2020 Presidential Candidates: Pete Buttigieg

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Bicycle Bill
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Re: 2020 Presidential Candidates: Pete Buttigieg

Post by Bicycle Bill »

wesw wrote:Hollywood is evil.

I won t provide the link, but you can find it if you want.
You won't provide the link, or you *CAN'T* provide the link?

You shoot off your mouth via the keyboard constantly with your stream-of-consciousness rantings, but you are just like your idol Dumb'old Trump.  When it comes time for solid, concrete facts, he can't provide them either.  Take the other day, for instance .... he claimed that China’s economy has lost up to $20 trillion in value since his election.  That's one helluva good trick, considering their total economy is something like $13 trillion.  So China's economy, according to the financial "genius" who is impersonating a president, has been wiped out and is now something like $5 trillion in the hole!!

Everyone who believes that, please stand on your head and clap your feet.

Or take today .... during a press conference, he was asked about a 'deadline' for Mexican tariffs.  He brushed the question aside, pointing to his marble-headed skull, saying "“No, I have no deadline.  My deadline is what’s up here. We’ll figure out the deadline.  Nobody can quite figure it out.”

... in other words, he's running the country as if it was a giant game of "Calvinball", and he's making it up as he goes along.
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Re: 2020 Presidential Candidates: Pete Buttigieg

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I did provide the link in a following post.

sorry I said trans boy his official moniker is drag boy

wake up, bill, wake up

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Re: 2020 Presidential Candidates: Pete Buttigieg

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One of the more remarkable parts of that speech, was Buttigieg saying that Congress should reassert its rightful power to declare war and no longer rely on the use of force authorization passed after 9/11. How many times have we discussed the expansion of Executive power and noted that, once the Executive Branch gains new powers, they are rarely if ever taken away? Here is someone running for President who would willingly relinquish powers granted to the Executive Branch by Congress because the Constitution says that Congress should exercise them.

That alone would make him stand out among any president of most of the last century. You'd probably have to go back to Calvin Coolidge to find a president who didn't seek to expand the powers of the presidency (and then, only because he was lazy), let alone one who would relinquish powers that Congress had chosen to grant him.
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Re: 2020 Presidential Candidates: Pete Buttigieg

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Re: 2020 Presidential Candidates: Pete Buttigieg

Post by Joe Guy »

The remaining letters can't be R, M or S, so he's going to have a difficult time solving that one....

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Re: 2020 Presidential Candidates: Pete Buttigieg

Post by Scooter »

Trump iz destuoying Amerika.

Is the way a Trumpanzee would spell it.
Last edited by Scooter on Thu Jun 13, 2019 5:59 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: 2020 Presidential Candidates: Pete Buttigieg

Post by Joe Guy »

Not quite. You'll have to spin the wheel again.

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Re: 2020 Presidential Candidates: Pete Buttigieg

Post by Scooter »

Awejika. Even closer to the way a Trumpanzee would spell it (because they so often see things upside down and backwards from what they actually are)
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Re: 2020 Presidential Candidates: Pete Buttigieg

Post by ex-khobar Andy »

Fake News. I studdied that Photograph of Ms White (very nice!) and they had already used the M in TRUMP! Now I don't watch Jeopardy very much because Alec Trebbec is Canadian (most people don't know that) but its Photoshoppped! It doesn't take a Stable Genius to see that!

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Re: 2020 Presidential Candidates: Pete Buttigieg

Post by Scooter »

At least a new president could care about governing

In his foreign policy address Tuesday at Indiana University, South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg took pains near the end of his speech to focus on the functioning of foreign policy and national security, not just goals and values. This kind of talk is practically unheard of in the Trump presidency: When the “deep state” is the boogeyman, political slots go unfilled and patently unqualified appointees are put in charge of departments whose missions they seek to undermine. Trump predictably has government rife with corruption, incompetence and poor morale.

It’s no secret that Democrats, who favor an involved public sector, care about its upkeep and functionality. Republicans’ limited government mantra has in recent years turned into hostility to government, facts and experts. Buttigieg showed how invested he is in actually managing the executive branch.

He spoke about “subnational” diplomacy (such as gathering cities to make their own commitments toward reducing our carbon output) and about updating foreign policy institutions — “intelligence, communications, diplomatic and development” operations. He seemed to take delight in getting into the weeds of military budgeting, arguing that how we spend is as important as how much we spend, especially at a time when we need to direct funds to new threats such as cyberterrorism. On veterans, he argued for mental-health services to be upgraded in Veterans Affairs and for cooperation with state and local leaders to reintegrate veterans into society. Speaking about the intelligence community, he thanked it for safeguarding our elections — something the current president would never do.

