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The Clintons Pull Another Fast One

The President-Elect evidently offered the Secretary of State position to his former rival last week, possibly earlier.
 
The funny part is, it was suppoed to be between them, until at least the vetting process got done.
 
Evidently Hillary decided to make it public, and are the Obama people ever steamed. This should be a simple payback for when Obama had a private conversation with the incumbent in the oval office and his staff laid out the details to the press that afternoon.
 
The vetting process is a big part of why she didn't get offered the VP slot. Her husband's Presidential Library has a list of multi-million dollar donors who are highly problematic. There was a bunch of money from all over the Middle East, and neither Clinton seems to want to let the donor list go public in any way.
 
Now Obama is in a position where, instead of never publicly offering it to her, he has to publicly take it away from her, which will not sit well with all her supporters in the party that threatened to not vote for him (but obviously still did).
 
It's bad enough that they have to resurrect many of Clinton's staffers, in order to fill his adminstration. Surely there is somebody else out there who can serve him as Sec State as well as her?
 
The Clintons have to go. Stop feeding them. It only encourages them. They are that couple that stays at the party even after the bar is boxed up and put away. They don't take a hint.
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Fair Warning To General Motors

I know you're up against it. You are paying your workers packages of well over $70 an hour, while your non-union competition in the Southeast is just north of $40. Your pension and health care costs for your retirees are killing you, and they seem to live forever, don't they?
 
So you want to apply for federal funds to keep going? That's nice, for this quarter. It sure will beat Chapter 11, because they won't even ask you for a recovery plan.
 
Chrysler had to submit a firm recovery plan in 1979, when they borrowed from Carter. You will just get the money. Too good to be true, right?
 
You're damned right, it's too good to be true. If you take this money, the number of Washington people reaching in and running your company for you will astound you, and it will never, ever go away.
 
You've had plans in the works for over a decade for the rollout of hybrids? Forget that. You will now dance to Carol Browner. You've been pushing your engineers to raise CAFE standards so you could react when the rest of the country followed California? Drop it. Just do what Henry Waxman says. And if he says something different tommorow, drop it again and dance that way. If that means an extra $50M, just get it from Congress.
 
I wouldn't have a problem buying a car from somebody who was in Chapter 11- if they had a plan to keep their creditors happy, that would be good enough for me.
 
I won't buy a car from a company that is an arm of Congress. And I won't go along with nationalizing an industry, for the sake of social engineering. Not with my money.
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Open Letter To Secretary Paulson

Now that the $750 billion has gone into open application mode, the line is forming in the soup kitchen.
 
AIG needs the money because they are an essential credit service and the execs taking their parachute vacation don't want to settle for anything less than the gold masseuse package.
 
General Motors needs the money because they are an essential manufacturer to whom the Midwest (and all of America, if you count suppliers) depends on to keep going. They pay their workers almost twice what Honda and Toyota do in Kentucky and Tennessee, and we all pay over $1000 of every new purchase to cover for pensions and bennies for their skilled negotiation with past generations of UAW workers.
 
The city of Phoenix is an essential city, because without it, you'd have to move the airport to Tuscon, and they don't want the extra traffic or the tourists there, being the bedroom community they are.
 
The city of Philadelphia is an even more essential city, because they are the epicenter of social protest for the cause of convicted cop killers. They also need the money to continue their program of clearing the streets of weapons by buying them with cash and Sony Playstations, in lieu of actually arresting the ones with open records.
 
Well, I am an essential consumer. It is important that I am a functioning shopper in full form for the Christmas season. I know I don't have any credit card debt and I'm not behind on my mortgage, but I ordered the baseball package from the cable company this summer, because a transplanted New Yorker has to follow his old team. Also, there were a lot of kids trick-or-treating this year, and I had to buy extra candy. I can get by with $2 million. A mere pittance in the new world order, no?
 
Just send me the disclosure forms. My CFO believes in transparency, you won't have any problems with that.
 
Is this starting to sound just a bit ridiculous? We've elected a President who swore to bend over backwards to help the middle class, and now that times are tough, the line is already forming. This is his base. They wouldn't know Adam Smith from Adam West.
 
