Speaker Mike Johnson is a "MAGA Mike" yes man

Can the kowtowing to Trump get any worse?

Echo opinion by Jackie Calmes published the LATimes and Yahoo.com

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (MAGA Mike) is shamelessly doing Trump's — not the country's — business. (J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

It was so predictable. Speaker “MAGA Mike” Johnson belatedly did the right thing in April, by allowing the House to vote to approve aid to Ukraine, over most wrongminded Republicans’ opposition. 

Even former Speaker Nancy Pelosi called him “courageous.” 

Yet ever since, he’s been truckling to his fellow House right-wingers, and to Donald Trump, to make up for his perceived heresy.

Two of Johnson’s recent actions show just how low he’ll go to kowtow to the disgraced former president and his MAGA disciples in the House, and how hypocritical they all are.

But Republican whip-lash! Hypocrite

 Johnson announced that the House would go to federal court to press charges against Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland for contempt of Congress. Two days earlier, the House had voted along party lines to seek the Justice Department’s prosecution of its boss. The department declined and within hours Johnson said the House would proceed on its own.

MAGA kowtow to TrumptiDumpti

At issue is Garland’s refusal to give Republicans an audio recording they subpoenaed of President Biden’s interview last fall in the investigation of his past handling of classified documents, which didn't result in criminal charges. Garland did provide other materials the House sought, including a transcript of the interview, but Biden asserted executive privilege over the audio.

For all the Republicans’ highfalutin posturing about respect for Congress, you know their real reason for demanding the recording: They figure the audio must include parts they can exploit to embarrass Biden. They’ve coveted it ever since the Republican special counsel who interviewed the president unnecessarily alluded in his report to Biden’s advanced age, poor memory and “diminished faculties.”

Johnson, on message, condemned the refusal to prosecute Garland as “another example of the two-tiered system of justice brought to us by the Biden Administration.”

Only a shameless Trump toady would keep spouting that “two tiers” nonsense after the Justice Department’s successful prosecution of Biden’s son, with a second federal trial ahead in September. And House Republicans layered on another preposterous lie: Hunter Biden’s conviction was a feint to distract us from the real crimes of the father, the ones that House Republicans haven’t been able to identify despite more than a year of investigations.

The actual double standard is Republicans’: They want Garland prosecuted for only partially complying with a congressional subpoena, yet their ranks include members who utterly scorned subpoenas from the House January 6 committee to testify about their efforts to help Trump overturn the 2020, election. 

They even turned their defiance into fundraising pitches: “I’VE BEEN SUBPOENAED” was the Trumpian headline atop one email.

That boast came from Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, now chair of the Judiciary Committee that recommended Garland be held in contempt. Prominent among the others who flouted subpoenas was Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, who begged Trump post-election to name an acting attorney general who would declare the election fraudulent. Perry's phone, seized by FBI agents, was rich with incriminating calls and messages (“11 days to 1/6 . . . We gotta get going!” he texted the White House at one point). And no less than the highest-ranking official within the building that was attacked, then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield (“My Kevin” to Trump), also ignored his subpoena to tell what he knew.

The January 6 committee, in its report, justified its extraordinary subpoenas of House members by describing “the centrality of their efforts” to help Trump illegally stay in power. For example, in December 2020, Trump named Jordan and Perry when he urged resistant Justice Department officials to “just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”

The contempt for Congress is all theirs, not Garland’s.

Perry also figures in Johnson’s other recent Trump-toadying gambit. At the former president’s urging, the speaker quietly named Perry and Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas (Texas District 13) to the House Intelligence Committee, one of Congress’ most sensitive and least partisan panels, privy to classified information that most other lawmakers don’t see. It’s a posting that neither Perry nor Jackson deserve, which is why their appointments reportedly incensed the committee chair, Michael R. Turner of Ohio, among other more moderate House Republicans. Turner told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the speaker promised to intervene in the event of “improper” behavior by the two.

Why the concern? As former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney’s fellow Republican profile in courage on the January 6 committee, put it in a recent podcast, Perry had been the House member the committee most wanted to force to testify, because he was considered “basically the driving force behind January 6” among those in Congress.