Buttigieg spoke enthusiastically of the need to bring in “new people and next-generation information operations” and to prioritize (as we did in the Cold War) communications that both refute enemy disinformation and accurately explain the United States’ actions and values to the world. Our communications capacity is only “as robust and sophisticated as the people we recruit,” he said. He put in a plug for finding people with language skills and digital competence and urged that we upgrade hiring practices to seek out a more diverse labor pool. He advocated efforts to structure “flexible career paths” for civilians in the military and to make benefits flexible for the multiple job changes they’ll have in their careers. And lastly, he made clear that military, diplomatic and development workers abroad must know Congress and the president “have their back” and won’t scapegoat them when things go wrong. With a swipe at Trump’s constant politicization of the military, Buttigieg promised that he would “absolutely not use them as political props or pawns.”

This address was truly the polar opposite of Trump’s “I alone can fix it” attitude and his gleeful ignorance about what government does, let alone how it does it. Maybe it was Buttigieg’s military training or his experience in McKinsey analyzing business systems, or maybe running a city really does make one detail-oriented. In any case, it was refreshing to hear someone who wants to make what he would be in charge of — the executive branch — do its job better. It shows that it’s not all about him, that he wants to be a good steward of taxpayer dollars and that results, not photo ops, are what drive him. Perhaps we’ll get a president who would hire the best people.
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Re: 2020 Presidential Candidates: Pete Buttigieg

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Buttigieg’s Message Ahead of BET Black Economic Alliance Forum

A week from now, our nation will celebrate Juneteenth. It marks the day when enslaved Black people in Texas learned–almost two years after the fact* – that the Emancipation Proclamation had rendered them free people. It is a fundamentally American occasion–a celebration of freedom, but also an acknowledgement of freedom delayed. As we observe this day, we must be honest that the hopes stirred almost 160 years ago have still not been fully realized.

Black Americans are not yet fully free when Black unemployment is still almost twice the national average, when the average Black eighth grader reads at a level far below their white peers, and when Black mothers are 3-4 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women. We lack true freedom when so many schools are almost as segregated as they were before Brown v. Board of Education. And, we cannot have freedom when identical resumes with stereotypically white or Black names lead to wildly different chances of being hired. These persistent inequalities have compounded over hundreds of years. They hold back our economy and corrode the American soul.

Replacing racist policies with neutral ones will not be enough to deliver equality. We must actively work to reverse these harms, which is why I propose that we invest in equity with a plan as bold as the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II. Let’s call it the Douglass Plan for Black America, in honor of Frederick Douglass, who called America to better live up to its promise. Such a plan could help heal the deep wounds of America’s original sin and supercharge economic growth for every American.

Like my campaign, the plan is structured around three values: freedom, security, and democracy.

When it comes to freedom, America–with only about 5% of the world’s population–is home to nearly 25% of the world’s incarcerated population, and this population is disproportionately Black. We would be a safer and more just country if we did not harshly penalize the poor, or young people who’ve made missteps. By reducing sentencing disparities and ensuring that every returning citizen can reintegrate into society, I commit to using every tool possible to end unnecessary and discriminatory incarceration, with the result of reducing the number of Americans incarcerated by 50 percent. This is not a random target, but the hard math on how many Americans should not be locked up in the first place.

True security means being able to provide food, shelter, and a livelihood. Yet today–as a direct result of slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing discrimination large and small–for every $100 in wealth a white family has, the average Black family only has $5.04. To combat this wealth gap and encourage greater economic security within the Black community, America should triple the number of entrepreneurs from underserved areas–particularly ones of color–within ten years. This would create over 3 million new jobs and more than $660 billion in new wealth for Black communities and our country, through a number of policies to support this goal. For example, I’m proposing a federal fund–modeled on a Maryland program–that would co-invest in entrepreneurs of color, particularly in low-income communities.

We want to increase the number of successful small businesses in Black communities by 50%, by reforming credit scoring, increasing access to credit, and supporting long-term growth. Under my administration, the federal government will also almost triple its contracting business with minority-owned firms, from just over 9% to 25%. This single proposal could inject more than $100 billion in communities of color. The Douglass Plan would further support the next generation of Black entrepreneurs by expanding access to capital, training entrepreneurs, and rigorously and tracking our progress.

Lastly, we must safeguard our democracy. Americans have lost faith in a political system where dollars outvote people, and where politicians fail to deliver even on ideas supported by an American majority.