Welcome to the new world. I hope we get over it soon.
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Stock Market Rationality

It sometimes seems like the beginning of a Barnum & Bailey's show every time the NYSE bell rings at 9:30 in the morning. The beat up Volkswagen comes out, the hordes of dancing midgets emerge and everybody staring at the Dow numbers breaks into a sweat.
 
Lesson number one: the Baby Boomers, unlike their Depression parents, were born comfortable with the stock market. It is where the bulk of their retirement money is. There isn't a better producing alternative for it in the long run. What comes out will go back in, absent any immediate liquidity needs.
 
Lesson number two: there are reasons why the numbers see-saw like they do. One big one is that the brokers and the fund managers aren't the only ones playing the game day by day. Everybody with a brokerage account learns the history, and it is common wisdom among them that falling markets bottom out 40-50% below the peak, and many put computer generated buy triggers around that level. That is why the market keeps falling towards 8000 and jumping up again. Also, most fund managers place their cash out orders around 2-2:30PM, so expect some craziness then, followed by a final settlement for the day.
 
Three: I wanted no part of Obama, and my heart wanted him to lose, even when my head was telling me he wasn't going to. The players in the market have anthracite and bituminous hearts, and they bet their horses on Obama within two weeks after Lehman Brothers took on the formaldehyde. Part of the downturn, and it's inability to reverse out, is the uncertainty of where he is going, along with a good guess that some things are going to make market investment suck eggs.
 
This would include:
Raising the capital gains tax not to a predictable level, but to one that Mr. Obama thinks is "fair" on a given day.
Letting the Bush tax cuts die in 2010.
Not doing anything about the pernicious Alternative Minimum Tax, because the feds need the money.
Openly musing about the environmental constructivity of high energy prices.
Making the recovery process (starting with the $750B) another earmark process for Democrats.
 
This makes investment a more difficult game,  but not an impossible one. Wall Street, and your 401K, would survive Karl Marx, once the investors had some sort of handle on Marx's predictability, so they had an idea of where to go.
 
That is the danger of Obama. It is that he has built a movement based not on a specific set of ideas, but on whatever he thinks is the best idea today. Anybody who wanted a handle on Reagan's impending direction in 1981 could get a damned clear idea from reading his speeches to that point. You can't do that with Obama.
 
But the market will continue, and the only question is, will the new President create a semi-socialist sludge, or get out of the way enough for another boom to take hold? Either way, your stock situation in 2015 will be appreciably better than it is now.
 
One way or another, we will find a way to clear up the damage wrought by the bad mortgages, even though the three Senators most responsible for the mess will get off scot free: Chris Dodd, Barney Frank and......Barack Obama.
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Palin The Undead

You'd never know the Presidential campaign was over. There she is at the Republican Governor's Conference, taking the bulk of the press questions and sucking the oxygen from everybody else in the room.
 
There are some Republicans who seem to want her to stay down, as evidenced by some McCain staffers who are trying to convince us that the driven, overachieving honor student Governor couldn't make her way through a simple geography lesson, and was a "diva" to boot. And it is a sure bet that most Democrats would rather that Wasilla swallowed her whole.
 
The Democrat equation in this is simple- it is the classic culture/ counter-culture schism at work. The rural, church-going folksy Governor vs. the urban/ suburban, cosmopolitan, secular, coastal sophisticates. Obama was the other lightning rod in the recent campaign. McCain and Biden were almost bystanders.
 
Myth number one: Sarah was a drag on the ticket. I've been through the numbers and it seems that, if she were Mitt Romney, McCain loses at least four more states, and the race is an Obama 8-9 point win, instead of five. McCain took off with the independents after the convention, and held them like a rock until the Lehman Brothers went belly up on September 15th. The Obama people saw the numbers not budging back their way for two weeks, and they were starting to react. This was the force behind the Barack dictum to "get in their face" at that time.
 
Myth number two: Sarah is an unsophisticated hick ignoramus. This is one that has been married to by those out there who got the bulk of their Palin updates from Tina Fey, and this will never go away, just as it never did with Bush.
 
