The former US president Bill Clinton’s health is improving but he will remain in a California hospital for at least another night to receive antibiotics intravenously for a urological infection that spread to his bloodstream, his spokesperson said on Friday.
The 75-year-old Clinton, who served as president from 1993 to 2001, entered the University of California, Irvine, medical center on Tuesday evening after suffering from fatigue. He spoke with Joe Biden on Friday.
Clinton’s spokesperson Angel Ureña said that Clinton’s white blood count has decreased, indicating his health is improving.
“All health indicators are trending in the right direction, including his white blood count which was decreased significantly,” Ureña said on Twitter. “In order to receive further IV antibiotics, he will remain in the hospital overnight.”
Since his admission to the intensive care unit at the hospital, Clinton has received fluids along with antibiotics, his doctors said.
His wife, a former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, was at the hospital on Thursday and Friday, and the two read books and talked about politics, Ureña told Reuters.
It remained unclear when Clinton would be released.
Biden said Clinton would likely go home soon, though it was not clear whether he would be released on Saturday or later.
“He is getting out shortly. … Whether that’s tomorrow or the next day, I don’t know,” Biden told reporters in Connecticut. “He’s doing fine. He really is.”
The urologic infection that a source close to Bill Clinton says led to the former president’s hospitalization is common in older individuals and can be serious, experts say.
But when treated in a timely manner, the prognosis for such cases is excellent….
A source close to Clinton told NBC News that his initial diagnosis was a urologic infection that morphed into a broader infection.
While little else was immediately revealed about Clinton’s condition, including whether it originated in his urinary tract or elsewhere in the urinary system, experts who were not involved in his care said such spread of infection can be life-threatening without prompt medical attention.
“This is not uncommon. This is something we frequently treat in the emergency room, where somebody comes in with a urinary tract infection,” NBC News senior medical correspondent Dr. John Torres said Friday on the “TODAY” show. “Especially as they get older, their body is not able to contain that, so it moves from the urinary tract, from the bladder and the kidneys, into the bloodstream.”
At that point, Torres said, a patient is at risk of sepsis — a dangerous overdrive of the immune system in response to an infection — or septic shock, when organs start to fail.
Doctors must keep a close eye on these patients to make sure the strong antibiotics they are treating them with are lowering their white blood cell counts, which would indicate the infection is getting under control, said Dr. Ash Tewari, a urologist and prostate cancer specialist at Mount Sinai in New York.
Doctors will also work to identify any underlying conditions that may have led to the infection in the first place: a blockage, a kidney stone, even diabetes, Tewari said. Sometimes, procedures are necessary to prevent future recurrences.
The Jefferson Parish Shraeriff’s Office is investigating a deputy accused of holding a Black woman by her hair and slamming her head repeatedly into the pavement with such force that a witness to the Sept. 20 incident said it ripped several of Shantel Arnold’s braids from her scalp. A 14-second video captured the incident in the New Orleans suburb where, for decades, Black residents have accused the Sheriff’s Office of targeting them.
It was the second time that hour that Arnold had been assaulted. By the time the deputies arrived, she said she had already fended off an attack by some local boys.
In an interview, the 34-year-old Arnold, who has not been previously identified, told the news organizations she had needed the police’s protection. But protection is not what she got.
The video begins with a sheriff’s deputy seen holding the wrist of Arnold, who is lying on her back on the sidewalk. The deputy appears to be dragging her along the pavement. The deputy then grabs Arnold’s arm with his other hand and jerks her upward, lifting her body off the ground. They briefly disappear behind a parked white vehicle. When they come back into view, the deputy is holding Arnold by her braids, slamming her repeatedly onto the cement. At one point, he whips her down so violently her body spins around and flips over.
The footage ends as the deputy crouches down and places a knee onto Arnold’s back.
Arnold is only 4 feet eight inches tall and weighs about 100 pounds.
The incident started around 2 p.m. on Sept. 20 when Arnold was attacked by three boys as she was walking down the street near her family’s trailer home. At 4-foot-8 and about 100 pounds, her left eye missing from a car accident years earlier, Arnold regularly made an easy target for the neighborhood bullies, her family said.
During the attack, which lasted several minutes and was captured in a cellphone video, the boys slammed Arnold to the ground and beat her while a crowd watched and laughed. She tried to defend herself with a stick, which is visible in the video. The assault ended only after 71-year-old Lionel Gray, whom Arnold considers her stepfather, chased the boys away.
Disheveled and covered in dirt, Arnold stumbled down the road toward her home when an unidentified sheriff’s deputy rolled up beside her in his patrol car.
BENTON HARBOR, Mich. — During the three years that officials have known about dangerous amounts of lead flowing from faucets in Benton Harbor, Mich., they have sent out notices, distributed filters and tried to improve water treatment. But the problems persisted, and some residents said they never heard about the risks of the toxic water coming from their taps.
Now, in scenes reminiscent of the water crisis in Flint, Mich., state officials have told Benton Harbor residents not to drink, cook or brush their teeth with tap water. Elected officials came to town Thursday promising help. And so many cars have turned out for bottled water giveaways that traffic has been snarled, a rarity in a place with 9,100 residents.
“It’s horrible to watch, to see my city like this,” Rosetta Valentine, 63, said as she directed traffic at a water distribution site where some people lined up nearly an hour before the event started.
Residents of Benton Harbor see parallels between their plight and the water crisis that unfolded less than three hours up the highway in Flint, also a majority-Black city, where a change in the water source in 2014 led to residents drinking contaminated water despite repeated assurances that it was safe. In Benton Harbor, where thousands of homes are connected to the water system by lead pipes, efforts to bring down problematic lead readings by using corrosion controls have so far failed, and officials have recently grown concerned that lead-removing filters given to residents since 2019 might not work.
The problems in Benton Harbor and Flint are extreme examples of a broader, national failure of water infrastructure that experts say requires massive and immediate investment to solve. Across the country, in cities like Chicago, Pittsburgh and Clarksburg, W.Va., Americans are drinking dangerous quantities of brain-damaging lead as agencies struggle to modernize water treatment plants and launch efforts to replace the lead service lines that connect buildings to the water system. Health officials say there is no safe level of lead exposure.
