Netanyahu: In My Tenure Iran Won't Develop Nuclear Bomb

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JerusalemPost

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has pledged that Iran will not develop nuclear weapons if he is reelected on January 22.

 

“As long as I am prime minister Iran will not have nuclear weapons,” he said.

 

Netanyahu spoke in a prerecorded Channel 2 interview aired on the Uvda investigative journalism program on Monday night, as he linked stopping Iranian nuclear weapons to his bid for another term as prime minister.

 

He said that when he entered office four years ago, there were barely any real sanctions on the Islamic Republic. He had placed all his efforts on thwarting Iran’s nuclear program.

 

Netanyahu said international leaders including US President Barack Obama and French President François Hollande have agreed that Israel has a right to defend itself.

 

The program flipped to a clip of former prime minister Ehud Olmert speaking, in which he noted that Israel was obviously not acting alone against Iran, given that the Jewish state would use weapons purchased from other countries.

 

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Voting problems reported in several states

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WashPost

Americans went to the polls by the tens of millions Tuesday, and while most voted without incident, long waits, legal disputes and lingering damage from Hurricane Sandy hindered balloting in several states.

In Philadelphia, some voters reported that election workers required photo identification, despite a judge’s ruling last month placing Pennsylvania’s tough new ID law on hold for 2012. Officials are permitted to ask for photo identification as part of a test run but not as a condition for voting.

Albert Hill, 56, said he argued for 10 minutes with a poll monitor who insisted he would not be allowed to vote unless he showed his photographic identification. He said he watched two African American women leave the line in front of him because they were turned away for the same reason.

“I told [the poll monitor], ‘If you want to play this game, here is my wallet, and here’s my ID, but I don’t have to show it to vote,’ ” said an angry Hill, a former employee of a bottle manufacturing company. “As of last night, the governor and the mayor of Philadelphia said I don’t have to show my ID to vote.”

Ron Ruman, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of State, said his office gave clear instructions to poll workers that they could ask for but not demand voter identification, and believes such problems are very limited.

“We heard very few scattered reports of this, and we really weren’t able to confirm any of it. I don’t know for sure what happened,” Ruman said. “If poll workers said this, they were mistaken, and this should not have happened. “

In New Jersey and New York, voters struggled with the residual effects of Hurricane Sandy. As the polls opened Tuesday, an estimated 600,000 New Jersey residents were still without electricity, and thousands remained in emergency shelters. The National Weather Service forecast another storm for Wednesday, with the possibility of high winds and new flooding in coastal areas.

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Romney staffers totally butthurt that chris christie is too busy for their nonsense

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Wonkette

One of the most delightful developments of the past week has been seeing New Jersey Governor Chris Christie get evicted from the Republican Party for the crime of being respectful and grateful (in the wake of a hurricane that devastated his state) to the president of the United States, who is a known black person. (Christie is one of the last remaining Republicans who operate in actual reality — for instance, he believes global warming is real and we need to shut the fuck about the terrifying Musliny threat — even though he does spend an awful lot of time yelling at teachers.) First he went on Fox & Friends and blew their minds when he was all “nah mang, don’t got time for Mitt Romney’s ass,” and then everybody flipped out! Rush Limbaugh called him a big fat idiot! IT. WAS. GLORIOUS. And according to Christie, Romney was all like, “Indeed, fellow, I quite understand that the well-being of your state comes before the needs of our politickal campaign,” but Romney’s staffers are another (more butthurt) story entirely! READ MORE »

Seven Things That Could Go Wrong (or Already Have)

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ProPublica

Get ready. Here are all the things that could go wrong (or already have) as Americans head to the polls.

1. Confusion over voter-ID laws spurred by ongoing ads, litigation and misinformation

Despite a state judge's Oct. 2 ruling that Pennsylvania voters are not required to show photo ID this election, the state is continuing with a $5 million ad campaign to broadcast the future requirement: "Show It," the ad slogan reads, with the words, "if you have it," in fine print. (Here's our guide on everything you need to know about voter ID laws.)

A spokesman for the secretary of state told the Washington Post these ads remain "faithful" to the judge's ruling, which held that elections officials could still ask voters for identification, just not require it.

In addition, the state's largest utility company, Peco, sent a courtesy newsletter out to 1.3 million customers in seven counties informing them they'd need valid photo ID to vote — though by that time the judge had already ruled they don't have to.

