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Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2018
All Gave Some~Some Gave All
Report: Barack Obama weaponized the IRS against pro-Israel groups
The editorial was written by self-proclaimed Zionist and former lawyer Lori Lowenthal Marcus, who founded an organization known as Z Street in 2009 “to educate Americans about the Middle East and Israel’s defense against terror.” But when she experienced trouble obtaining tax-exempt status from the IRS, Z Street filed suit against the agency.
The Department of Justice announced Thursday that it had entered into a settlement agreement with the nonprofit, but that only tells part of the story. Marcus told the rest.
Application languished
Marcus said that she applied for tax-exempt statue in December 2009, “a process that usually takes three to six months.” But like the applications filed by fellow conservative groups, hers took much longer.
When Z Street lawyers asked what the holdup was, an IRS agent was uncharacteristically honest. Marcus wrote:
Z Street’s application was getting special scrutiny, the agent said, because it was related to Israel. Some applications for tax-exempt status were being sent to a special office in Washington for review of whether the applicants’ policy positions conflicted with those of the Obama administration.
So in August 2010 we sued the IRS for violating Z Street’s constitutional rights, including the First Amendment right to be free from viewpoint discrimination — government treatment that differs depending on one’s political position.
After filing its lawsuit, Z Street went through the legal process known as discovery, which includes interrogatories, depositions, and requests for admissions.
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“Our application was flagged because Z Street’s mission related to Israel, a country with terrorism. Therefore, an IRS manager in our case said in sworn testimony, the IRS needed to investigate whether Z Street was funding terror.
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Some applications for tax-exempt status were indeed being sent to IRS headquarters in Washington for more intense scrutiny. They were selected because of the applicants’ viewpoint.
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In August 2010, three other Jewish organizations applying for tax-exempt status were asked by the IRS to ‘explain their religious beliefs about the Land of Israel.'”
There goes the First Amendment freedoms of speech and religion — right out the window.
Anti-Semitism the Obama way
To learn the truth, we fought in the courts for seven lonely years — defeating IRS arguments that it didn’t have to obey the First Amendment, that it was immune from the suit, and that it wasn’t obliged to produce in discovery any documents revealing why its employees did what they did. During the seven years Z Street’s application was frozen, it couldn’t raise funds. If my husband and I weren’t lawyers, able to pursue justice without getting paid, there’s no way we could have succeeded.
The IRS’s targeting of Z Street wasn’t the only anti-Israeli move the Obama administration made. In 2016, the Obama State Department used $350,000 in taxpayer funds to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In contrast, President Donald Trump promised to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s historic and rightful capital of Jerusalem.
Final settlement between the Department of Justice and Z Street was announced on Thursday. According to the department, “the settlement agreement includes an apology from the IRS to Z Street for the delayed processing of the group’s application for tax-exempt status.”
“Tax exemption eligibility should be based on whether an organization’s activities fulfill requirements of the law, not a group’s policy positions or the name chosen to reflect those views,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Zuckerman said of the settlement.
“The attorneys at the Department of Justice work hard to ensure that all Americans receive equal treatment under the law,” Zuckerman added. “Today’s settlement further illustrates this commitment.”
Barack Obama’s presidency was not ‘scandal-free’ – here are four big ones
Democrats like to tout the claim that the administration of former President Obama was “scandal-free,” but it’s simply not true.
In fact, the record shows that the Obama administration was unusually scandal-ridden. But since the media wasn’t interested in reporting on them, many Americans remain unaware.
Here are four of the worst.
Fast And Furious.
Operation Fast and Furious was facilitated by the Obama administration as a program to sell firearms to Mexican drug cartels, presumably to track the guns to the cartel leaders and arrest them.
But the government lost track of the guns and when those guns were used in crimes in America, including the murder of United States Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, the administration scapegoated the Second Amendment.