Congressional Democrats, who control both chambers and have a majority on the January 6 committee, can ask the House or Senate sergeant-at-arms to arrest Bannon. Yesterday afternoon, though, Representative Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chairs the committee, announced that he will pursue a more moderate path: Next week, the committee will vote on whether to refer Bannon to the Justice Department for potential criminal prosecution.
“We fully intend to enforce” the subpoenas, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who is one of two Republicans on the special committee, assured me. “That doesn’t come with the snap of a finger, but we will get to the bottom of these questions and pursue all avenues.”
Democrats want to uphold norms of interparty civility while also preventing Trump and his buddies from completely undermining democracy. But time is running out. The January 6 committee is one of Congress’s last chances to narrate the Capitol riots and the Trump administration’s efforts to subvert the peaceful transfer of power. The only way to fight fascism is with narrative, Masha Gessen, the writer and activist, once told me. The select-committee probe presents a real opportunity to do just that.
Enforcing the committee’s subpoenas isn’t a controversial idea, Representative Eric Swalwell of California told me. “We must enforce congressional subpoenas not just for holding insurrectionists accountable but to show everyone in America that we all follow the same rules,” he said. “If Bannon and company are above the law, why wouldn’t nonpublic figures toss their lawful subpoenas in the trash?”
Perhaps Bannon thinks that the committee won’t follow through, or that jail time might martyr him. He’s dodged consequences for alleged misconduct before. Last year, he faced prison for his role in the “We Build the Wall” scheme, which prosecutors said was fraudulent, but Trump granted him an 11th-hour pardon. At least he’s had some time to think about what he might have to pack.
The congressional committee tasked with investigating the January 6 Capitol Riots is closing in on top Trump ally and adviser Steve Bannon with an expected vote to recommend criminal contempt charges against the former White House aide for defying a subpoena.
Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chairman who also sits on the January 6 committee, went as far as to say that he expects the Justice Department to prosecute.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who also sits on the January 6 panel, said he expects the Justice Department to prosecute the cases.
The chairman of the special committee, Representative Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, said the panel will vote Tuesday to recommend charges against Bannon, an adviser to Donald Trump for years who was in touch with the president ahead of the most serious assault on Congress in two centuries….
If approved by the Democratic-majority committee, the recommendation of criminal charges would go to the full House. Approval there would send them to the Justice Department, which has final say on prosecution.
The showdown with Bannon is just one facet of a broad and escalating congressional inquiry, with 19 subpoenas issued so far and thousands of pages of documents flowing to the committee and its staff. Challenging Bannon’s defiance is a crucial step for the panel, whose members are vowing to restore the force of congressional subpoenas after they were routinely flouted during Trump’s time in office.
Why is the January 6th Committee waiting until Tuesday to hold Steve Bannon’s criminal contempt hearing? Because they’re doing it in prime time and airing it in public. They’re going to make an example out of him as loudly as possible. Get your popcorn ready.
Of course no matter how forcefully the hearing is conducted, and no matter how serious the resulting criminal contempt referral is, we’ll still have to put up with the defeatists. Whatever the committee does, most pundits will naturally insist that it should have done the opposite, because that’s the only way that a lot of pundits feel they can keep themselves relevant.
And of course the defeatists will falsely insist that the Department of Justice “won’t do anything” and that Bannon will “get away with it all.” But at this point that kind of background whining is just par for the course.
What the whiniest of pundits and activists don’t get is that these kinds of hearings are not for their benefit. Their minds are already made up. The January 6th Committee, its actions, its hearings, and its conclusions are for the benefit of average Americans in the middle who know that something went wrong that day but want to be convinced of what specifically happened in painstaking fashion.
We’ll find out next week. I can’t wait.
I’ll add a few more links in the comment thread. Have a nice weekend everyone!!
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Just got back from a very long wait for my Covid-19 Pfizer booster. I’d plan to get a flu shot too but they’d been out for over a week at my closest Walgreen’s. So, I’m way late and needed a reminder from BB. There are a lot of stories out there with one basic theme. Donald Trump and the throwback Republican Party are actively trying to dismantle our democratic republic.
Bannon has also made repeated use of the technique known as stochastic terrorism to encourage right-wing violence, while disclaiming personal responsibility. As HuffPost reports, he recently told his listeners of his “War Room” podcast: “We need to get ready now. We control the country. We’ve got to start acting like it. And one way we’re going to act like it, we’re not going to have 4,000 [shock troops] ready to go, we’re going to have 20,000 ready to go.”
Bannon has said these “shock troops” would be used to destroy the federal government from within in a second Trump administration, as a way of tearing down what he calls “the administrative state,” an anti-government euphemism that also includes multiracial democracy.
Political scientists, historians and others have shown that such rhetoric is used by Republicans and their allies (and by too many “moderate” or corporate-sponsored Democrats) to justify attacks on the very idea of government itself, in large part because they perceive it as serving the interests of Black and brown people and others deemed to be “undeserving.”
Bannon’s use of violent language about “shock troops” — in a military context, this means heavily armed, fast-moving elite soldiers used to break through enemy defenses — is not necessarily hyperbole or metaphor. Rather, it should be seen as part of a larger embrace of political violence and other terrorism by the Republican fascist movement.
Democrats want to uphold norms of interparty civility while also preventing Trump and his buddies from completely undermining democracy. But time is running out. The January 6 committee is one of Congress’s last chances to narrate the Capitol riots and the Trump administration’s efforts to subvert the peaceful transfer of power. The only way to fight fascism is with narrative, Masha Gessen, the writer and activist, once told me. The select-committee probe presents a real opportunity to do just that.
Enforcing the committee’s subpoenas isn’t a controversial idea, Representative Eric Swalwell of California told me. “We must enforce congressional subpoenas not just for holding insurrectionists accountable but to show everyone in America that we all follow the same rules,” he said. “If Bannon and company are above the law, why wouldn’t nonpublic figures toss their lawful subpoenas in the trash?”