This cynicism is nowhere more warranted than in the Black community, where systematic efforts are taking away the right to vote. To counteract this troubling trend, we commit to advancing a 21st Century Voting Rights Act, to ensure that every vote is counted everywhere, particularly in communities with a history of discrimination. This means banning practices like voter ID laws and ensuring that potentially discriminatory changes to voting laws first be reviewed by the Department of Justice. We are not a true democracy if certain Americans are restricted from voting because one party has decided they would be better off if fewer people vote.

I’ll have a lot more to say about these policies in the coming weeks. But the time to act is now. Frederick Douglass once noted that “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” So let’s demand greater freedom, security, and democracy for communities that need it most. Doing so will enrich not just Black America, but all Americans.
* June 19, 1865, when the slaves of Texas learned they were free, was in fact just short of two and a half years after the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation.
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Re: 2020 Presidential Candidates: Pete Buttigieg

Post by Econoline »

RayThom wrote:I'm starting to feel a Warren/Bootigieg race is not as strange as it once sounded.
I just realized that if this happened, not only would Trump have to debate Warren, Pence would have to face Mayor Pete. Now that's some must-see teevee right there.
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Re: 2020 Presidential Candidates: Pete Buttigieg

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Has the shooting torpedoed his candidacy?
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Re: 2020 Presidential Candidates: Pete Buttigieg

Post by Lord Jim »

Looks like Mayor Pete is going through a very nasty Town Hall meeting...
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2020 Presidential Candidates: Pete Buttigieg

Post by RayThom »

Pete's "baptism of fire" prior to the debates. I think he'll weather the storm without sinking his ship.
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Re: 2020 Presidential Candidates: Pete Buttigieg

Post by Scooter »

"I couldn't get it done."

Will it be seen as a refreshing moment of honesty and humility heretofore almost never witnessed in a politician, or will it reverb in every opposition ad if he gets the nomination?
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Re: 2020 Presidential Candidates: Pete Buttigieg

Post by Lord Jim »

I think that short term it will redound to Mayor Pete's advantage simply because it's so unusual to see a politician step up and admit to failure without making excuses....

He'll get some points for good character...

However strategically (if he winds up being one of the last three or four candidates standing for the nomination, and certainly if he is the nominee) it can be very problematic....

It begs the question:

"If you 'couldn't get it done' in eight years when it came to increasing minority hiring in your mid-sized city police force, why should the American people believe you or have any confidence when you say you can 'get it done' when it comes to the wide array of far more complex problems you would face as President Of The United States?"

That's really not an unfair question to ask, and Buttigieg is going to need to come up with a compelling answer for it...
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Re: 2020 Presidential Candidates: Pete Buttigieg

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Re: 2020 Presidential Candidates: Pete Buttigieg

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Pete Buttigieg’s Undeniable Allure

By WALTER SHAPIRO
October 4, 2019


Before Pete Buttigieg was born in 1982, the now-shuttered brokerage house, E.F. Hutton, began running a famous series of TV commercials touting their ability to predict the fluctuations in the stock market. In one emblematic spot, the mere mention of the firm’s name in a posh restaurant prompts everyone, including the waiters, to eavesdrop for investment tips. The tag line from the ad campaign: “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen.”

Watching the way that people listen to a presidential candidate is a surprisingly good indicator of raw political talent. In September 2006, at the annual Tom Harkin Steak Fry near Des Moines, a fledgling Illinois senator named Barack Obama (not yet a presidential candidate) mesmerized 3,500 Iowa Democrats. I knew then, studying the rapt expressions on people’s faces as they listened to Obama deliver his first political speech in Iowa, that 2008 would be his year. The Iowa Democrats all looked like extras from Frank Capra’s movie Meet John Doe.

Needless to say, in 2016, neither major Democratic candidate rewarded intense listening. Hillary Clinton offered predictable bromides and Bernie Sanders has a passion for yelling. But this time around, Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old gay mayor of a small Indiana city (South Bend) half the size of Des Moines, is acing the listening test. His words, even in a stump speech, tend to be more thoughtful and more surprising than the standard political applause lines of his rivals. Elizabeth Warren often elicits cheers, Joe Biden gets the occasional affectionate chuckle, but Buttigieg summons up a different reaction. I first noticed it while seeing him at a Des Moines house party on a sparkling Saturday morning in June. As with Obama in 2006, members of the audience leaned forward to listen to Buttigieg speak rather than sitting back to applaud politely. What struck me at the time was that Buttigieg was pulling off this listening trick even though he lacked the national political profile that Obama boasted back in 2006, from his electrifying speech to the 2004 Democratic convention.