“The Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives apparently ordered one of its own agents to purchase firearms with taxpayer money, and sell them directly to a Mexican drug cartel…” a report in The New York Post read. “Let that sink in: After months of pretending that ‘Fast and Furious’ was a botched surveillance operation of illegal gun-running spearheaded by the ATF and the U.S. attorney’s office in Phoenix, it turns out that the government itself was selling guns to the bad guys.”
IRS Targeting Scandal.
The Obama administration’s IRS targeted conservative groups for special “reviews” of their tax status applications. Groups with the words “patriot” or “tea party” in their names were singled out for increased scrutiny.
The Daily Caller reported that President Obama personally met with a top official at the IRS days before that official instructed his staff on how to target the groups.
“IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, who was named in House Oversight testimony by retiring IRS agent Carter Hull as one of his supervisors in the improper targeting of conservative groups, met with Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on April 23, 2012. Wilkins’ boss, then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, visited the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on April 24, 2012, according to White House visitor logs,” the report read.
“On April 25, 2012, Wilkins’ office sent the exempt organizations’ determinations unit “additional comments on the draft guidance” for approving or denying tea party tax-exempt applications, according to the IRS inspector general’s report.
“During Obama’s first four years as President, IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman made 157 visits to the White House,” it said.
Spied On The Press.
The Obama administration got its hands on two months of phone records of editors and reporters of The Associated Press in what it called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.
“The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of calls,” it said.
“In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters,” The AP reported.
Lied About Obamacare.
You remember when President Obama said “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” don’t you? It was voted Lie of The Year by Politifact in 2013.
“No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people… If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what,” he concluded.
But after the law was passed the American citizens found out that those words were untrue when the Congressional Budget Office announced that a minimum of seven million people would lose their health insurance because of The Affordable Care Act.
And that is not all Obama lied about to get his signature legislation passed by Congress.
“I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future. I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period. And to prove that I’m serious, there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don’t materialize,” he said.
But after he signed it The Washington Post reported that Obamacare would add $340 billion to the budget in the next decade.
Of course, the Obama Administration was beset by dozens of other scandals small and large. From Benghazi to the Iran deal, Obama’s leadership was characterized by unprincipled use of government power, and a total lack of transparency.
Obama benefited from a compliant media that refused to cover his many transgressions. He may have been free from accountability, but scandal-free he was not.
Trey Gowdy sent out two tweets that had anti-Trump FBI agents scurrying under a rock
This move put the FBI and the Deep State on edge.
Then Trey Gowdy sent out two tweets that were their worst nightmare.
The memo outlined how the Obama administration and the FBI colluded with a foreign spy – who was paid by the Clinton campaign – to abuse the FISA warrant process to spy on Carter Page, a one-time Trump campaign associate.
Trey Gowdy put the scandal in perspective in just two tweets.
It is important for the American public to know if the dossier was paid for by another candidate, used in court pleadings, vetted before it was used, vetted after it was used, and whether all relevant facts were shared with the tribunal approving of the FISA application.
It is important for the American public to know if the dossier was paid for by another candidate, used in court pleadings, vetted before it was used, vetted after it was used, and whether all relevant facts were shared with the tribunal approving of the FISA application.
While this memo raises serious concerns with the FISA process, I have been and remain confident in the overwhelming majority of the men and women serving at the FBI and DOJ.
This is just the tip of the iceberg in this massive scandal.
There will surely be more damaging revelations.
But the FBI and the Obama Department of Justice signing off on a FISA warrant on the basis of the opposing campaign’s unverified opposition research confirms Donald Trump’s accusation that this investigation is a partisan witch hunt.
5 Things The FBI Never Told The FISA Court About The Trump Dossier
The memo asserts the FBI and DOJ scrubbed the Steele dossier of relevant political context when presenting it to the FISA court as a basis for a surveillance warrant.
The memo from House Intelligence Committee Republicans outlining how the FBI and Department of Justice secured a warrant to spy on a Trump campaign official alleges the agencies scrubbed highly relevant political context when presenting it to the secret court as a basis for the warrant.