Perhaps Bannon thinks that the committee won’t follow through, or that jail time might martyr him. He’s dodged consequences for alleged misconduct before. Last year, he faced prison for his role in the “We Build the Wall” scheme, which prosecutors said was fraudulent, but Trump granted him an 11th-hour pardon. At least he’s had some time to think about what he might have to pack.
A book from the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, “The Chief’s Chief,” is due out in December; Trump promoted it the other day as “an incredible Christmas present” that will explain how his Administration “did things that no other administration even thought they could do.”
Trump, of course, meant this as a bragging point, not as an ironic commentary on all the norm-busting and lawbreaking that occurred during his four years in office. “Remember,” he said in the statement, “there has never been an administration like ours.” In that, he’s right. The rapidly accumulating pile of books on the history of the Trump Administration is different in a crucial respect: they are not helping to explain the past so much as they are attempting to explain a present and very much ongoing crisis. Meadows, for example, is a crucial witness in the investigation by the House select committee into the events of January 6th. The panel subpoenaed him and several other Trump advisers to give testimony and hand over documents, with a deadline of Thursday. Not one has done so, setting the stage for a new and potentially protracted series of court battles. The panel announced on Thursday that it will seek to hold Steve Bannon, Trump’s fired White House strategist (the two later reconciled), in criminal contempt; it said that it is still negotiating with Meadows and the former Pentagon official Kash Patel. How many months or years will we have to wait to find out what they and others knew, and did, as a pro-Trump mob tried to stop Congress from certifying Trump’s defeat?
The bottom line is that the story of the Trump Presidency still has important unanswered questions that the forthcoming pile of books cannot answer. And they have an urgency about them that unanswered questions about past Administrations usually don’t, given the ongoing threat to our democracy: Trump is not only preparing to run again but is determined to mold the G.O.P. into a single-issue Party, the ideology of which consists solely of disputing the legitimacy of the election that turned him out of office. The Trump Presidency is not yet, alas, simply a matter for booksellers and book writers; it’s an active crime scene.
Prosecutors in Oklahoma successfully argued to a jury this month that a woman who had a miscarriage was guilty of the manslaughter of her non-viable fetus.
Brittney Poolaw, 21, was convicted of second-degree manslaughter by a Comanche County jury on Oct. 5 for the death of her fetus that had a gestational age of 15 to 17 weeks, reported ABC affiliate KSWO in Lawton, Oklahoma. She was charged with in the case on Mar. 16, 2020 after a miscarriage that occurred on Jan. 4, 2020.
Obstetricians determine gestational ages based on the date of the woman’s last period prior to getting pregnant — i.e., before the date of conception. The U.S. Supreme Court determined with Roe v. Wade in 1973 that legal viability is after the 28th gestational week, when fetal survival is generally above 90 percent, but medical viability is pegged at 25-26 weeks, when the fetus has more than a 50 percent chance of surviving outside the womb, according to the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only defines a fetus as “stillborn” if it is delivered after 20 weeks gestational age; before that, it’s medically considered a miscarriage.
The Lawton Constitution reported last year that, according to police, the then-19 year-old Poolaw miscarried at home in early 2020 and was brought to the Comanche County Memorial Hospital with the umbilical cord still attached to the fetus. She told the medical staff that she had used both methamphetamines and marijuana while she’d been pregnant.
Later, in interviews with police, Poolaw allegedly confirmed that she’d smoked marijuana but used methamphetamines intravenously, including as recently as two days prior to her miscarriage. She also allegedly told them, according to the Lawton paper, “that when she first became pregnant, she didn’t know if she wanted to keep the baby or not.”
It is unclear from those reports whether she had actively decided to continue the pregnancy, given that she had been 15 to 17 weeks along, simply hadn’t made a decision or had few other options but to continue it. The nonprofit Guttmacher Institute notes that 53 percent of women in Oklahoma live in the 96 percent of counties with no facilities that offer abortion services — Comanche County among them — and the state requires a woman go to a provider twice, 72 hours apart, in order to obtain an abortion. Abortion is, by law, not covered by most private insurance plans in the state without an extra rider, and it isn’t covered by Medicaid except in extremely limited circumstances.
(In April 2021, Oklahoma’s governor signed three bills that will effectively eliminate all abortion access in the state — including a ban on any abortions after six weeks gestational age. The new laws are scheduled to take effect in November. They would not, however, have applied in Poolaw’s case.)
Technically speaking, Oklahoma state law did not criminalize women for miscarriages, stillbirths or other fetal harm for which prosecutors felt the woman was at fault until September 2020, when the state Supreme Court ruled that, despite the state’s child neglect and homicide laws making no reference to fetuses, the laws nonetheless encompassed a viable fetus whose mother used drugs.
The Department of Justice said Friday that it will ask the Supreme Court for an emergency halt to the Texas law that has restricted access to abortion in the nation’s second largest state to an extent not seen in 50 years.
The announcement followed a decision by a federal appeals court Thursday night that allowed the law to remain in effect. A lower court judge last week said the law was unconstitutional.
The department’s announcement meant the high court for the second time will be asked to put the law on hold while legal challenges to it continue. In a divisive 5 to 4 decision last month, the court allowed the law to take effect as the case goes forward, even though the majority said it raised constitutional concerns.
Abortion has emerged as the most dominant issue at the Supreme Court this term, as those opposed to it see a new opportunity for victory in the court’s changed membership, with three members nominated by President Donald Trump.
The court on Dec. 1 will hear a challenge to a Mississippi law that conservatives have urged the court to use to overturn the constitutional right to abortion established nearly a half-century ago in Roe v. Wade.
Mississippi’s law would ban most abortions after 15 weeks. Roe and subsequent decisions say a state may not impose undue burdens on the right to choose abortion before fetal viability, normally gauged to be between 22 and 24 weeks. The Mississippi law was put on hold by lower courts.
Texas’s law is more restrictive than that. It bars abortion as early as six weeks into the pregnancy, when many do not realize they are pregnant, and makes no exceptions for rape or incest.