Sarah will continue to polarize both sides. She is a mercurial figure who lights the crowds up. Her advance work this fall involved getting large venues and announcing where to get tickets. Nobody had to beef the crowds for her.
 
I've been crunching through why she polarizes some on the right, and more will follow on that. Let us finish by laying my betting money on Ms. Palin not going away any time soon. She will be in the spotlight when Senator Stevens has to resign. Many will try to talk her into appointing herself into that seat. She will be a fund raising magnet in 2010, and an obvious front runner two years after that.
 
Tina will have to take some more time off from her work at "30 Rock" after all.
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Obama's New Pit Bull

The direction of Obama's White House is as unpredictable as it is because we all elected the most inexerienced candidate in memory, with the smallest legislative track record. This effect is augmented by the personal way with which his campaign was run.
 
As a result, the new direction is all in Obama's head right now, and all of us are left to guess. I suspect that he will follow his most consistent convictions, and pull left. The alternative would be to use his popularity to run to the center.
 
The choice of Rahm Emanuel for White House Chief of Staff is a good one either way. A President's Chief has to be the great gatekeeper, the one who keeps the agenda and the calendar from becoming the great circus that it was under Clinton's first, Mack McClarty ("Mack the Nice"). Most of the DNC world in a political position today worked for the Clinton's at one time or another. Obama's fate may be tied to his ability to pull the wheat from the chaff of all the Clinton retreads.
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Self Evident Comic Relief

Every once in a while, a standup routine need merely make an observation, and the comedy provides itself. I'm thinking of a moment when, after Michael Jackson sang many years ago at a Super Bowl halftime bonanza, and we all stood in shock at what he had done to himself surgically, all David Letterman needed the next night was, "What's up with Michael Jackson?"
 
Well, I have two for you. One is Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.): "...this administration's simplistic notion that those who have wealth should get to keep it".   Run that over for yourselves a few times, folks. Those of you who are familiar with Marx's Manifesto won't have to.
 
And another one, which I first noticed the day after Election Day- the new logo for CNN: "No bias, no bull". I wonder which one of the Clintonites in the news heiarchy came up with that one? Did they realize they would be announcing their Fox fixation?
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Election Night

It's been a while since I've worked for a side that was as outgunned as the Republicans were this year.
 
I felt like a pallbearer out in the rain last Tuesday, coaching a beleaguered staff through what they knew was going to be a tough day. Every place I landed, the Obamaites were outnumbering us three and four to one, with replacements rotating all day. They had their giant rotogravure, three-color Obama medallions, done over in the best Che Guevera motif. They were positively giddy.
 
Since the election, a few eye-openers: first, the turnout was less than two percent over the 2004 level- still historically high, but not at the 65% levels that were mused upon my some of the media people.
 
Secondly, the youth turnout wasn't appreciably higher than the last two elections.
 
Finally, it seems that the Obama campaign raised about $400 million in the last two months of the campaign. That is an astounding number. It was the fuel that fed the organizations in place in all 50 states.
 
McCain's people were struggling for money and staff until the end. Obama's offices were staffed by salaried people. When a mailing needed to be done, there was never a wait for money. When they needed temps, they passed out $30 Visa cards for three hours of work. There was always food on the table. That kind of advantage is really hard to overcome.
 
That is not to say that there wasn't a discipline of message to be found in the Obama campaign that McCain was always trying to keep up with. Even when Obama had to turn on a dime, he had a rationale for it, and there was no staffer upsetting the apple cart with open dissent. His back tracking on public campaign financing is a golden example of this.
 
I wish Obama luck, and forward my sympathy. He has set himself up as a bit of a cult figure. The good side of this is that he probably has less I.O.U.s out there than anybody in recent history. The down side is that he has set himself up as the grand uniter, and the expectations are going to be something of a challenge.
 