In Missouri, the Republican candidate for secretary of state is running on a platform favoring a new voter ID law. Because the state doesn't currently have a photo ID requirement — since the courts struck it down — the outgoing secretary of state has said the campaign focus on photo ID is potentially confusing for voters.

In Tennessee, where a voter ID law went into effect this year, state officials were instructing some counties not to honor photo library cards as an acceptable form of voter ID. The city of Memphis sued, and just last week, the Tennessee Supreme Court issued the final word: It affirmed a lower court's ruling that voters can cast regular ballots using free library cards.

2. Disruptions caused by Hurricane Sandy — not just in the Northeast

The destruction caused by the storm is expected to disrupt voting somewhat in solidly Democratic New York and New Jersey, but there are indications it is also causing complications for absentee voting in at least one presidential swing state.

Priya Sanghvi, a 28-year-old filmmaker from Arlington County, Va., requested an absentee ballot on time but didn't get mail at her apartment in downtown New York City all last week. Some mail arrived on Saturday and Monday, but the absentee ballot wasn't there.

When Sanghvi called the Arlington County registrar, who confirmed that her ballot had been sent out, and Virginia's Board of Elections, officials told her their hands were tied: The deadline for returning mailed absentee ballots was 7 p.m. on Election Day.

"I'm at a loss," Sanghvi told ProPublica. "I would literally have to get to Virginia to vote, which I'm not going to be able to do."

It's not clear how widespread absentee voting problems related to disruptions in postal service may be.

"We don't keep statistics on the possible number of ballots that could be delayed due to Hurricane Sandy," U.S. Postal Service spokesperson Darleen Reid told ProPublica in an email. "There is no way to determine this at this time."

Arlington County Registrar Linda Lindberg told ProPublica her office had gotten "a few" calls from people whose absentee voting had been disrupted by the storm, including a voter sent to New York as part of the relief effort.

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Obama mural ordered covered at Philadelphia polling place

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NBC PHILADELPHIA – A Philadelphia court judge ordered poll workers to cover up a mural of President Barack Obama that was inside a polling place at a local school.

The uproar started when upset voters began circulating pictures via social media after voting at Ben Franklin Elementary School Tuesday morning.

The Republican Party quickly took action, filing a lawsuit that claimed illegal electioneering. The Republican Party of Pennsylvania Chairman Rob Gleason issued this statement on PAGOP.ORG.

“Whether it’s blocking Republican Election Day workers form doing their job or violating Pennsylvania law by electioneering in the polling place, it is clear the Obama campaign has taken their campaign in the gutter to manipulate this election however they can.  Based on the Obama campaign’s behavior today, it certainly raises the question: what are Democrats doing in the polls that they are working so hard to shield folks from monitoring this election?”

Click here to read more.

True the Vote poll watchers barred from Columbus Ohio polls

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theGrio 

The Franklin County Board of Elections has rejected requests from True the Vote to place poll watchers at precincts around Central Ohio.

According to Ohio political blog Plunderbund, the Board of Elections met yesterday over suspicions that the organization’s forms had been falsified. It seems that True the Vote used candidate signatures from a previous set of forms filed in early October to fill out this recent set. The only problem is that all but one of the six candidates whose names were on the form have since withdrawn their signatures.

Board member Zachary Mainfold said he was “amazed that a group that goes to such extreme lengths to claim voting fraud in Ohio would knowingly forge or misuse signatures to try to gain access to Franklin County polling locations.”

The forms were rejected unanimously by both Republican and Democratic board members, barring the organization’s poll watchers from entering polling locations today. Some suspect there will still be observers posted outside the locations, though.

Plunderbund reported earlier this week that True the Vote filled out requests to place observers in polling locations in 28 precincts. The website confirmed that 20 of the precincts the organization targeted were predominantly black communities. African-Americans also made up more than 80 percent of the population in the top 12 targeted precincts.

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Hacking voting machines: Easier than ever imagined

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Rt.com

Millions of Americans are already waiting for hours outside of polling places to vote for the next president of the United States. All of that might not matter though, as some security pros say the entire election can be rigged all too easily.

In one example, it wouldn’t take much more than ten dollars’ worth of parts from any RadioShack store to steal and manipulate votes. It’s called a man-in-the-middle attack and the computer program that logs the results on electronic voting machines isn’t even compromised.