And lastly, in the category of they walk among us:
BREAKING: A U.S. Capitol Police officer has been indicted on obstruction of justice charges after prosecutors say he helped to hide evidence of a rioter's involvement in January’s insurrection. https://t.co/MZPGs9fsfJ
A U.S. Capitol Police officer has been indicted on obstruction of justice charges after prosecutors say he helped to hide evidence of a rioter’s involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
The officer, Michael A. Riley, is accused of tipping off someone who participated in the riot by telling them to remove posts from Facebook that had showed the person inside the Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack, according to court documents.
Riley, 50, appeared virtually in federal court in Washington and was released with several conditions, including that he surrender any firearms and not travel outside the U.S. without permission from a judge. He was ordered to return to court later this month.
Riley, who responded to a report of a pipe bomb on Jan. 6 and has been a Capitol Police officer for about 25 years, had sent the person a message telling them that he was an officer with the police force who “agrees with your political stance,” an indictment against him says.
The indictment spells out how Riley sent dozens of messages to the unidentified person, encouraging them to remove incriminating photos and videos and telling them how the FBI was investigating to identify rioters.
I hope you have a good weekend. I seem to have no soreness or anything on my arm. I’m hoping this holds. Meanwhile, Blow up your TV, Throw away your paper …
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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A member of the U.S. House select committee explained how Donald Trump’s allies might be rounded up and arrested if they continued to defy congressional subpoenas in the Jan. 6 investigation.
Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL) appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” where she called for fines or jail time for former Trump advisers who flout orders for their testimony and documents related to the insurrection, and she revealed what questions the committee had for former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and others served with the subpoenas.
“I want to know how much planning was involved, who was involved in the planning, who funded it, how they — what their intent was when they came into that day, and then what they knew as that day unfolded and the safety and security of people like the vice president and members of Congress were at risk, [and] what they did, either to respond or not respond on that occasion,” Murphy said.
If those individuals don’t show up for their scheduled testimony, Murphy said they could be taken into custody by the U.S. Marshals Service.
“We have engaged with a wide variety of law enforcement offices, including the U.S. Marshals, in order to issue the subpoenas,” Murphy said. “We will use everything, as you said, with all due respect, we will use all of the agencies and all of the tools at our disposal to issue the subpoenas and enforce them.”
Despite all the complaints on social media, today is the day the people who were subpoenaed by the committee were required too appear and produce documents; nothing can be done to enforce the subpoenas unless they don’t show up.
Stephanie Murphy who sits on January 6th Committee, confirmed US Marshals will be sent after Steve Bannon. This isn’t a movie so Tommy Lee Jones won’t be sent out at 12:01am to look for Bannon in every outhouse, barn house, & henhouse.This process will happen on a legal timeline
Yesterday the Committee subpoenaed Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department official who worked with Trump to overturn the 2020 election and whom Trump wanted to appoint as Attorney General.
Breaking WaPo: The Jan. 6 select committee is planning to ramp up its efforts to force Trump officials to comply with its subpoenas. ⁰Lawmakers who sit on the panel said they are prepared to pursue criminal charges against witnesses like Steve Bannon. https://t.co/irgkj1Nl20
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack is planning to ramp up its efforts to force Trump administration officials to cooperate with its inquiry, and on Wednesday it issued a subpoena for a former Justice Department official panel members view as key to the examination of the former president’s efforts to overturn election results.
The committee said it is seeking records and testimony from Jeffrey Clark, a Trump-era Justice Department official who sought to deploy department resources to support President Donald Trump’s false claims of massive voting fraud in the 2020 election.
“The Select Committee needs to understand all the details about efforts inside the previous administration to delay the certification of the 2020 election and amplify misinformation about the election results,” committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) said in a statement. “We need to understand Mr. Clark’s role in these efforts at the Justice Department and learn who was involved across the administration. The Select Committee expects Mr. Clark to cooperate fully with our investigation.” […..]
The committee on Wednesday also took eight hours of closed-door testimony from former acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen regarding the final days of the Trump administration, according to two people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private testimony, as it also focuses on witnesses willing to voluntarily meet with the panel.
The latest activity comes as tensions over compliance with the investigation are increasing and as the committee’s plans to hold depositions this week are already facing head winds. The focus of those depositions are Stephen K. Bannon and three other Trump administration officials — former chief of staff Mark Meadows, former deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino and Kash Patel, who was serving as chief of staff to then-acting Defense secretary Christopher Miller on Jan. 6.
In the plague-spotted orchard of Trumpian malfeasance, Steve Bannon, the last heir to House Harkonnen, is the low-hanging fruit. https://t.co/gGqCI7UN20
In the plague-spotted orchard of Trumpian malfeasance, which the House of Representatives is trying to defoliate before it poisons everything in the garden, Steve Bannon, the last heir to House Harkonnen, is the low-hanging fruit. There is no reason on god’s despoiled earth why he shouldn’t be made to testify under oath about everything that happened on January 6. He wasn’t working for the president* at the time, so there’s no question of executive privilege. He was a private citizen when he allegedly played a role in orchestrating an insurrection meant to overturn a national election. Steve Bannon is the easy one.
He has until October 14 to turn over everything the special investigative committee’s subpoena demanded. Assuming he ignores the deadline, at 12:01 a.m. on October 15, he should be in cuffs and in the back of a car with two U.S. marshals, on his way to the pokey….
The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they’re Mixmasters compared to watching Congress and the Department of Justice move on this matter. I have been staunchly in the camp of take the time you need. I have believed from the jump that there’s more going on underground at the DOJ than we know about. But even my patience gauge is blinking red. It’s not enough to be doing something. The country needs to see you doing something. It needs to see that to build its confidence that justice is coming. It also needs to see it as a kind of vicarious triumph over all the worst cynicism and corruption that attended the last administration*. A Steve Bannon perp walk would do nicely.
The January 6 committee is steaming ahead
And it is already garnering powerful information of Trump’s wrongdoing and that of his cronies— even before the coming contempt battles
Bannon’s lawyer on Wednesday wrote a letter to the panel saying that his client will not provide testimony or documents until the committee reaches an agreement with former President Donald Trump over executive privilege or a court weighs in on the matter. “That is an issue between the committee and President Trump’s counsel and Mr. Bannon is not required to respond at this time,” attorney Robert Costello wrote.