I looked for a repeat of this response when Buttigieg spoke at the sprawling Polk County Steak Fry in September. A clump of Democrats—not visibly aligned with any candidate although there were a few “Beto” signs around—were seated in lawn chairs 300 feet from a stage filled with pumpkins and hay bales. Seven other presidential candidates had already made their 10-minute pitches when Buttigieg stood up to deliver his.

“If everything is going well in this country, a guy like Donald Trump never is able to take over a political party, let alone get within cheating distance of the Oval Office,” Buttigieg declared. Then he added the tried-and-true follow-up line that quietly challenged Biden’s belief in the politics of restoration: “And we’re not going to be able to replace this president if we think he’s just a blip, just an aberration. It’s going to take more than that.”

Yes, Buttigieg got a laugh with the phrase “cheating distance of the Oval Office.” But as I panned the crowd, I once again saw an atypical level of attentiveness. In the klatch of voters watching from their lawn chairs, a woman in a blue windbreaker, maybe in her late twenties, sat ramrod straight, the phone tightly gripped in her hand forgotten for the moment. A guy with glasses and greying light brown hair strained to catch every word as if he were listening to the reading of his favorite aunt’s will.

Four months before the Iowa caucuses, it is time to reckon with the reality that Buttigieg probably has a better chance to be the Democratic nominee than anyone aside from Biden and the surging Warren. With Sanders ailing and Kamala Harris sputtering, Buttigieg has enough money to go the distance (he has raised $44 million in the last six months) and enough polling support to guarantee his place on every debate stage. Whatever happens next, this youthful candidate with a long resume (Harvard, Rhodes Scholar, McKinsey analyst, failed statewide candidate, mayor, and intelligence officer in Afghanistan) has already emerged as the political surprise of 2019.

And that raises a new question: Is Buttigieg, who would be four years younger than JFK if he were inaugurated in 2021, ready for the White House? Not ready in the way that Donald Trump was ready (a random first-grader eating paste would undoubtedly do a better job), but ready to be a successful president who would lead America out of the wreckage of the Trump years?

As a veteran of the Jimmy Carter administration, I am perhaps more sensitive than most to the challenges of governing for a Democrat. But I also covered Bill Clinton in the Oval Office—and know from those years, too, how easily a president can stumble if he or she does not understand Washington. Clinton’s improvisational approach to the presidency paved the way for Newt Gingrich’s stunning 1994 House victory, and in hindsight, Obama would probably also have benefited politically from a longer Senate career (and the relationships that it fostered) rather than declaring for the White House after just two years in Washington.

In theory, a fledgling candidate like Buttigieg, without Washington credentials or a lengthy stint as governor, might be tempted to hide from the press out of fear of being exposed as little more than a walking set of talking points. But he, to his credit, has gone to the opposite extreme by making himself more accessible to the press than any other major presidential candidate since John McCain in 2000.

Last week, Buttigieg embarked on a four-day Iowa bus tour with an important twist—virtually everything that the Indiana mayor said to reporters en route would be on-the-record. The trip was a conscious echo of McCain’s “Straight Talk Express,” which propelled the then-Arizona maverick to victory in the 2000 New Hampshire primary. On the bus last week, I was the only journalist who had also covered the McCain campaign, and I can testify that the South Bend mayor lived up to that laudable tradition for openness as he cheerfully answered questions, large and small, from a press contingent that topped out at 15 reporters.

Sitting in a swivel chair in the middle of a rock-star bus that had carried the likes of Justin Timberlake and Gloria Estefan, Buttigieg displayed flashes of the agile mind that has made him a favorite, along with Warren, among the high-SAT-score wing of the Democratic electorate. At the same time, he was working to differentiate himself from the rest of the field, on issues from guns, to health care, to paper straws, displaying a keen sense of nuance and a willingness to challenge party orthodoxy on nuclear power.

On the road from Boone to Webster, Buttigieg described how his opinion on guns changed after he was first deployed to Afghanistan in 2014. “Early on, there’s a sense of toughness that goes with having a gun,” he said. But, “on a few occasions, when I felt it was necessary to have my pistol under my pillow, I realized that having a gun made me feel smaller—rather than bigger—because of this idea that I needed it.”

In his stump speech, Buttigieg often warns his fellow Democrats, “We can’t water down our values. But we also can’t get so caught up in purity tests that we shut out half the country before we get to November.”