Anonymous sources previously claimed the agencies used the unverified dossier produced by Christopher Steele on behalf of Hillary Clinton as a basis for the warrant, and confirmation of that is deeply troubling. But the revelation that the FBI and DOJ deliberately withheld information about the dossier that would have undermined their case before the court — that it was opposition research paid for by the target’s rival campaign — is stunning.
Here are five things the FBI and DOJ never told the court when asking for multiple warrants, according to the memo.
1. The dossier was funded by Hillary Clinton and The Democratic National Committee.
Although the false claim that Republicans helped pay for the dossier is still circulating, the dossier was commissioned by Fusion GPS only after Republican funding ceased. The Clinton campaign and the DNC were the sole source of funds to the opposition research firm for the entire duration of Steele’s work on the dossier.
The FBI and DOJ knew this, but didn’t tell the FISA court that Trump’s rival campaign paid for the document they were submitting as a basis for spying on a member of Trump’s campaign. They didn’t mention the DNC, the Clinton campaign, or any political party in the first application for a warrant, or in any of the three applications to renew the warrant, according to the memo.
2. The FBI terminated Steele as a source for “what the FBI defines as the most serious of violations.”
Steele was terminated as a source to the FBI after he disclosed his relationship with the bureau to the press in October 2016. He should have been fired sooner for other unauthorized disclosures to the press, but he lied about them to the FBI, which delayed their discovery of this fact. Yet the FBI never disclosed to the FISA court any issues with Steele’s credibility, the memo says, even after they fired him because he broke their trust. Instead, the bureau used his history of credible reporting in the FISA application to firm up their argument for a warrant.
The FBI also had reason to believe Steele might be politically biased. They learned shortly after the election he told a senior DOJ official in September 2016 that he was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” The FBI noted this indication of Steele’s bias at the time and in following official files, but never disclosed it to the FISA court.
3. The dossier had not been independently verified.
The head of the FBI’s counterintelligence division assessed corroboration of the dossier as in its “infancy” when the first surveillance application was submitted to the FISA court in October. After Steele was fired for disclosing his relationship with the FBI to the press, an independent unit inside the FBI reviewed his reporting and assessed the document as “minimally corroborated.” FBI Director James Comey later referred to the dossier as “salacious and unverified” in testimony before Congress.
4. A news story purporting to corroborate the dossier actually came directly from the dossier.
The FBI “cited extensively” from a Yahoo news report in its initial application to the FISA court that turned out to be based in part on information Steele leaked to the reporter, Michael Isikoff. So the FBI effectively used the dossier to corroborate the dossier, and incorrectly told the court Steele was not the source for the Yahoo news article. It’s unclear when exactly the FBI found out Steele was the unnamed source of the Yahoo report, but they fired him for a separate unauthorized disclosure to the press just a few weeks later, shortly after obtaining the first of four warrants.
5. Some of the information provided to the court came from a senior DOJ official’s wife, who was getting paid by Clinton campaign’s opposition research firm.
In addition to Steele, Fusion GPS employed the wife of a senior DOJ official to assist in gathering opposition research on Trump. The official, then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, later provided the FBI with his wife’s opposition research, and it was apparently included in the information provided to the FISA court as a justification for authorizing surveillance.
The FBI never disclosed the couple’s connection to the Clinton campaign-funded Fusion GPS, so the court didn’t know some of the information came from the wife of a DOJ official ultimately working for the Clinton campaign.
Bottom line: The FBI and DOJ had four opportunities to disclose some or all of this information to the FISA court. Steele was fired for proving untrustworthy just nine days after the FISA court approved the first warrant in October, and the claims in his dossier quickly proved unverifiable. But according to the memo, the FBI chose not to disclose these developments to the court — nor the specific political context of his research — in three subsequent renewals of the warrant for 90 days each.