If Bannon is a no-show, the committee is expected to immediately begin seeking a referral for criminal contempt after the subpoena deadline passes — essentially making an example of Bannon’s noncompliance as the House seeks more witnesses, sources familiar with the planning told CNN.
While it could take some time before the House sends such a referral to the Department of Justice, the committee could take initial steps within hours of the panel’s stated deadline — which is Thursday — if Bannon refuses to cooperate, the sources added, underscoring the growing sense of urgency around the investigation itself.
CNN reported Wednesday that the committee is unified in its plan to seek criminal charges against those who refuse to comply, and lawmakers have specifically honed in on Bannon while discussing the option publicly….
CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen swiftly pushed back on Costello’s letter Wednesday, saying, “It’s just wrong. The letter quotes a case saying ‘the President’ can make executive privilege determinations. But Trump is no longer ‘the President.’ In the United States, we only have one of those at a time, he is Joe Biden, and he has not asserted privilege here.”
The White House has informed the National Archives it will not assert executive privilege on behalf of Trump in the Jan. 6 investigationhttps://t.co/i80OJmgGYN
The White House formally rejected the request by former President Donald Trump to assert executive privilege to shield from lawmakers a subset of documents that has been requested by the House committee investigating January 6, and set an aggressive timeline for their release.
The latest letter came after the Biden administration informed the National Archives on Friday that it would not assert executive privilege over a tranche of documents related to January 6 from the Trump White House. When the White House sent its first letter last week, the former President had not formally submitted his objections yet. The latest response from the White House counsel is more of a technicality in response to the request from Trump regarding the subset of documents, according to a person familiar, reaffirming the decision already made by President Joe Biden not to assert executive privilege.
The letter sent Friday, and released on Wednesday, from White House counsel Dana Remus to Archivist of the United States David Ferriero requests that the documents be released “30 days after your notification to the former President, absent any intervening court order.
After that decision was reported, Trump wrote to the National Archives, objecting to the release of certain documents to the committee on the grounds of executive privilege.
In the letter released Wednesday, Remus wrote: “President Biden has considered the former President’s assertion, and I have engaged in additional consultations with the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. For the same reasons described in [sic] earlier letter, the President maintains his conclusion that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the best interests of the United States, and therefore is not justified as to any of the documents provided to the White House on September 8, 2021.”
“Accordingly, President Biden does not uphold the former President’s assertion of privilege.”
How close did Trump come to actually overturning the election? Very close. And it’s not over yet. I’ll end with this Substack post by Jared Yates Sexton: How An Attempted Coup Becomes A Successful Coup. The piece is a response to Trump’s video on Ashli Babbitt’s birthday.
Ashlii Babbitt’s family held an event today on her birthday, and Trump actually sent them a video message. This .. is … unbelievable. “There was no reason Ashlii should have lost her life that day. We must all demand justice for Ashlii and her family.” pic.twitter.com/DpRMhkgCVa
Like all things Trump, the former president’s video was equal parts absurd and disturbing. On what should have been veteran Ashli Babbitt’s thirty-sixth birthday, her family played a taped message from Donald Trump that lauded her as “a truly incredible person” and assured them “her memory will live on in our hearts for all time.”
Of course, Trump was eulogizing a woman who participated in the storming of the United States Capitol on his behalf. That Babbitt and her compatriots were attempting to overthrow the will of the electorate and re-install Trump as president, thus carrying out a violent coup, went unsaid. That Babbitt would have still been alive had Trump and his cronies not organized the even and attempted a violent coup also went unnoted. What was important, what really needed emphasized, was Babbitt’s newly minted role as rallying point and martyr.
With every passing day new and more damning information emerges that underscores the real and present danger of January 6th. There were legal strategies in place, under-the-table dealings, plans to both slaughter lawmakers and utilize terror to retain power. And yet, many in the political and pundit class still consider any concern over those facts hysterical, overblown, or at least look at the events as the culmination and final endpoint of the crisis. Meanwhile, the January 6th Commission has subpoenaed Trump confidants and conspirators Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, and others, only to be stonewalled at every turn.
What we are watching is something we have seen time and again throughout history. A failed coup that, through continued momentum, sanctification as faith and movement, and the failure by those who should know better to head the threat off before it grows out of their control, is predictably and miserably heading toward completing its purpose of seizing power.
We struggle with fascism and authoritarianism, talking about "brainwashing," but what we don't acknowledge is that these movements become religions.
Their rallies are services. Their symbols icons. Their martyrs fallen saints.
On that note, here’s hoping the January 6 Committee sends out the U.S. Marshalls for Steve Bannon and any other Trumpist who defies their subpoenas! U.S. democracy is in serious jeopardy.
What do you think? As always, this is an open thread.
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For once I have something to smile about. The Red Sox, after a fairly lackluster end to their season, are now on the way to the American League Championship series. They beat the Tampa Bay Rays, supposedly the best team in baseball this year. I doubt if anyone else here cares, but I’m glad I finally have something to celebrate in this depressing time.
Now back to the discouraging topic of U.S. politics. If anyone can come up with something good about it, I would love to know about it.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott is still doing his best to kill Texans–by banning mask and vaccine mandates. At the same time he is trying to force women to bear children against their will, which will lead women to die from back alley abortions like they did in the bad old days before Roe v. Wade. Freedumb!
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) on Monday banned any entity in his state — including private businesses — from mandating coronavirus vaccines for workers or customers, expanding prior executive orders from his office that prohibited state government entities from imposing similar requirements.
Abbott’s move puts him at odds with some large corporations and with the Biden administration, which last month announced plans to require all employers with 100 or more workers to adopt vaccine mandates or testing regimens. A number of large private companies in Texas have issued mandates.
“If indeed the mandate now is everyone must be vaccinated or . . . tested once a week, we will obviously comply by that mandate,” Doug Parker, chief executive of Fort Worth-based American Airlines, said in a Washington Post Live interview in September.
“All along, as we’ve been going through this, we have been considering mandates and may have done one on our own. But what we wanted to do was do everything we could first to encourage everyone to do so,” he said.