 
 
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Election Day

First things first: my condolences to the Obama's on the loss of the most influential person in his upbringing, his Grandmother. There will be no snapping allowed here about how he spent her death bed day on the campiagn trail. I thinks it is highly likely that his trip to Hawaii last month was a good bye visit, and also that she would probably die happier knowing he was that much closer to the White House.
 
I understand that this seeming graciousness is likely something that would never, ever be returned in kind by the bulk of his supporters. The Obamaniacs are some of the most disrespectful, obnoxious people I have ever met in number in the game of politics. They make the Clintonian obnoxiousness seem tame by comparison.
 
Which makes Election day all the more special. It is like the eye of a hurricane, an oasis where much of the partisan tirades take a back seat to a population taking pride in waiting on line to carry out a responsibility that both upholds and is played out in a freedom the whole world envies.
 
I'll be spending Tuesday at my usual vocation of working the polls. This will serve the secondary purpose of keeping me away from the media. This is something I crave more than ever because of the uselessness that networks have wreaked on themselves.
 
The networks all availed themselves of a service called VNS (Voter News Service) until 2004- when the service gave up all pretenses of objectivity, and just interviewed whoever they felt like, and then rolled the numbers. The networks spent the afternoon of Election Day 2004 breathlessly preparing us for an oncoming John Kerry landslide. I know there were at least two people out there staring at this, looking at their own notes and wondering what kind of ginga these people were smoking- myself and Karl Rove.
 
So they dumped VNS en masse, and are probably handling the exit polling in house tomorrow- which means a better result is not likely. The only thing relevant on the airwaves before the polls close tomorrow will be the weather.
 
Then, y'all watch Virginia and Pennsylvania. If Obama carries them, it will be an early night, except in the South Side of Chicago. If they can't call them, it will be a long month and a great pay day for the DNC lawyers.
 
If McCain pulls this off, it will either be with factors I have conceded as unpredictable, or something simple I missed. It will also likely be close enough to create a debacle that will make Florida 2000 look like a church bingo social. Gore had to be pushed into playing hard ball. Obama will do all the pushing right from the top.
 
That's because Obama has a cruel streak that is the discipline for the people around him. Barack is the Crip that scares the wits out of both the Red and Blue bandanas. His campaign's threats and actions towards uncooperative media and politicos should serve notice on that, but the long campaign year has provided too many other fish to fry.
 
It's too bad that such a trait would remain relatively unexplored in such an untested candidate, but there it is. Win or lose, I will expand on this later, either as a fleshing of a President-Elect or the irresponsibility of the traditional media.
 
 
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Harry Truman Redux

In 1948, George Gallup, the nation's pre-eminent pollster, decided in early October that Tom Dewey was far enough ahead to call the race his way then, and shut down operations for the season.
 
There was no last minute surge for Truman. It was more likely a slow buildup from his campaign work, done without a million pollsters following up every weekend. The race in 1980 was a last minute shift- five points away from Carter and towards Reagan on the final Saturday, and five more Sunday- pushed by Reagan's performance in the last debate.
 
That race was a more apt comparison to the present- the world hated Carter, and was looking to see if the less known Reagan was a safe commodity to place in power.
 
The final three day rolling averages will be in tomorrow morning. The pollsters know that most final decisions are made by the Sunday before Election Day, based on one's workweek and occupation.
 
At that point, most decisions are finalized, and internal questioning is no longer as necessary to isolate sincerity or likeliness.
 
I have, as yet, seen nothing plausible enough happening with this nationwide or in the key swing states to garner anything but John McCain being in a world of trouble.
 
Add to that a few other factors:
 
An omniprescent court precedent known in all areas to simply keep the polls open if there are long lines- which mitigates the classic mismanagement of urban voting centers.
 
Good weather nationwide, a boon to increased turnout.
 
An Obama campaign with manpower and money advantages not seen since Nixon trounced McGovern in 1972.
 
I see nothing in the next twelve hours that will mitigate any of this, much less reverse it.
 
But I will press on. I never sympathized with Cassandra- knowing the future should never keep you from being able to do something about it.
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Closing The Sale

As I've mentioned before, this election is now a referendum on Obama. Barack is not trying to pose new ideas anymore. He realizes he is sitting in the catbird seat on Election Day, and is striving mightily to pose himself as the "safe" option to those who still haven't decided.
 