As for Jackson, he so flattered Trump when he was the White House doctor that Trump picked him to be Veterans Affairs secretary, a nomination that imploded amid allegations that Jackson drank, abused staff and improperly dispensed drugs (nickname: “Candy Man”). Demoted to captain after a Pentagon investigation, he still called himself a rear admiral on his congressional website until the Washington Post revealed his deceit in March.

A former counsel to the Intelligence Committee — a Republican — said that Perry and Jackson “couldn’t get a security clearance if they’d come through any other door.” But Johnson has put them in position to know the nation’s deepest secrets just to please Trump, who is charged himself with taking and sharing classified documents.

That makes sense only if your motivation isn’t the country’s interests but instead those of the once and perhaps future president. Which pretty much describes the House speaker.  😡😥😨

Republcian right wing chaos caucus must learn how to govern

Opinion echo by Ruth Marcus published in The Washington Post:
Speaker Jim Jordan? That would be a colossal mistake.

At the dawn of the last century, historian Mary Follett assessed the role of speaker of the House, and the inherent tension between institutional responsibility and party loyalty. The speaker, she wrote in 1902, “is not only allowed, but expected to use his position to advance party interests. It must not be supposed, however, that this implies gross partisanship on the part of our Speakers. They neither attempt to use every inch of power to be conjured out of the rules, nor guide the House entirely from party motives. Their office has on the whole been administered with justness and fairness.”

Mary Follett, meet Jim Jordan. Justice and fairness are not his stocks in trade. If he manages to win the office, and if past performance is any guide, the 59-year-old Ohio Republican will be an “every inch of power” speaker, wielding the gavel in relentless pursuit of partisan advantage.

Let’s not be naive here. Previous speakers, Democratic and Republican — in Follett’s time and, perhaps even more so, in ours — have been, first and foremost, party animals. 

Nevertheless, they understood and, for the most part, behaved in accordance with their simultaneous role as a constitutional officer. For the sake of the country — and, Republicans, for the sake of your party — let us hope that Jordan’s bid for the speakership fails in future votes as it did on Monday and Tuesday.

Because, if Jordan becomes the 56th speaker, he would be a bomb-thrower entrusted with dangerous new powers and, while this carries more symbolic than practical significance, second in line for the presidency. His speakership would commence at a moment when the need for bipartisan cooperation — on funding the government, on dealing with international crises in Israel and Ukraine — has rarely been greater and when the capacity to achieve it rarely more elusive.

To this fraught, even dangerous, moment, Jordan would bring ... Jordan. 😟😞😡There is hardly a profile of him that does not use the word “firebrand.” His skill is in shutting things down, not making them work. His legislative record is thin to the point of indiscernible; he hasn’t passed a single bill.

#GymJimJordan is a political destroyer a "firebrand" political extremist.

Fellow Ohioan and former House speaker John A. Boehner (R) famously labeled him a “legislative terrorist.” Boehner told CBS News’s John Dickerson, “I just never saw a guy who spent more time tearing things apart — never building anything, never putting anything together.”

That may be fine when you are chair of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus. The speakership requires something very different. How does a man who professes to believe that President Biden was not legitimately elected to office, who has championed the baseless effort to impeach the president for high crimes unknown — how does such a speaker go to the White House to negotiate with the president?

Jordan’s path in dealing with House Democrats is similarly unimaginable. He was subpoenaed by the House January 6 committee and simply thumbed his nose at the summons. The Jan. 6 committee report called him a “significant player” in President Donald Trump’s efforts to undo the election. Lawmakers should be holding him in contempt of Congress, not electing him to help lead it.

“Jim Jordan was involved in Trump’s conspiracy to steal the election and seize power; he urged that Pence refuse to count lawful electoral votes,” former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), vice chair of the Jan. 6 committee, wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “If Rs nominate Jordan to be Speaker, they will be abandoning the Constitution. They’ll lose the House majority and they’ll deserve to.”