Dallas-based Southwest Airlines last week gave all employees until Dec. 8 to get vaccinated or face possible termination. (Many U.S. airlines also are government contractors, which must meet a Dec. 8 federal deadline for coronavirus vaccinations.) Telecom giant AT&T, also based in Dallas, in August ordered most of its management employees to get vaccinated by this week. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, headquartered in Houston, announced a similar move the same month.
Abbott called the Biden administration’s sweeping plan “yet another instance of federal overreach,” saying in his order that the administration is “bullying” private entities into vaccine mandates, hurting the livelihoods of Texans and threatening the state’s economic recovery from the pandemic.
But bullying a woman into bearing her rapist’s child is A-OK with Abbot. Make it make sense. Also, Abbott hasn’t explained how he will enforce his ban at U.S. military bases in Texas. Will he send the Texas Rangers in to battle the feds?
President Biden is in trouble. As my colleague Damon Linker writes, his approval numbers have been steadily declining for months, now hovering in the low 40s in some surveys. Without some upward movement, that will spell disaster for the Democrats in the upcoming midterms.
There is one straightforward policy Biden can undertake, completely on his own initiative, to turn this around: vaccine mandates. Strict policies to force vaccine-resistant populations to get their shots would do more than anything else under Biden’s direct control to improve the condition of the country — and his own polling numbers.
Harold Knight, The Green Book, 1915
Now, there are no doubt many reasons Biden’s approval is down. The shrieking tantrum from the mainstream media over the American empire being humiliated in Afghanistan plays a part, as does the general tendency for presidential approval to decline following inauguration. The relentless drumbeat of conservative propaganda takes its toll as well.
But the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is surely the largest part. Political science has shown for years that the incumbent party in the White House tends to be blamed for bad things that happen on its watch — even if that assignment of blame makes little sense. That’s what’s happening here.
As long as the pandemic continues, it will play hell with the economic recovery. Unemployment is relatively low, but recent jobs numbers have been weak, and supply chains are badly snarled up across the globe. That, coupled with the worst mass casualty event in a century — more people have died of COVID-19 this year than in 2020 — is surely sandbagging presidential popularity.
Republican resistance to measures to control the pandemic is the reason for Biden’s slipping poll numbers as well as the horrible case and death rates in red states and counties.
Right-wing media and leaders have constantly spewed anti-vaccine propaganda for months, while Republican politicians have bitterly fought any kind of forcible pandemic controls. Even as Florida suffered by far its worst surge of the virus since the pandemic started, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) continued to punish schools that required masks. He’s currently in a legal fight trying to ban private cruise ship companies — perhaps the most notoriously disease-prone businesses in the world — from implementing vaccine requirements.
Sure enough, if you plot former President Donald Trump’s vote share by county in 2020 versus vaccination rate, you find a large and consistent negative correlation. That is, the more Trump voters, the fewer shots in arms. A recent study in The Lancet found that if Texas and Florida alone had matched the vaccination rates of the most-vaccinated states, more than 22,000 Texans and Floridians who died of COVID-19 would still be alive today.
As I have previously argued, Republicans like DeSantis (who is vaccinated, by the way) are functionally conducting human wave attacks against Joe Biden’s approval rating, sacrificing their own loyal base for cheap political wins. The extent to which this is a conscious calculation may vary, but the practical effect is that the pandemic continues; Biden is blamed for it; and that (probably) does more damage to Democrats’ vote totals than the GOP loses in dead voters.
This ruthlessness must be met with bold, uncompromising action to save life rather than end it. A minority of Republicans insist they absolutely will not choose to get the vaccine? Fine. Force them to do it.
AUSTIN, Texas — The Biden administration urged the courts again to step in and suspend a new Texas law that has banned most abortions since early September, as clinics hundreds of miles away remain busy with Texas patients making long journeys to get care.
The law bans abortions in Texas once cardiac activity is detected, which is usually at six weeks and before some women even know they are pregnant. Although other GOP-controlled states have had similar early bans on abortions blocked by courts, the Texas law has proved durable because the state offloads enforcement solely onto private citizens, who can collect at least $10,000 in damages if they successfully sue abortion providers.
“If Texas’s scheme is permissible, no constitutional right is safe from state-sanctioned sabotage of this kind,” the Justice Department told the appeals court.
In wording that seemed to be a message to the Supreme Court, the Justice Department raised the specter that if allowed to stand, the legal structure created in enacting the law could be used to circumvent even the Supreme Court’s rulings in 2008 and 2010 on gun rights and campaign financing.
Former Republicans seem to be doing a better job of defending the Biden agenda and elucidating the threat to democracy posed by the former guy than Democrats are. Of course the mainstream media plays a role in this too; they simply refuse to explain what’s in the Democrat’s infrastructure bills.
Quick: What is in the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better,” “Human Infrastructure,” “Reconciliation,” “Unicorn Boner,” “Bed Bath & Beyond” legislation?
Can you tell me?
I’m guessing that you can. Well maybe you don’t know everything that’s in it. But I bet you can name a couple things. Because you, dear reader, are an engaged citizen. You participate in our rollicking national civic dialogue. You subscribe to a few substacks.
Painting by Vincenzo Irolli, Italian artist
But do you understand just how rare you are, person who knows what is in the BBB plan? You are like the recherché and retired Batty the Bat beanie baby or the sweet Nikola Jokic double behind the back dribble TopShot NFT.
Because when CBS News asked the American public how much they know about the “Build Back Better” plan only 10 percent replied “a lot of the specifics.”
10 percent!
And let me tell you a secret: Even that number is wrong, because a bunch of those people were lying.
There is copious political science research which demonstrates when people are asked whether or not they voted, those who didn’t will often report that they had. It’s human nature. You don’t want to sound like a laggard to the stranger on the phone!
So we have 1-in-10 as our absolute ceiling when it comes to the share of Americans who know what is in the bill that is cock-blocking the done-and-ready infrastructure bill.
This seems like a problem!
Read the rest at the link.
From former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson: Opinion: The Trump nightmare looms again.