“It’s a classic attack on security devices,” Roger Johnston tells Popular Science. “You implant a microprocessor or some other electronic device into the voting machine, and that lets you control the voting and turn cheating on and off. We’re basically interfering with transmitting the voter’s intent.”

According to the magazine, anyone from a high-school student to an octogenarian could corrupt the voting process. Johnston is the head of the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory and has done it himself, even on camera. It wouldn’t be hard for others, he says, and some fear that that could easily be the case on Election Day. And with many prediction polls estimating a close contest between President Barack Obama and Republican Party challenger Mitt Romney this year, it wouldn’t take much to render the entire contest corrupted.

On the website for Argonne, Johnston says Americans believe too often that election officials assume — incorrectly — that it takes a computer genius capable of a nation-state cyberassault or a frazzled, Hollywood-designed hacker to turn an electronic voting machine on its head. And while that route is once that can be taken too, it isn’t the only way to ruin an election.

Insider threats from election officials or anyone with access to a voting machine could easily alter contests, and monitors aren’t necessarily on the look-out for that kind of unauthorized access.

“And a lot of our election judges are little old ladies who are retired, and God bless them, they’re what makes the elections work, but they’re not necessarily a fabulous workforce for detecting subtle security attacks,” Johnston tells Popular Science. In the example of hijacking the computer transmission with a few bucks’ worth of electronics, it wouldn’t require much more than walking into a polling place and entering a booth with the right knowhow and intent, and most machines can be access without even requiring a two-dollar lockpick and a tiny tension bar. “No one signs for the machines when they show up. No one’s responsible for watching them. Seals on them aren’t much different from the anti-tamper packaging found on food and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals. Think about tampering with a food or drug product: You think that’s challenging?” he asks.

Johnston has recorded himself demonstrating how a logic analyzer, an Allen wrench and a screwdriver is all it takes to change votes to register for one candidate instead of another by using a man-in-the-middle attack. Although it hasn’t been verified yet, a video posted to YouTube early on November 6 from an account registered to “Centralpavote” shows what is reported to be a similar machine showing signs typical of exactly that kind of abuse —not in a test setting, though, but only hours before the polls close for real [VIDEO].

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Voters in Black Ohio Suburb Forced to Cast Provisional Ballots

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Colorlines

A number of residents in Forest Park, a predominantly black suburb outside Cincinnati, are reporting they're being forced to cast provisional ballots because records incorrectly show they already submitted an absentee-ballot.

The state Board of Election says the issue was caused by a "human error" but Forest Park residents--65% of them who are black--will still have to file a provisional ballot

WKRC-TV has more details about the "human error" thats preventing msny Forest Park voters from casting their ballots today:

We learned of it from a couple who lives in Forest Park and who vote at Word of Deliverance Church. When Acquanitia and Thomas Moxley showed up this morning, a poll worker said that they already voted absentee. The Moxley's contend they never requested an absentee ballot-nor did they fill one out. They say they've voted at the polls every year since they turned 18 years old.

Precinct officials told them to cast a provisional ballot. Wilson went down to the Board of Elections, where the deputy director checked the official list and confirmed the Moxley's story.

Meanwhile, other voters began reporting similar problems. Officials finally figured out that human error is to blame and affects the voters at only that Forest Park polling. Those voters will be asked to cast a provisional ballot. Officials will wait ten days to count the votes-but they will be counted.

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Electronic Voting Machine Filmed in Pennsylvania by Voter Flipping Votes

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Oped News

News just breaking that a voter in Pennsylvania tried to vote for Obama on a touch screen voting machine but the machine continued to register Romney instead of Obama. The voter filmed the incident and has uploaded the video to YouTube. This voter just happend to be a computer software designer and attempted other test votes to see if it was a miscalibration. Only voting for Obama was flipped to Romney. NBC is reporting that this machine has now been taken off-line.

 

 

White Supremacy Tricks: iPad 'Vote at Home' Suppression Scheme Reported in Ohio

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BradBlog

Here come the dirty tricks. This one courtesy of Ohio's Plunderbund...

An Obama volunteer in Greene County reports some mysterious canvassing activity whereby people are coming by asking if the resident has voted and if not offering them the fraudulent ability to vote in their doorway via an iPad. 

The story was relayed to us by Obama campaign volunteer Anita Dobrzelecki, who says she was calling committed Obama supporters to confirm they had voted. She reached a woman who said she had not, but that she “wanted to vote like my fiancée voted.”