There are a number of reasons why he hasn't taken his run against an unpopular incumbent in a bad economy with a huge money advantage and blown this race open already:
 
Divided government factor- many out there are mulling the possibility that, while they want some sort of "change", they see the presence of McCain as a limit to the inevitably stronger Democrat majorities that are coming.
 
Too many unanswered questions- McCain is a known factor. Obama still has large gaps in his biography, and new questions about his past and his friends keep erupting. His repeated use of the 'barely knew the guy' defense, dragged out with the likes of Ayers and Wright, only works well on the synchophants.
 
The CIC factor- while Obama has been all over the map in his post Iraq strategy, his strength has been his projection of absolute confidence in his control of military policy. In other words, he is not in the least bit intimidated by men in uniform. However, the back and forth from getting out entirely to attacking Afghanistan to attacking Pakistan has been noticed.
 
The money advantage- which has largely been dissipated by the last week in October by McCain and RNC funds saved for the finale and getting out the vote. This may well not be enough to overcome the organizational advantage Obama has in paid staffers in many states, but it will close the gap into the last weekend.
 
The money advantage with Obama is greater than anything seen since 1972. That difference may make closing the sale unnecessary. Money is blood and oxygen to the life of a campaign, and McCain could not keep up with the financial crisis and the magic $150M that appeared on Obama's doorstep the month before. Not both at once.
 
 
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The New "Funny Money"

It turns out the smell I picked up coming from the Obama fund raising arm was not just from being downwind from Chicago.
 
Many people, it turns out, have gone above and beyond what I would do, and put their credit card numbers on Obama's site to make a small donation- under assumed names and addresses of the laughable order. The campaign was happy to accept their money. They tried the same on McCain's site, and were stopped cold. Why?
 
From Tuesday's NY Post:
 
What accounts for the Obama campaign's acceptance of these fraudulent donations? Most merchants selling goods and services use the basic Address Verification System that screens credit-card charges for matching names and addresses. (It can also screen cards issued by foreign banks.) The McCain campaign uses AVS and provides a searchable database of all donors, including those who fall below the $200 threshold. The Obama campaign apparently has chosen not to use the AVS system to screen donations.
 
The part about screening foriegn banks is important, too. So it seems we have no way of tracking where, or from whom about half of the $600M that Obama has raised has come from. Doesn't anybody out there have a problem with this?
 
The good news is, this will be the last national candidate to go through the ludicrous laundry mill of public financing. Now we will actually have to SOLVE the problem of constant fund raising, instead of gloss it over with another batch of feel-good laws that the lawyers find get arounds for within weeks.
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November Is Upon Us

The poll numbers are still closing, but McCain is still consistently at the bad end of the margin of error, which is not a good place to be.
 
This campaign has long gone from being a referendum on Bush to a referendum on Obama, and many undecideds are still mulling over the slick salesman as President. One does not translate automatically into another. If the final weekend rolling averages don't show some improvement by Monday morning, McCain's position will be even more precarious than it is now.
 
I spoke last week of a swing state strategy that McCain had to run the table with, in order to win. He has followed this, with one significant detour. He has all but written off Colorado and New Mexico. There are three reasons to do this: bad polling, money or time & resources. The polling in those two states is not bad for him. I think the other two have come into play.
 
McCain's campaign has decided to throw one last hail mary, and try and roll all the southern and midwestern swing states, capped off with the daily double of Virginia AND Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania, where he is behind by 10%. I think he has decided that those two critical states, being neighbors, accommodate a campaign schedule that has a candidate there every day, twice a day and more through Monday night.
 
This is an Electoral College campaign. It always is when the popular vote is close. The fact is, because the Electoral vote is based on population, the popular vote is tied to it more strictly than most people realize. The only times in our history when the two showed competing winners, the popular vote was within half a percent.
 