It is increasingly evident that the nightmare prospect of American politics — unified Republican control of the federal government in the hands of a reelected, empowered Donald Trump in 2025 — is also the likely outcome.
Why this is a nightmare should be clear enough. Every new tranche of information released about Trump’s behavior following the 2020 election — most recently an interim report from the Senate Judiciary Committee — reveals a serious and concerted attempt to overthrow America’s legitimate incoming government.
At roughly the same time that Trump was gathering and unleashing his goons to intimidate members of Congress on Jan. 6, he was pressuring Justice Department leaders to provide legal cover for his effort to prevent certification of the election. When they refused, Trump conspired with a lower-level loyalist to take over the department and run it according to the president’s dictates. Under the threat of mass resignations, Trump eventually backed off.
This led to one of the lamest excuses in the long history of lame political excuses. Trump defenders such as Brit Hume want to award Trump kudos for desisting in the end. “Trump decided against it,” Hume tweeted. “It is not to his credit that he even considered it, but his rejection should be part of any story on it.” But this retrenchment, on Trump’s part, was a recognition of positional weakness, not a display of public virtue. The thing that matters most is this: The current front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination would have broken the constitutional order if he could have broken the constitutional order.
Meanwhile, it is clear that this same lawless, reckless man has a perfectly realistic path back to power. The GOP is a garbage scow of the corrupt, the seditious and their enablers, yet the short- and medium-term political currents are in its favor.
Rational Republicans are losing the party civil war. And the only near-term way to battle pro-Trump extremists is for all of us to team up on key races and overarching political goals with our longtime political opponents: the Democrats.
This year we joined more than 150 conservatives — including former governors, senators, congressmen, cabinet secretaries, and party leaders — in calling for the Republican Party to divorce itself from Trumpism or else lose our support, perhaps with us forming a new political party. Rather than return to founding ideals, Republican leaders in the House and in many states have now turned belief in conspiracy theories and lies about stolen elections into a litmus test for membership and running for office.
Starting a new center-right party may prove to be the last resort if Trump-backed candidates continue to win Republican primaries. We and our allies have debated the option of starting a new party for months and will continue to explore its viability in the long run. Unfortunately, history is littered with examples of failed attempts at breaking the two-party system, and in most states today the laws do not lend themselves easily to the creation and success of third parties.
So for now, the best hope for the rational remnants of the Republican Party is for us to form an alliance with Democrats to defend American institutions, defeat far-right candidates, and elect honorable representatives next year — including a strong contingent of moderate Democrats.
It’s a strategy that has worked. Mr. Trump lost re-election in large part because Republicans nationwide defected, with 7 percent who voted for him in 2016 flipping to support Joe Biden, a margin big enough to have made some difference in key swing states.
When will actual Democrats speak up and force the media to report what they are doing and saying? They need to begin to fight for what they supposedly believe or our democracy is doomed.
I missed the days when Louisiana was a purple state. That was back before Dubya’s Turd Blossom decided it would be a great idea if we could just find a way of stopping Black New Orleanians from returning home after Katrina. Of course, they mainly were bussed off to Georgia and Texas, where they’ve helped turned those states purple, which is a good thing. However, we’ve been saddled with the craziest pathetic group of KKK-loving, christianist nitwits ever assembled in one place.
One of them popped up on a Sunday show and proved he was still a Trumpy goose-stepping sleazeball.
CHRIS WALLACE: Do you think the election was stolen?
STEVE SCALISE: What we need to do is to fix the broken lights in the Piggly Wiggly restroom. Look what time it is. I got a cross burning at 2. SQUIRREL! We still on the air? Remember Gangnam Style? Great song. Opa opa…
Millions of Americans have been sold a fraud that the election was stolen. Republicans have a duty to tell the American people that this is not true. Perpetuating the Big Lie is an attack on the core of our constitutional republic. https://t.co/I0bgEIdJrU
“Do you think the 2020 election was ‘stolen’ from Donald Trump? And in continuing to make that charge…do you think that that hurts, undermines American democracy?” Wallace asked Scalise on Fox News Sunday.
Scalise didn’t directly answer the question. “I’ve been very clear from the beginning. If you look at a number of states, they didn’t follow their state-passed laws that govern the election for president. That is what the United States Constitution says,” he responded.
Wallace went on to ask the direct question two more times, but Scalise responded with his concerns about state’s allegedly not following their local election laws. He also criticized Democrats for opposing controversial election changes pushed through by Republican legislatures in conservative states.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) asserted on Sunday that there are times that public school teachers deserve to be the target of verbal threats.
During a panel discussion on ABC’s This Week, Christie falsely suggested that Attorney General Merrick Garland was trying to silence parents who disagree with critical race theory being taught in schools.
“It makes him look partisan,” Christie said of the attorney general. “I think he needs to get back to what the Justice Department is supposed to do, which is dispassionately look at the facts like they did after 9/11.”
Democratic strategist Donna Brazile had a different point of view.
“Chris, no teacher should be threatened simply because he or she is trying to do their job,” Brazile explained.
“It depends on what you call a threat, Donna!” Christie interrupted forcefully. “Parents standing up for what they want is not a threat.”
“A threat is when you verbally assault someone and threaten their lives,” Brazile noted, “which has happened across this country. And that’s why the Justice Department decided to take a position on that.”
A Louisiana teenager could face up to five years behind bars for assaulting a teacher, an attack that authorities say could have been inspired by a TikTok challenge.Larrianna Jackson, 18, was charged with felony battery of a schoolteacher after a video shared across social media showed her attacking a Covington High School teacher on Oct. 6, police said.
A spokesman for the Covington Police Department, Sgt. Edwin Masters, told The Washington Post that some students and teachers have suggested that the attack was inspired by the “slap a teacher” trend found on social media site TikTok.
“We’re still trying to figure out if it’s isolated or related to TikTok,” he said, noting that soap dispensers have been stolen and urinals have gone missing across St. Tammany Parish in recent weeks. Such antics reportedly have been part of a September challenge known as “devious licks.”
The Teacher is wheelchair-bound and was taken to the hospital. Watch the video if you can but it’s a rough thing to see and hear. This is from our local Fox affiliate.