If Jordan has a forerunner in no-holds-barred norm-breaking, it is Newt Gingrich, who served as speaker from 1995 to 1999, years before Jordan was elected to Congress in 2006. “There is a direct line from Newt Gingrich, that goes through the tea party and Donald Trump, to Jim Jordan. Gingrich pioneered the style of no-guardrails, smash-mouth partisanship that defines Jordan’s approach to politics,” Julian Zelizer, a Princeton historian and author of “Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party,” told me by email. “The main difference is that Jordan, several generations later, has just taken things much further than what Gingrich could have ever have imagined, perfecting the takedown, gridlock-creating, crisis-generating partisan style which will now dictate life in the House.”

Congressman Jim Jordan spews vitriolic rhetoric.

Zelizer pointed to a significant difference between the two situations: a shift in the media landscape that helps turbocharge the conservative message. “Unlike Gingrich, Jordan enjoys a massive conservative media ecosystem that can help him deploy vitriolic rhetoric, blistering smear and conspiracy theories in ways Gingrich could not,” he said. “Whereas Gingrich still relied on the mainstream press and cable networks like CSPAN, as well as talk radio, Jordan has the behemoth of Fox News, Newsmax, and social media to attack his adversaries.”

It is possible, I suppose, that a Speaker Jordan would turn out to be more accommodating, more practical than his 16 years in the House would suggest. Behind closed doors, he has been discussing the possibility of a continuing resolution that would fund the government through April and has suggested that he’d allow a floor vote on Ukraine funding, which he has previously opposed.

Put me down as skeptical. Leopards don’t change spots. Bomb-throwers don’t suddenly start defusing them. Jordan will be Jordan, gavel or no gavel — which is the best reason for not handing it to him.

Democrats need political oxygen to rapid fire fake GOP investigations

Echo opinion by Jennifer Rubin published in The Washington Post:

The GOP’s conspiracy theories and unhinged accusations work best when Republicans are in the minority, when they can throw out half-baked accusations and make leaps of logic with little consequence.

When they are in the majority, however, they must show their cards about supposed Democratic scandals. And that is already proving to be a problem for right-wing performance politicians for four reasons.

First, most voters don’t want lawmakers to spend time spinning scandals. A recent CNN poll found that 67 percent of voters (including 74 percent of independents) don’t like the way Republicans are handling their job. Seventy-three percent (including 48 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of independents) say Republicans aren’t paying enough attention to the country’s real issues. Likewise, a CBS poll earlier this month found that less than one-third of Americans want Republicans to spend time investigating President Biden. Every hearing that Republicans devote to distractions highlights their failure to tackle real issues.

Second, it is hard for Republicans to explain to an audience not already seeped in right-wing conspiracy theories what they heck they are talking about. At least the Benghazi matter and the bollixed Fast and Furious program were events worthy of oversight. The cockamamie Hunter Biden “scandal,” by contrast, is a mix of convoluted, illogical accusations, as former FBI special agent Asha Rangappa explains in a Substack post.

In an actual hearing, unlike an interview with a captive right-wing media host, one has to explain the alleged scandal in a way that is comprehensible to those who haven’t spent hours soaking up bogus talking points. Democratic committee members will be able to channel what average voters are thinking: “What in the world are you talking about?”

Third, Republicans have a problem with evidence — or the lack thereof. The administration has already told Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the Oversight Committee, that it would not provide documents from the ongoing investigation of classified materials found at Biden’s home and office. 

Likewise, the Justice Department told Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who is leading the House Judiciary Committee, that it would follow long-standing practice and not turn over information about ongoing criminal probes. So what now?

Republicans can grouse all they like and even send subpoenas, but they will have difficulty getting their slim House majority to find any Biden official in contempt of Congress. Beyond holding a hearing complaining about not being allowed to muck around in pending criminal cases, there is not much Republicans can do.