The reamining wild card is the youth and Black turnout. If the polls do not change from today, and they turn out as the Obama campaign is predicting, Barack will get 300-320 Electoral Votes and 52% of the popular vote. If they turn out in more historical numbers, this all becomes a giant toss up, and more DNC lawyers get their Christmas bonuses.
 
The Senate is less of a quandary. Liddy Dole in my state and Norm Coleman in Minnesota are in trouble. Liddy because the fate of the top of the ticket will probably determine her fate here. Norm because a third candidate is sucking votes away from him and giving hope to the Stu Smalley of our time, Al Franken. And then there is the ever-dignified Senator Stevens of Alaska, who wouldn't resign even if he were photographed with his pants down in a room full of Cub Scouts.
 
With all the extra Republican incumbents being challenged, and the problems at the top of the ticket, it still looks like the best the Dems can hope for is 58- a little short of making Obama the new Emporer.
 
The House will increase the Dem total by somewhere between 15 and 24, also depending on the fate of McCain. That would leave Pelosi with something either just north or south of 250.
 
It's not over yet.
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"Change We Need"

If Obama gets elected, and a reasonable Democrat majority follows along to support him, there will be a push from their base to get things done in a hurry, because the smarter ones know there will be a reaction.
 
The first one is a no-brainer: dumping the secret ballot in union elections, because they can't seem to stem the decline in union membership in the private sector. And that seems entirely fair, because organized labor doesn't have ANY history of intimidation or violence, right?
 
Then there will be the watering down (but not the elimination) of No Child Left Behind, so the standards can be better determined by the people that are supposed to uphold them. You mean, the Teacher's unions will do what they see fit? I'm sorry I keep saying things so plainly, I should really learn to be polite and use my doublespeak.
 
Oh, and Obama is all for charter schools- "public" charter schools. Which means that parents that disagree with the way the unions are running things can always have their children taught by union members in another location. You can't put enough pine tree fresheners around that one to keep the smell down.
 
Here's the best part: there will be an attempt to expand Medicare in a fashion not seen since 1965. The biggest purpose of this is to water down the eligibility requirements so that employers will pass their minions over to it, it being cheaper for them than paying the taxes and fines on faiiling to meet the new requirements of employer based health care. The employer based health care that Obama is presently condemning McCain for being so unconcerned about. Ain't that a hoot?
 
It doesn't take much to work past the Obama the moderate stump speech song and dance. When you work past the laugher of his website showing just about every policy position in existence, there are things he makes obvious he is serious about.
 
So the candidate is serious. His base is damned frustrated, and even more serious. If we all give him the horses to make this happen in two weeks, you will see the effort started before the turkey is on your Thanksgiving table.
 
So, you swing voters out there: is this the "change we need"?
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Colin Powell's New Self

I don't know which was more troubling to watch last weekend, General Powell or the Obama campaign worker who "interviewed" him, Tom Brokaw.
 
The former Secretary of State was "troubled" by the "connections to terrorism" and "Muslim origins" to Obama that the McCain campaign was making. What? They aren't making them? McCain has openly declared both a non-issue? So what? I guess if you are a big enough "get", you are allowed to go off the DNC talking points reservation and meander right into DailyKos.
 
And who would challenge him on this? Brokaw? Why the hell would he do that? Look at the way he led off the 'discussion' on WMD in Iraq. It's easy money that a former network anchor has managed to grope through the Kay and Dulfur reports on this subject, and it is damned certain that Powell has. So how is it that Brokaw could have the stones to lead in with "...We all know there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq" and Colin wouldn't challenge it?
 
But, we'll move on. The General has decided to assuage his Alma guilt (his Wife has been less than enthusiastic about his GOP affiliations for years) by taking up the flag of the impoverished and the middle class here. So does this mean he'll donate some of his $15G+ per night speaking fees to charity, or that maybe someday, somehow, he'll fly commercial again?
 
You can guess where my money is on that one. I got tired of Powell when he tried to dump his doctrine of military force, which worked reasonably well in 1991, on the ground game in Iraq- where it doesn't fit at all. Everybody has their day. Powell's has passed, but he obviously sees a new life in the Great Unifier. Good luck to him on that one.
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