.Police say that Larrianna Jackson, 18, was arrested after video captured her physically assaulting the teacher after the dismissal bell rang. Video obtained from another student’s cell phone shows Jackson striking the teacher four times as she’s hurled to the ground.
“I was just devastated to know what our teachers go through on a day-to-day basis just to educate students,” said St. Tammany Schools Superintendent Frank Jabbia. “For this teacher to be having a conversation with a student and then to be assaulted in this manner was very disturbing.”
Jabbia says anyone involved will be disciplined.
The teacher was badly bruised and rushed to a hospital for treatment. She was released but Jabbia says her condition will be monitored over the next couple of days.
“She is hurting,” he said. Jabbia says it’s unknown if the teacher will return to the classroom following the attack.
Jackson was arrested and accused of a felony count of battery of a school teacher. Jackson was transported to the St. Tammany Parish Jail where she will await prosecution.
Still Life, 1906 par André DERAIN
I’m not exactly sure what is happening to civility these days. Still, I believe that politicians and social media standards are setting the bar pretty low for acceptable behavior these days. There is a high level of burnout for Health Care Workers who have also come under attack recently for just doing their jobs. The same is true of Teachers. The Capitol Police Force has more PSTD than most of their officers experienced while on active duty military service in the Middle East. Why has this country turned on its Helpers; the people there to help, as Mister Rogers used to call them when speaking to children in need.
Saturday’s rally in Iowa, though, was different. This one was attended by longtime Iowa US Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, Iowa Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Ashley Hinson, and other mainstream Republican officials. Some of these very same people, who just nine months ago were slamming Trump for his role in the Capitol riots, were now only too happy to be seen supporting him. This is politics at its worst — and at its most dangerous for our democracy.
The most hypocritical of the bunch is Sen. Grassley, who on January 6 was escorted by his security detail to a secure location to protect him from the pro-Trump mob that had laid siege on the Capitol. Grassley, who voted to certify the 2020 election, made a veiled reference to Trump in his statement, noting that the lawsuits filed after the election had failed and that “politicians in Washington should not second guess the courts once they have ruled.”
In February, however, after Trump’s impeachment trial for allegedly inciting the January 6 insurrection (allegations which Trump has denied), Grassley was even more direct with his criticism. He said in a statement that “President Trump continued to argue that the election had been stolen even though the courts didn’t back up his claims,” and “belittled and harassed elected officials across the country to get his way.” Grassley added that Trump “encouraged his own, loyal vice president, Mike Pence, to take extraordinary and unconstitutional actions during the Electoral College count.”
Grassley continued bluntly: “There’s no doubt in my mind that President Trump’s language was extreme, aggressive, and irresponsible,” sharing his view that all involved in the attack — including Trump — “must take responsibility for their destructive actions that day.”
Flash forward to Saturday, and there was Grassley beaming as Trump offered a “complete and total endorsement for re-election” for the 88-year-old Senator. Grassley responded, “If I didn’t accept the endorsement of a person that’s got 91 percent of the Republican voters in Iowa, I wouldn’t be too smart.”
To Grassley, it was “smart” to accept the endorsement of the man who spent Saturday’s rally spouting the same falsehoods that led to the January 6 violence that caused Grassley to hide in fear. Trump’s litany of dangerous election lies at his Iowa rally ranged from irresponsible claims he won Wisconsin “by a lot” in 2020, to lying that the results of the recently released Arizona audit support his false claim that he had actually won that state. He even declared that “First of all, [Biden] didn’t get elected, OK?”
The crowd responded to Trump’s buffet of lies by chanting, “Trump won! Trump won!”
It would be sad to think that Trump and Trump’s behavior–like gaslighting, lying, and promoting angry violent responses to everything–is the rubicon we’ve crossed for our social interactions. It seems, however, cruelty and gaslighting are about all you see on both social media and the regular press with very few folks calling it out for what it is.
It is burning out the empathetic among us. These are the very people we rely on to care for us at all stages of our lives. I see this in my own family and in myself. It’s those of us that that do people work that are taking the brunt of it. Every one of us has studied, gone to school, and worked to become society’s public servants. If only the Republican politicians approached their duties the same way. At the very least, they could uphold their oath to the Constitution and most seem incapable of that even. It would behoove them to think of this medical commandment “First, do no harm”.
Meanwhile, I’m basically feral and staying home. I haven’t had the T.V. on all day or last weekend, and watch less of it all the time. I read. I play silly video games. I’m just glad my parents haven’t lived to see all this and I fear for our children and grandchildren. Several major Republicans spoke this weekend.. One basically okayed abusing teachers. The others just gaslit the nation on lies about our elections.
I’m bereft. I miss simple kindness.
I am working on a spontaneous gift for my daughter and granddaughters. A friend is downsizing her collectibles and offered up a cookie jar that’s a beautiful spotted little bear. I am picking it up on Wednesday. I have a recipe box that I started in 8th grade. It contains handwritten instructions for my favorite cookie recipes in bright peacock blue and pink ink with hearts where dots should be. I’m giving her my originals.
My daughter is thrilled and said she did not have my mother’s chocolate chip cookie recipe. That recipe came from a neighbor in Ponca City and it is forever Mrs. Daniels’ chocolate chip cookies. I’m also giving her the one that came from our Cleaning lady of 30 years. Dr. Daugter said she had become interested in decorated cookies so I am also sending three generations of cookie cutters and my mother’s decorating kit that came from Italy. She learned how to decorate cakes when I was little. I have all her tips and a book. The Italian lady across the street from us in Council Bluffs taught her. Both my mother and I gave our daughters designer cakes So, it’s the little things like these that make me smile. Generations of women helping each other and passing things forward. At least we can still share those small things on a most local level.
You take care and embrace all the small pleasures that you may find!
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
It would be sad to think that Trump and Trump’s behavior–like gaslighting, lying, and promoting angry violent responses to everything–is the rubicon we’ve crossed for our social interactions. It seems, however, cruelty and gaslighting are about all you see on both social media and the regular press with very few folks calling it out for what it is.
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