Pentagon: China, Russia Soon Capable of Destroying U.S. Satellites
J-2 intelligence report warns of new dangers to low earth orbit satellites
BY: Bill Gertz
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin / Getty Images
China and Russia are developing anti-satellite missiles and other weapons and will soon be capable of damaging or destroying all U.S. satellites in low-earth orbit, according to the Pentagon's Joint Staff.
The Joint Staff intelligence directorate, known as J-2, issued the warning in a recent report on the growing threat of anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons from those states, according to officials familiar with the assessment.
The report concludes that "China and Russia will be capable of severely disrupting or destroying U.S. satellites in low-earth orbit" in the next several years, said the officials.
The capability to attack low-earth orbit satellites could be in place by 2020, the officials said.
A Joint Staff spokesman declined to comment, citing a policy of not discussing internal reports.
The J-2 report echoes a similar but less specific warning from Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats in May.
"We assess that Russia and China perceive a need to offset any U.S. military advantage derived from military, civil, or commercial space systems and are increasingly considering attacks against satellite systems as part of their future warfare doctrine," Coats said. "Both will continue to pursue a full range of anti-satellite weapons as a means to reduce U.S. military effectiveness."
Coats added that both nations are pursuing information operations seeking international agreements that would limit U.S. defenses in space against such weapons.
Russia's space weapons include a "diverse suite of capabilities to affect satellites in all orbital regimes," Coats testified to Congress, including an airborne laser for use against U.S. satellites.
"Ten years after China intercepted one of its own satellites in low-earth orbit, its ground-launched ASAT missiles might be nearing operational service within the PLA," Coats said.
Both China and Russia also are developing debris-removing satellites that Coats said could be used to damage satellites.
Space expert Michael J. Listner said the threat posed by anti-satellite weapons is not new. Both the United States and Soviet Union developed systems to degrade space systems during the Cold War.
"The United States ASAT program, Program 437, took the form of the ASM-135 missile, or the ‘flying tomato can' and was intended by the Reagan administration to be a deterrent to the Soviet co-orbital system," said Listner, founder of Space Law & Policy Solutions, a consulting firm.
"When Congress defunded development of the ASM-135 there was no follow-on program to provide the desired deterrent effect," Listner said.
"That Russia did not completely scrap its program and China is pursuing its own, leaves the United States with the conundrum of how to deter the threat aside from the hope of resilience."
Resilience is a term used by the Pentagon for protecting, hardening, or replacing satellites in a future conflict.
Low-earth orbit satellites operate between 100 miles and 1,242 miles above the earth and are used for reconnaissance and earth and ocean observation. Those low-orbiting satellites provide key military data used in preparing battlefields around the world for deploying forces in a conflict or crisis.
Also, weather monitoring and communications satellites, including Iridium, Globalstar, and Orbcomm, circle in low-earth orbit.
A number of critical intelligence and military communications satellites also operate in highly elliptical orbits that during orbit travel in an extremely low perigee close to earth where they will soon be vulnerable to Chinese or Russian attack.
All these low-earth orbit satellites are now highly vulnerable to Chinese or Russian anti-satellite weapons and capabilities.
Those capabilities range from several types of ground-launched space missiles, to lasers and electronic jammers, to small maneuvering satellites that can maneuver, grab, and crush orbiting satellites.
According to a report by the National Institute for Public Policy, as of 2016 there were 780 satellites in low earth orbit operated by 43 nations. At total of 37 highly elliptical orbit satellites will soon be vulnerable to Chinese or Russian ASATs.
"U.S. space systems are among the most fragile and vulnerable assets operated by the U.S. military," the report by former Pentagon missile expert Steve Lambakis states.
"This vulnerable communications and data collection, processing, and distribution infrastructure is worth billions of dollars and is vital to nearly every activity of the United States and, increasingly, the armed forces of U.S. allies," he stated.
China has deployed two road-mobile ASAT missile systems and is developing two more advanced ground-launched anti-satellite missile systems.