Aboard the bus, Buttigieg replied to a question I had asked by outlining some of the “purity tests” in the current Democratic race that trouble him. He began, as expected, by restating his opposition to the proposed elimination of any role for private health insurance in the Medicare for All plans ballyhooed by Sanders and Warren. But the next purity test he listed was surprising: the calls to outlaw plastic straws. “Anybody who thinks we ought to ban plastic straws should first have a conversation about disability,” Buttigieg said. “Plastic straws are actually important for a lot of people. But that’s way to the side. I just think we need to have a level of focus on what’s most important in dealing with the planet.”

Buttigieg went on to challenge the absolutism on nuclear power that animates many Democrats. (“At least in the short term, I don’t think we need to build new nuclear. I think that waste storage and disposal are a real issue.... But I don’t think we can afford to be dogmatic.”)

Of course, on some points, he simply refused to engage, dismissing, for instance, a question about why he chose to work for the famously arrogant management consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, by saying “it’s not something that I think is central in my story.” But some details were more revealing. The candidate claims to iron his own white shirts (he owns more than a dozen), a skill that his mother taught him when he was about 10 years old. (Needless to say, as a veteran of many campaigns, I cannot imagine Bill Clinton ironing his own shirts.)

No Democratic presidential nominee since Alton Parker—a New York state judge who was the party’s pick to challenge Theodore Roosevelt in 1904—has boasted as light a political resume as Buttigieg’s. Several times, I struggled to find a polite way to ask Buttigieg if he really felt ready to move from mayor of South Bend to Leader of the Free World.

At one point in our rolling conversation, I noted that in 1960, Democratic elders like Eleanor Roosevelt opposed John Kennedy in part because they felt that at 43, he was too callow and inexperienced to be president. At the time, JFK had spent nearly 14 years in Congress.

Buttigieg responded by rattling off world leaders who are roughly his generational contemporaries from French President Emmanuel Macron (now 41) to New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden (39 years old). “So there’s a generational shift happening among countries around the world,” the 37-year-old mayor said. “It’s the kind of thing that you expect the United States to be leading on. This time we’re kind of catching up.”

The answer seemed a little too glib and practiced for my taste. So I tried again when I sat down with Buttigieg for an interview the next morning in a corner of a hotel lobby in Waterloo. This time I quoted from memory Harry Truman’s words on becoming president after FDR’s death in 1945: “I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me.”

Choosing his words carefully and speaking more slowly than usual, Buttigieg—who is less than half the age of Biden and Sanders—said, “I think any sane person has to be aware of the daunting nature of the office. There is no function on earth that is comparable. At the same time, every person who’s done the job has been … at different stages of their lives. I think there is a lot to be said for experience. And that my experience is certainly as relevant as any experience that I could have in a legislative job in Washington.”

A few minutes later, I circled back to the experience question by asking Buttigieg what he wished that he had time to learn before embarking on this quest for the Oval Office; in 1994, for example, as president, with a genocidal war raging in Bosnia, Bill Clinton had lamented that he wished he had known more about the Balkans.

Once again, Buttigieg’s answer was unexpected. “One skill that I’ve developed which will need to be at a whole different level is the art of knowing what not to concern yourself with,” he said. “Because up to a certain point, you can convince yourself that if you stay up an hour later, or move a little quicker, you can touch everything that deserves to be touched. Even as mayor, I’ve learned that’s not true. And, as president, I’m sure it’s on a completely different level—incredibly important, consequential, and demanding. Urgent priorities need to be ignored because there are others that even more so. And the art of that you can only learn by doing.”

Mayor Pete, as he prefers to be known on the campaign trail, left me wondering if maybe I have been too rigid in inventing imaginary criteria to identify successful would-be presidents. Maybe talent and temperament are enough. Maybe that old E.F. Hutton commercial holds the only relevant clue that Pete Buttigieg is indeed ready to be president in 2021: When he speaks, people listen.

Walter Shapiro, who is covering his eleventh presidential campaign, is a staff writer at The New Republic. He is also a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and a lecturer in political science at Yale.
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2020 Presidential Candidates: Pete Buttigieg

Post by RayThom »

Mayor Pete has been my candidate of choice since he announced the formation of an exploratory committee back in January. Although my donations are $mall, I am on his monthly contributors list.

I'd be quite happy with a Warren/Buttigieg ticket but I don't think that will resonate with the majority of Dem voters. I do hope that Pete will be offered a key Cabinet position, thereby further honing his skill for a run for president in 2028.

My gut feeling tells me it will be Biden/Warren, and if they should win, Biden will pass up a second term and let Warren make the run in 2024. And maybe Pete will get the nod for Veep.

It's time.
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