When asked, the young woman said that a man came to her fiancée’s door and asked if he had voted. When he answered no, he was asked who he wanted to vote for. He answered Obama. The man at the door says “Great! You can do that right now” and presented an iPad with what looked like an electronic ballot. He made a selection and was told his vote was counted and he did not need to submit an absentee ballot or go to the polls.

We had heard a rumor of this kind of activity also happening in the Youngstown area, but there were very little details on that story and we’ve been unable to find anyone to talk to about it. The Youngstown story wasn’t fully consistent with this Greene County report as it included the marking of a paper type ballot and also included an “I Voted” sticker.

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Faulty PA Electronic Touchscreen Voting Machines Votes for Anyone But Obama

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Colorlines 

A central Pennsylvania voter reminded the country why plenty of people have so much paranoia about casting ballots on electronic voting machines. They break, while they're supposed to be delivering future-altering votes in national elections.

The voter, who was trying to cast his ballot with his wife today wrote that after having his vote switched to Mitt Romney when he intended to vote for President Obama he, "assumed it was being picky so I deselected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney."

He writes about the ordeal of trying to figure out how to fool the machine into letting him cast a ballot for Obama:

Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.

The machine was eventually taken offline, and "recalibrated," and returned to service, Mother Jones reported.

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Houston NAACP: 'True the Vote' 'Attacking' Volunteers for Giving Water to Voters in Line

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NAACP

As this year’s election comes to a close, True the Vote, a Texas Tea Party group, has begun attacking the NAACP Houston Branch and our volunteer poll monitors for handing out water to voters at Early Vote locations and for assisting Disabled and Elderly voters by standing in line for them or asking younger people in line to let the elderly and disabled go ahead of them in the line to vote.

Carroll G. Robinson, Chairman of the NAACP Houston Branch Political Affairs Committee said, “It is a shame that the NAACP Houston Branch and its volunteers are being attacked by a right wing extremist group for being “Good Samaritans”. The NAACP will continue to help elderly and disabled voters, as well as all other voters, exercise their right to vote.”

The NAACP Houston Branch has worked with the NAACP Texas State Conference and Region VI Offices this year to register thousands of new voters and to conduct a major voter turnout effort that included 180,000 auto calls, the distribution of approximately 900,000 emails, 10,000 pieces of literature to African- American churches and over two hours of radio time focused on informing people about their right to vote and encouraging them to vote.

According to Rev. Reginald Lillie, President of the NAACP Houston Branch, “True the Vote’s attacks on the NAACP Houston Branch are validation of the effectiveness of the Branch’s efforts. The attacks are a badge of honor. They motivate us to keep pressing on.”

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"Reggie Bush looked like he was chasing a bucket of chicken" - Fox Stands Behind Terry Bradshaw's Racist Comments (He Must Go/Sucks Anyway)

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USAToday

Fox's Terry Bradshaw told USA TODAY Sports on Monday that he's "so sorry if I hurt anybody and I'm shocked I'm in this position."

Bradshaw is talking about something he said during Fox's NFL studio show Sunday as he called highlights of the first half of the Miami-Indianapolis game. During a clip of Miami's Reggie Bush running for a score, Bradshaw said it was "like he was chasing that bucket of chicken the wind was blowing."

Bradshaw says he wasn't even aware he said "he" -- referring to Bush -- when he meant to say "you" as a reference to fellow Fox NFL studio analyst Jimmy Johnson. "I can't defend myself," says Bradshaw. "I've never been in a situation like this. I don't know how to react, except to apologize for something I didn't know I said. I've been upset today. It's not me. I'm shocked."

Bradshaw said the comment was just part of a running joke Sunday that Johnson's "big thing is chicken, Kentucky Fried Chicken. He won't share it with anybody."

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Renowned Expert: Memory and perception key in wrongful convictions

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Rosevelttorch

Renowned psychologist and professor at the University of Washington, Geoffrey Loftus, highlighted the issues with perception in court testimony at last Thursday’s Wrongful Convictions lecture series on memory and perception. He told students that because of certain factors, they cannot trust their own memories.

Loftus brought in a composite case for the attendees based on a portion of more than 300 cases he has previously worked on in his professional career. Loftus described a scenario where a white woman was mugged by a black man.

Loftus said that even though some witnesses have great confidence when describing important details about the attacker, this does not mean their claims are accurate.

According to Loftus, there are several reasons for poor memory and recollection of traumatic events. Bad lighting, short duration of time, distance and obscuration can all be a detriment to the memory of a crime and even impact the efficiency of remembering details.

