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      Michigan primary a test for Biden as key voters turn away over Gaza war

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      Polls began to close in Michigan on Tuesday, in a presidential primary that tested how much Joe Biden and Donald Trump should be worried about winning key groups of voters in the general election in the critical swing state.Though both were on track to win their races, Biden and Trump faced challenges within their respective parties. After underperforming in the polls and struggling with suburban and college-educated Republican voters in earlier primaries, Trump’s campaign in Michigan is dealing with a state Republican party whose local leaders have been embroiled in an ugly factional dispute, while Biden faces a campaign by anti-war activists to abandon him over the president’s continued support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.In an interview with the Guardian, Layla Elabed, sister of the congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and campaign director for Listen to Michigan, said organizers were hoping for a showing of between 10,000 and 15,000 “uncommitted” votes, a mirror of the margin by which Hillary Clinton lost the state to Donald Trump in 2016. They passed 14,000 “uncommitted” votes by 8.30pm, according to an Associated Press count, which could be a significant rebuke of Biden.As the sun began to set on Tuesday evening, a steady stream of voters made their way to polling stations in Dearborn, where the “uncommitted” campaign has concentrated much of its resources on election day.Volunteers sat at intersections and outside the doors of the McDonald elementary school handing out campaign literature, but many of those arriving to vote had already decided to cast an uncommitted ballot.“This is to send a message to the president,” said 41-year-old Khalifah Mahdi, a local business owner who said he was voting for the first time in a primary election. “He has lost a lot of strength and respect in this first term and he needs to win that back.”Maria Ibarra, a volunteer with the Listen to Michigan campaign, said that one Dearborn precinct ran out of voter-registration applications around 7pm Eastern standard time. The voters waiting in line, Ibarra said, “want to make sure that there’s a clear message, that they want a permanent ceasefire”. By 8pm the precinct had obtained more applications.The push by Democratic voters to vote “uncommitted” in today’s primary picked up steam since organizers launched it in early February, with dozens of local elected officials in greater Detroit publicly endorsing the push.That effort has the support of the Dearborn mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, whose Detroit suburb has the largest percentage of Arab Americans of any city in the US. He wrote in a February op-ed in the New York Times that his constituents were “haunted by the images, videos and stories streaming out of Gaza” and felt “a visceral sense of betrayal” by Biden’s support for Israel.The campaign also has support from the representative Tlaib, a Palestinian American who represents Dearborn in Congress. In a video posted on social media today, Tlaib announced that she “was proud today” to vote “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary. “President Biden is not hearing us,” she said, citing a recent poll that showed about 74% of Democrats in Michigan support a ceasefire in Gaza. “This is the way we can use our democracy to say ‘listen – listen to Michigan.’”The campaign also earned the backing of the former congressman Andy Levin, who is Jewish and close to organized labor in the state, and the former 2020 presidential candidate and representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas.“We can use uncommitted to send a clear and powerful message to Joe Biden if we get enough uncommitted votes for a margin of victory,” Elabed, who voted for Biden in 2020, said. “If we’re able to replicate those numbers we can really send a message that he’s at risk of losing Michigan in the general election come November.” The Listen to Michigan campaign on Tuesday evening said they believed they would win at least one delegate at the Democratic national convention. Delegates can be awarded to candidates who earn at least 15% of the vote in a congressional district.Recent history offers some points of comparison for the ongoing “uncommitted” push in Michigan.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2008, when voters in Michigan, frustrated at Barack Obama’s absence from the Democratic primary ballot, launched a similar campaign, nearly 40% who cast their ballot did so for the “uncommitted” option. When Obama ran in 2012 – the last time a Democrat entered the Michigan primary as an incumbent – more than 10% of voters in the primary chose “uncommitted”.On the Republican side, Trump was expected to win comfortably against the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley – but weaknesses in his coalition that emerged in earlier primaries in South Carolina and New Hampshire could show up again in the key swing state.If Trump struggles in Kent county in western Michigan, a former Republican bastion that includes Grand Rapids and which flipped to Biden in 2020, and in Oakland county, a more upscale area in suburban Detroit where voters have also shifted away from Trump, that could be particularly telling. Haley made campaign stops in both places in the days ahead of the primary, where she argued that Trump, who won the South Carolina primary by 60% to Haley’s 40%, would struggle to pick up support from those voters.“He’s not gonna get the 40% if he’s going and calling out my supporters and saying they’re barred permanently from Maga,” Haley told a Michigan audience this weekend. “And why should the 40% have to cave to him?”But Tuesday’s vote won’t be the end of things.The Michigan GOP, to comply with national party rules on the timing of the primary, will only award 30% of its delegates to the national convention based on Tuesday’s vote. The rest will be awarded at a Saturday convention. The convention itself has been caught up in a chaotic power struggle over who the real Michigan GOP chair is – but the delegates are expected to be heavily pro-Trump. More

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      Michigan Judge Orders Kristina Karamo to Stand Down in G.O.P. Leadership Fight