"With this range of direct-ascent ASAT capabilities, China may be capable of using hit-to-kill technologies to target and destroy surveillance satellites in low earth orbit, GPS satellites in medium earth orbit, and early warning satellites in geosynchronous orbit," Lambakis said. "Use of a single nuclear warhead in an ASAT role has the potential to decimate low altitude satellites."
Beijing also has tested satellites that can maneuver close to satellites in space, a capability that can be used to attack them.
Cyber attacks against satellite control stations also are being developed, along with radio-frequency weapons and directed energy beam weapons.
Russia's anti-satellite forces have been rapidly built up in recent years, with estimated investments of $5 billion annually, after a lapse in the program after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
Moscow's space weaponry includes development of a new ground-launch ASAT missile called the Nudol that was tested for the third time in December 2016. Other weapons include lasers and jammers that can blind or disrupt satellite electronics. Russia also has cyber weapons capable of disrupting satellite control systems on the ground.
Russia's newer surface-to-air missiles, including the S-300, S-400, and S-500 also are capable of hitting targets in low earth orbit, with the S-500 slated for deployment this year.
For maneuvering killer satellites, Russia in 2014 launched four satellites, including one that was observed maneuvering. The Pentagon suspects that satellite will be used for anti-satellite warfare. Two other of the remaining satellites were detected maneuvering after months of remaining in stationary orbit.
The Russian anti-satellite program also is expected to include an interceptor missile launched from a MiG-31 jet, similar to the now-defunct U.S. ASM-135.
Moscow also has developed high-altitude electromagnetic pulse weapons that could be used disrupt the electronics of all satellites not hardened against EMP attack.
The Pentagon's Defense Science Board also warned of the strategic vulnerability of U.S. satellites in a report last March.
The board report said military satellite communications used for global operations, in particular, "will be contested by a myriad of effects ranging from reversible to destructive."
"The estimated and projected electronic threats against satellite communication (satcom) have rapidly escalated in the last few years and will continue to increase in the foreseeable future," the report, made public in March, said.
"Advances and proliferation in advanced electronic warfare (EW), kinetic, space, and cyber capabilities threaten our ability to maintain information superiority," the report said, noting "under severe stress situations, jamming can render all commercial satcom and most defense Satcom inoperable."
"This reality should be considered a crisis to be dealt with immediately," the board warned.
In a fiery rant on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House,” television personality fervent Trump critic Donny Deutsch not only claimed President Donald Trump was a puppet of Russian President Vladimir Putin — he called for a revolution.
Not that he’d do it himself, of course.
“We have a guy, a president, who is clearly owned by Putin, we have an investigation going, OK, that’s good news,” Deutsch said Friday.
Deutsch has been a fierce critic of Trump before. What set him off this time was the president’s agreement to release the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence memo that detailed how the Department of Justice and FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in its investigation Trump associates.
“We basically have a press release that’s been put out, that’s been twisted and mangled that now will give this president permission to fire (Deputy AttorneyGeneral Rod) Rosenstein … who will now take over this investigation.”
MSNBC, concerned about "American democracy," calls for a "revolution" to overthrow an elected president because of the Nunes Memo. #MemoDay
7:26 PM - Feb 2, 2018
“Our democracy is under siege!” he added. “People need to start taking to the streets!”
“This is a dictator! This is not something to analyze anymore,” he continued.
“This is not a, ‘Oh, what a good day for Trump!’”
I’m not entirely sure what he was trying to accomplish there, and he wasn’t questioned on that, either. But hey — it’s MSNBC. They nodded right along.“This is frightening stuff if you are an American,” he said.
“If you’re someone who’s 80 years old and sitting at home and you’ve watched the greatness of this country, you should be terrified.
“And if you’re a 12-year-old and the future is in front of you, this is terrifying. This not time to analyze, to pundit,” he said, while giving his analysis and pundit-ing his very best.
“People, this is a, we need a revolution at this point… this is what’s going on,” he concluded.