Loftus also said that attention is a factor. Due to a large amount of neural filters screening enormous amounts of information at once—much of that information being irrelevant—you only remember what you pay great attention to. This is limited to one part of your sensory world at a time, causing you to lose focus in other areas.

Many witnesses do not have a vivid memory of the perpetrator’s appearance simply because they have no reason to. With all aspects of the situation competing for your attention at one time, your mind focuses on details of certain things and not others.

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Lawsuit claims 4 Amarillo police officers used excessive force on Latino Man

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LubbockOnline

An Amarillo man has filed a lawsuit against four city officers, alleging they used excessive force in an October 2010 incident.

The suit, filed Oct. 18 in Potter County, alleges that on Oct. 23, 2010, David Bastardo, 27, was standing on a sidewalk near Polk Street and Seventh Avenue on Oct. 23, 2012, when officers tackled him to the ground. The suit alleges officers struck Bastardo’s body and face and stunned him with Tasers more than once after he was handcuffed.

The lawsuit listed the defendants as Sgt. Jerome Godfrey, Officer Michael Vigil, Officer Dusty Johnson, Officer Esrael Silva Jr. and the city of Amarillo.

“The actions of defendants were unnecessary and unwarranted and constituted a use of excessive force,” the suit said.

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In South Africa, disillusionment with the party that ended apartheid

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WashPost

Khutsong, South Africa — The party that ended apartheid has begun to lose its appeal among black South Africans, many of whom have grown frustrated waiting for the “better life for all” promised when the African National Congress won historic multi­racial elections 18 years ago.

The disenchantment with the ANC, to be sure, has been gradually building over the years. But it has intensified in recent weeks amid ongoing, and often violent, labor unrest that has spread across the nation since police killed 34 strikers at a platinum mine in August, the deadliest police action in post-apartheid South Africa.

In newspaper columns, on radio talk shows, blogs and social media, the ANC is facing a public outcry, accused of being corrupt, ineffective, wasteful and out of touch with the hardships faced by South Africa’s impoverished masses. Even prominent anti-apartheid figures are publicly disparaging the ANC leadership, calling its credibility into question. Meanwhile, other critics, including senior ANC leaders, say the party is divided and facing a crisis of leadership, as President Jacob Zuma battles allegations of misuse of public funds to renovate his private residence.

“Now, the honeymoon is pretty much over,” said Robert Schrire, a political analyst at the University of Cape Town. “What we are seeing is that the average black South African is no longer blindly loyal to the ANC. That person feels angry and betrayed.”

When Nelson Mandela was elected South Africa’s first black president in 1994, there was a burst of hope that a new era of equality was on the horizon. The ANC promised sweeping social change to redress the inequalities forged under apartheid, which oppressed non-whites through a system of racial separation enforced by harsh laws and police brutality to ensure the supremacy of South Africa’s whites.

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How to Steal an Election (Again)

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InfoClearingHouse

Operations Plan:

1 – Step 1A: You, Mitt Romney, make millions of dollars by buying troubled companies, increasing their debt and then allowing them to go bankrupt, all with the result of reaping millions of dollars (and parking your plundered earnings in offshore tax havens) (http://www.alternet.org/election-2012/matt-taibbi-reveals-how-romney-made-his-fortune-it-aint-pretty-and-he-shouldnt-be).

2 – Step 1B: You, Mitt Romney, make millions of dollars by buying trouble companies and then closing them and shipping their jobs overseas (and parking your plundered earnings in offshore tax havens) (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/romneys-bain-capital-invested-in-companies-that-moved-jobs-overseas/2012/06/21/gJQAsD9ptV_story.html).

3 – Step 1C: You, Mitt Romney, attempt an effort to make millions of dollars by teaming up with a Chinese company (Haier Group) to purchase an American company (Maytag), with the result of attempting to send those jobs to China (the effort failed). (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=amvfWt5_l3z8&refer=asia).

4 – Step 1D: You invest in companies (Stream International and Modus Media) to assist American companies to outsource technical support services, thus shafting jobs in the United States (http://www.denverpost.com/recommended/ci_20920958).

5 – Step 1E: You increase your earnings by taking advantage of tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/10/04/fact-check-tax-break-for-shipping-jobs-overseas/) and “sticking it” to the middle class who have to make up for lost governmental revenue.

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