Moreover, in a revealing interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Jordan couldn’t exactly explain how Democrats have “weaponized” the federal government. Consider this exchange about Jordan’s claim that the FBI has “targeted” parents:—

NBC News host Chuck Todd: Well, I want to unpack a little bit. You talk about the FBI abusing powers when it comes to parents and school boards. School board members were getting death threats. These weren’t idle things. These weren’t parents just yelling and screaming. These were actual —

Jordan babble: Do you know how many parents —

Todd: — death threats to elected officials. And the FBI got a tip. Should they not look into a death threat when an elected official gets a death threat?

Jordan babble: School board writes a letter on September 29th, five days later, the Attorney General of the United States issues a memorandum to 101 U.S. attorneys offices around the country saying, “Set up this line that they can report on.” Sixteen days later, Chuck, the FBI sends out an email to agents all across the country saying, “Put this designation on parents. Report it on the snitch line that the attorney general set up.” So all that happens. Think about it, Sept. 29, Oct. 4, Oct. 20. That all happens in 22 days. When have you ever seen the federal government move that fast?

Todd: There were actual death threats. Congressman, literally —

(Maine Writer: Good job Chuck Todd!)

Jordan babble: I understand.
Todd: — this is —
Jordan babble: Chuck, but let me just finish this. Twenty-five parents get reported on that snitch line. They all get investigated. FBI shows up to their door and guess how many have been charged. How many have been charged? Zero.
Todd: Then the FBI did its job.
Jordan babble: Zero.
Todd: Did the FBI not do its job?

As Todd pointed out, it’s not much of a scandal for the FBI to investigate tips and not arrest anyone. 

Even worse for Republicans, the videos of MAGA true-believers threatening public officials are a vivid demonstration of how conspiracy theories can whip up violent rhetoric. Democrats should be happy to discuss the subject.

Fourth, there are rakes aplenty for Republicans to step on. 

Each time a Republican screams that the government has been “weaponized,” Democrats should be prepared to go through the litany of real GOP abuses and outrages while in power: the failure to audit Trump’s taxes, the Justice Department’s pointless John Durham investigations, GOP governors transporting of unwary asylum seekers out of state and the abusive arrests of African American voters in Florida, to name a few. Simply because these issues are not the majority’s designated topics does not prevent Democrats from talking about them in hearings.

It seems Republicans imagine their hearings will be some sort of payback for the revealing, substantive and gripping investigation conducted by the House January 6th committee. But a major reason those hearings were so effective was the personnel. There were no disruptive Republicans on the panel, and there were plenty of whip-smart Democrats. 

Those same Democrats will be present on Republican-led committees. Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (Md.), for example, will be the ranking member on Comer’s Oversight Committee. Even the Democrats’ far-left flank should prove useful. 

Whatever one thinks of her politics, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), the No. 2 Democrat on the panel, has ably demonstrated her proficiency in hearings.

In addition, Democrats have set up a rapid response group, the Congressional Integrity Project, to fire back at Republicans. The group will point out which Republican officials participated in the 2020 coup attempt and which refused to testify before the January 6th hearing. Knowing the media will likely give equal time to critics of the hearings, Democrats might receive plenty of oxygen to air Republicans’ dirty laundry.

Kevin McCarthy sold his political soul to the conspiracy coalition

 Thin GOP majority, dangerous game

Echo opinion letter published in theNews-Post a newspaper in Fort Myers, Florida:

Now that the GOP (QOP) House has a scant new majority of four seats: Republicans are going to play Russian Roulette with our debt ceiling and decimate our full faith and credit and threaten a shutdown at the worst possible time as we are clawing back from COVID. 

Speaker McCarthy has given new life to the cause of being a dummy. Who is his ventriloquist.

Because Kevin McCarthy promised everything to hardliners to get the gavel after 15 votes, we now have election deniers, conspiracy proponents and QAnon proponents like Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert sitting predominantly on the Government Oversight Committee and Jim Jordan (#GymJimJordan!) heading up the Judicial Committee. 

Their first order of business should be the debt ceiling and helping our economy bounce back but, instead, they’re going to concentrate on impeaching Joe Biden and investigating his son. The well-being of their constituents and the electorate is way on the back on the list of possible achievements. They probably will have their very thin majority for two years so this is what we have to deal with till then but it could be too late.