And, since I have not seen any news of Deutsch taking to the barricades to overthrow tyranny with revolutionary fervor, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the man was just engaging in moronic punditry in hopes that gullible men and women carry out the mission he’s too scared to do anything but tell others to do.
Can you imagine what would happen if Republicans called for literal American revolution when former President Barack Obama engaged in something they didn’t like — which was all the time?
A year later, Democrats are still sore they don’t sit in power, and many are willing to throw out the rule of law to get their way.
But if Donny Deutsch is the toughest they’ve got, we don’t have to worry for a while.
Assange Pulls Rug From Under Comey, Exposes Ex-FBI Dir.’s Schizophrenia
James Comey simply can’t have it both ways.
Just on Friday, Comey went to social media regarding the FISA memo that President Trump recently de-classified. In a word, his tweet is schizophrenic.
The ex-Director of the FBI managed to simultaneously blow off the release, and then magically switch to Private Hudson mode from “Aliens.”
The only thing missing from Comey’s dismissive is his inner-13-year-old sneering “big whoop, man” countered by Bill Paxton’s iconic “Game over, man. GAME OVER!”
“James Comey is unhinged. The fired FBI Director unleashed an angry tweet shortly after the FISA memo was released to the public exposing the FBI’s corruption. Comey also tried to downplay the FISA memo saying, ‘That’s it?'”
With half of his take already out there, Comey then shifted a full 180: “Dishonest and misleading memo wrecked the House intel committee, destroyed trust with Intelligence Community, damaged relationship with FISA court, and inexcusably exposed classified investigation of an American citizen. For what? DOJ & FBI must keep doing their jobs.”
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange pointed out the inherent contradiction (a weird kind of schizophrenia for a guy who used to run the nation’s premier law enforcement agency).
Assange tweeted, “James Comey, master of logic: FISA memo is nothing — and also the destroyer of worlds.’”
James Comey, master of logic: FISA memo is nothing -- and also the destroyer of worlds. https://twitter.com/Comey/status/959498570532577285 …
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Double hat tip to Assange for invoking both Robert J. Oppenheimer as well as the Bhagavad Gita in one Twitter snark. Awesome.
But with that aside, the self-evident split personalities of the anti-Trump thugs can perhaps best be described by the Gateway Pundit’s Cristina Laila:
“Comey’s schizophrenic tweet tells us everything we need to know. The Dems and Deep State wish the FISA memo was a nothingburger.”
Finishing with a flourish, Laila concluded,
“In their efforts to attack the damning memo, they downplay the content while simultaneously attacking the messenger for ‘exposing a classified investigation’.”
It’s not the first time Assange and Comey have gone at it on Twitter. Assange’s funky remix of one of Comey’s most famous moments has a good beat and you can dance to it. I’d give it an 87. Check out the video here.
FBI Director James Comey on Hillary Clinton and 'elite immunity
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/25/book_excerpt_with_liberty_and_justice_for_some/ … @ggreenwald
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/25/book_excerpt_with_liberty_and_justice_for_some/ … @ggreenwald
That tweet was from last May. On Friday, Assange called in a figurative napalm run on not just Comey, but the entire fetid swamp that is the Deep State,
With 3.5 million Americans receiving bonuses or other benefits from their employers as a result of TAX CUTS, 2018 is off to great start!
The DNC is finished... FACTS:
-Dossier is FAKE
-FBI new the dossier was FAKE
-Hillary/DNC paid for dossier
-Comey, Yates, McCabe, Rosenstein misled FISA courts
-FBI worked with the Dems to go after Trump#MEMOday
-Dossier is FAKE
-FBI new the dossier was FAKE
-Hillary/DNC paid for dossier
-Comey, Yates, McCabe, Rosenstein misled FISA courts
-FBI worked with the Dems to go after Trump#MEMOday
And that about says it all.
G’ day…Ciao…
Helen and Moe Lauzier
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