 12:37

Gyges: Aug 4, 2004; NOW NO ONE
RECOGNIZE HULK

Lastgirl posted:

as dumb as the idea is, even from a satirical post like this...

I know they would consider this a legit and valid reason without batting a loving eye

Remember how the last two nominations were characterized by the right whining about the lack of white male protestants on the Judeo-Papist court? The only thing better than a Hindu man would be a non white, non Judeo-Christian woman. Come on Trollbama, find an imminently qualified transgender Filipino Muslim.

# ? Feb 16, 2016 13:55

ate shit on live tv: Feb 15, 2004; by Azathoth

Democrats have a majority in the senate and there are 2 independents and the GoP is fractured. Unless Obama is trying to push through a useless culture warrior on gun rights or something dumb, he can confirm anyone he wants.

If he doesn't it's because he values the optics of a contentious scotus "fight" rather then the actual outcome.

# ? Feb 16, 2016 14:14

Baloogan: Dec 5, 2004; Fun Shoe

Powercrazy posted:

Democrats have a majority in the senate and there are 2 independents and the GoP is fractured. Unless Obama is trying to push through a useless culture warrior on gun rights or something dumb, he can confirm anyone he wants.

If he doesn't it's because he values the optics of a contentious scotus "fight" rather then the actual outcome.

you are consistently the least informed poster in all of YCS

which is loving saying something

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate

# ? Feb 16, 2016 14:16

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

Powercrazy posted:

Democrats have a majority in the senate and there are 2 independents and the GoP is fractured. Unless Obama is trying to push through a useless culture warrior on gun rights or something dumb, he can confirm anyone he wants.

If he doesn't it's because he values the optics of a contentious scotus "fight" rather then the actual outcome.

Are you literally retarded or just a shill?

# ? Feb 16, 2016 14:20

ate shit on live tv: Feb 15, 2004; by Azathoth

Haha, whoops was totally looking at the wrong congress.

# ? Feb 16, 2016 14:25

Baloogan: Dec 5, 2004; Fun Shoe

are you american?

# ? Feb 16, 2016 14:28

a god damn idiot: Sep 7, 2006

Powercrazy posted:

Haha, whoops was totally looking at the wrong congress.

To be fair to this guy there was a ton of poo poo in obamas first term where this was the case and he still used the senate republicans for cover to not implement campaign promises. I don't know if you guys remember the whole "he's just saving his political capital" mantra that was repeated ad nauseum until the democrats lost the house and senate.

# ? Feb 16, 2016 14:40

Gyges: Aug 4, 2004; NOW NO ONE
RECOGNIZE HULK

a god drat idiot posted:

To be fair to this guy there was a ton of poo poo in obamas first term where this was the case and he still used the senate republicans for cover to not implement campaign promises. I don't know if you guys remember the whole "he's just saving his political capital" mantra that was repeated ad nauseum until the democrats lost the house and senate.

This wasn't really a thing though. There was only like a total of a week or two where the Democrats actually had a large enough majority to ram through whatever they wanted in the senate. This was due to it taking months to seat Frankin, Specter not switching parties for a few months, Byrd being on his deathbed, and then Kennedy dying. This also left several noted shitweasels like Lieberman with the power to veto certain things they didn't like in any Democratic proposal.

# ? Feb 16, 2016 14:58

Nonsense: Jan 26, 2007

Gyges posted:

This wasn't really a thing though. There was only like a total of a week or two where the Democrats actually had a large enough majority to ram through whatever they wanted in the senate. This was due to it taking months to seat Frankin, Specter not switching parties for a few months, Byrd being on his deathbed, and then Kennedy dying. This also left several noted shitweasels like Lieberman with the power to veto certain things they didn't like in any Democratic proposal.

This matters little to the American people who were told over and over the Supermajority had taken their rights as free white men.

Nonsense has issued a correction as of 16:50 on Feb 16, 2016

# ? Feb 16, 2016 16:46

Salt Fish: Sep 11, 2003; Cybernetic Crumb

I heard an NPR interview with Orin Hatch and he said that things were "just too political" right now for congress to even consider any Obama nominee. What a complete piece of poo poo; I'm so sorry that your job as a politician is too political for you to do.

# ? Feb 16, 2016 16:50

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# ? Apr 28, 2024 21:26

Reik: Mar 8, 2004

quote:

Obama Compiles Shortlist Of Gay, Transsexual Abortion Doctors To Replace Scalia

http://www.theonion.com/article/obama-compiles-shortlist-gay-transsexual-abortion--52361

The Onion knocks another one out of the park IMO.

# ? Feb 16, 2016 22:05

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

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