From Glenn Chenot, in Cape Coral

Republican lies are like a Twilight zone immersion in hypocrisy

Echo opinion by Dana Milbank published in The Washington Post:

Ryan Zinke stepped up to the microphone and into the Twilight Zone.  "Time for telling lies!"

Republican hypocrisy has led them into a political twilight zone

“Despite the ‘deep state’s’ repeated attempts to stop me, I stand before you as a duly elected member of the United States Congress and tell you that a deep state exists and is perhaps the strongest covert weapon the left has against the American people,” he told the House. The Montana Republican, who has returned to Congress after a scandal-plagued stint in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, informed his colleagues that “the deep state runs secret messaging campaigns” and is trying “to wipe out the American cowboy.”

Yee-haw! Zinke was speaking in support of a new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, or, as Democrats call it, the “Tinfoil Hat Committee.” In substance, it’s the QAnon committee, with a remit to probe the “deep state” and other wacky conspiracy theories. 

With the panel’s creation, QAnon completes its journey from message board for the paranoid to official policy of the House Republican majority.

After the chaos of the first week of the 118th Congress, many Americans wondered: If it took them 15 ballots just to choose a speaker, how could Republicans possibly govern? 

Now we know. Republicans are going to govern by fantasy and legislate on the basis of fiction.

On Monday, their first day of legislative business, they voted to repeal funding for a fictitious “87,000 IRS agents” who don’t exist and never will. On Wednesday, they approved legislation purporting to outlaw infanticide, which is already illegal and always has been. In between, they set up the deep state committee.

What next? Sorry, that’s secret. And therein might be the biggest falsehood of all. After numerous promises of “transparency” from the new leaders, they are refusing to reveal multiple backroom concessions Kevin McCarthy made to secure the speakership. 

You might even call it a conspiracy of silence.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), the GOP conference chair, boasted this week that “we passed the most … transparent rules package in history.” McCarthy tweeted that the new rules would “increase transparency” and that “Republicans are keeping our commitment to make Congress more open.” 

Republicans are governing by spreading lies and hypocrisy!

Alas, the transparency claims could not survive the light of day. Punchbowl News reported that McCarthy’s team had inked a secret three-page “addendum” to the rules package outlining the giveaways he bartered with holdouts blocking him from becoming speaker.

McCarthy, in a caucus meeting Tuesday, reportedly denied the addendum existed. Alas for McCarthy, other Republican lawmakers claimed to have read the document whose existence McCarthy denied.

Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) told Axios he was personally reviewing the document. Rules Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) acknowledged that “it has to be out there.”

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), leaving the caucus meeting in the Capitol basement Tuesday, told a group of journalists that there remained “questions that I think many of us have about what side deals may or may not have been made.”

On the floor, where Democrats were hollering about the “secret three-page addendum,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), who negotiated much of the deal, countered that it was “classic swamp speak” to be “talking about secret deals.” But negotiating such secret deals is totally fine? 

One change Republicans did reveal is the gutting of the Office of Congressional Ethics (it won’t be able to hire new staff when current employees leave), which will help shield lawmakers’ wrongdoing from public scrutiny. Also made known: a commitment to vote on abolishing the IRS and eliminating income taxes.

The one beacon of transparency in this sea of opacity? McCarthy’s leading critic, Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). He wants to free C-SPAN cameras to film the House floor the way they did during last week’s speaker-vote chaos — during which the incoming chairman of the Armed Services Committee was physically restrained from lunging at Gaetz.

Steve Scalise is the ideal majority leader for the post-truth era.

Boasting to reporters about passage of “the bill to repeal those 87,000 IRS agents,” he claimed that the Congressional Budget Office “confirmed” that those agents would “go after people making less than $200,000 a year,” including “the single mom who’s working two shifts at a restaurant.”

In reality, the IRS is hiring only about 6,500 agents — and that’s over a decade. In reality, the CBO said that only “a small fraction” of revenue from increased enforcement would come from taxpayers earning less than $400,000 a year.

Here’s what else Congressional Budget Office (CB) said: The Republicans’ bill to cut funds to the IRS — the new majority’s first legislation — would add $114 billion to the deficit. So much for fiscal responsibility.

Beth Van Duyne (R-Tex.) added the inventive claim that the fake agents would “make the IRS larger than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI and Border Control together.” The Defense Department alone employs about 3 million people.

Former majority leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told the House it was the “most dishonest, demagogic rhetoric that I have seen.” But he hadn’t yet witnessed the infanticide debate.

But Republicans spent the entire debate repeating the outright falsehood that 87,000 “agents” would “target American working-class families” (Jason T. Smith, Mo.) and “harass and spy on middle-class and low-income families” (Michelle Steel, Calif.). Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) falsely said the CBO had projected “as many as 700,000 more audits, [of] Americans making less than $75,000 a year.”

“If a baby is born alive, outside the womb, alive, how could you kill that baby and that be legal?” Scalise asked during debate on the Republicans’ “born-alive” abortion bill. “And yet in a number of states, it is legal and happening today.”

No, it isn’t. Infanticide, of course, has always been murder, and a 2002 “born alive” law affirmed that.

The dispute is limited to rare cases, typically involving a fetus born or aborted with a medical condition that isn’t survivable: Should it be treated with heroic measures or compassionate care? Infanticide isn’t on the table.

The bill was one of three antiabortion measures House Republicans prioritized in their first week of legislating: New House rules promising a vote on permanently banning federal abortion funds, a denunciation of violence against antiabortion groups and the born-alive bill.

It was a curious response to the 2022, elections, when voters angered by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade propelled Democrats to better-than-expected results, and abortion rights supporters prevailed even in red states such as Kentucky and Kansas. “We learned nothing from the midterms if this is how we’re going to operate in the first week,” complained Mace, the South Carolina Republican. “What are we doing to protect victims of rape and victims of incest? Nothing.” She said her GOP colleagues were only “muddying the waters and paying lip service.”

Perhaps that’s to be expected from a GOP leadership in which, as Business Insider pointed out, there will be more guys named “Mike” running committees — six — than there are women in charge of them (just three of the 21 chairs). The old boys of the House Republican caucus might benefit from a Mike drop.

What will be the priorities of this new House majority? Well, let us take them at their word.

(Fake!) Fox News host Sean Hannity visited the Rayburn Room off the House floor this week where, under the watchful eye of a George Washington oil portrait, he broadcast interviews with McCarthy and his (Fake!) leadership team.

Total mentions of inflation: 1.

Total mentions of jobs: 1.

Total mentions of the economy: 2.

Total mentions of investigations: 20.

“Thank you, brother,” McCarthy said to Hannity before they got down to probing all of the planned probes: investigating the FBI, DOJ, China, the “weaponized” feds, the Afghanistan pullout, covid-19’s origins, Anthony Fauci, the “Biden family syndicate,” Hunter Biden’s laptop and more.

Hypocrisy is a chronic form of lying

And now: President Biden’s handling of classified documents. Intelligence Committee Chairman Michael R. Turner (Ohio), who dismissed Trump’s hoarding of classified documents as a “bookkeeping issue,” now demands “a full and thorough review” of Biden’s conduct. Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (Ky.), who said probing the Trump documents would “not be a priority,” said of Biden’s documents: “We’re probing it.”

https://twitter.com/mstee0226/status/1613240798992113664?s=20&t=-adi8ZpDPmX314NciuFsVg
"Jim Jordan should not be in charged of the juridical committee his ass should be in prison. This is the most corrupt GOP in history. All they want to do is chase phantom election conspiracies & Hunter Biden. President Biden would never knowingly keep Natl Security Docs. PERIOD!!" @mstee0226 (Twitter)

Oversight is important, but the deep state committee in particular goes beyond oversight and into the realm of vengeance. Under the chairmanship of the voluble (aka "Gym Jim Jordan!") Jim Jordan (Ohio), it gives lawmakers powers to interfere in active criminal investigations — including, potentially, investigations into themselves. (Six House Republicans requested pardons from then-President Trump for their role in trying to overturn the 2020 election.)