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      A circuit court judge on Tuesday ordered Kristina Karamo, the deposed leader of the Michigan Republicans, to abandon her efforts to cling to power. But what that means for Saturday, when Ms. Karamo had pledged to hold a dueling presidential nominating convention, remains unclear.“I have to comply with the judge’s orders,” she told reporters after the court hearing, according to The Detroit Free Press.She also called the ruling “egregious,” and said “I’m not going to jail.” But she did not say when asked if she would abandon her plans for the convention on Saturday in Detroit.In a two-page order, Judge J. Joseph Rossi of the 17th Circuit Court in Grand Rapids, Mich., granted a preliminary injunction to the group of Republicans that voted in January to oust her. He barred Ms. Karamo from presenting herself as the party’s leader and conducting business in its name, including organizing meetings.The judge determined that a group of state G.O.P. leaders, disillusioned over transparency issues and money problems in the party, had followed the party’s bylaws when they voted on Jan. 6 to remove Ms. Karamo as chairwoman and later elected Pete Hoekstra, whom the Republican National Committee recognized as the rightful chairman earlier this month.Mr. Hoekstra, whom Ms. Karamo had denied access to the party’s bank and email accounts, said in an interview that he was “thrilled” by the ruling.“When Michigan opens for business tomorrow, we will be going to the banks,” said Mr. Hoekstra. He had a warning for Ms. Karamo’s holdouts: “If there’s individuals that are not cooperative, as we’ve done so far, we will seek compliance through the courts.”Ms. Karamo did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.The judge also forbade her from accessing the party’s bank accounts and postal boxes, and from engaging in communication on social media on behalf of the party. In recent days, she had used the party’s social media accounts to promote her “convention” in Detroit on Saturday.The gathering had been scheduled for 10 a.m. Eastern time, the same time that the convention organized by Mr. Hoekstra is scheduled to take place across the state in Grand Rapids.Both sides are loyal to former President Donald J. Trump, who weighed in on the leadership fight, backing Mr. Hoekstra, his former ambassador to the Netherlands and a former House member.Mr. Hoekstra said that he was not ruling out a situation where Ms. Karamo goes ahead with her competing gathering on Saturday.“They have shown themselves to be unpredictable,” he said. More

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      The Michigan Republican party is already in chaos. What will the week bring?

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      Michigan is holding its presidential primaries on Tuesday, with campaigns by pro-Palestine activists to abandon Joe Biden and factional chaos in the state Republican party defining an otherwise sleepy election day.There’s little drama in predicting the winners: Biden and Donald Trump are expected to romp in their respective races. But the dynamics of the contests hint at the deep divisions within the Democratic and Republican camps as the nationally unpopular candidates prepare to square off in a presidential general election rematch this fall.Neither candidate is popular statewide. Only 17% of respondents in a January poll commissioned by the Detroit News said they believed Biden deserved a second term in office, while 33% said the same about Trump. When asked whether they would support Trump or Biden in the general, respondents favored Trump by 8 points.Neither candidate faces much opposition in their respective primaries. Trump’s only serious foe is the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, whom he just beat by a wide margin in her home-state primary on Saturday.Biden’s greatest threat isn’t a candidate, but a movement: activists have launched a coordinated campaign to withhold votes from Biden to protest against his support for Israel’s war in Gaza. If they are successful, their efforts could embarrass him in the critical swing state – which has one of the largest Arab American communities in the country.They are furious at Biden for his unwavering support for Israel’s military operations in Gaza, which has killed more than 29,000 people.Eyeing this primary as an opportunity to pressure the president to revise his position on the war, a coalition of activists are calling on Democratic voters to select “uncommitted” on their ballot. The Listen to Michigan campaign, which activists launched in early February, has gained traction among some prominent political figures on the left, including the progressive former state representative Andy Levin and the US representative Rashida Tlaib, whose sister is spearheading the campaign.“President Biden needs every vote he can get if he’s going to prevent Donald Trump and his white supremacist buddies from taking the White House again,” said Abbas Alawieh, a spokesperson for the Listen to Michigan campaign and the former chief of staff for the Missouri congresswoman Cori Bush. “Our votes on February 27 for ‘uncommitted’ hopefully will be a reminder of that.”It’s not the first time Michigan Democrats have rallied around the “uncommitted” vote. In 2008, the Michigan Democratic party generated outrage by moving their primary to 15 January, shaking up the presidential primary order and prompting most candidates to drop out in protest. With Hillary Clinton as the only real contender on the ballot, a movement to vote “uncommitted” took hold. Nearly 40% of voters chose “uncommitted”, an embarrassment for Clinton and an early win for former president Barack Obama’s campaign.In the 2012 Michigan Democratic primary, nearly 21,000 people voted “uncommitted” instead of for Obama – more than 10% of the total votes cast.Alawieh argued that one metric for measuring the campaign’s success would be 10,000 people casting their votes as “uncommitted”, given that Trump won the state by roughly that margin in 2016.“If we see that at least that many people vote for ‘uncommitted’, I think that sends a very, very strong message,” said Alawieh.On the Republican side, a very different kind of split has driven the state party into feuding factions – making an already logistically complicated election even more confusing.Trump is expected to beat Haley definitively in Tuesday’s primary. The primary margins and turnout will be telling, however – especially in traditionally Republican areas that have shifted away from the GOP during the Trump era, like parts of western Michigan and Detroit’s more upscale suburbs.But the real chaos isn’t for the primary – it’s for the state convention that is scheduled a few days later. Or, to be more precise, the state party conventions: right now, two warring factions have scheduled their own meetings, and it’s not totally clear which meeting’s delegates will count towards the presidential nomination.The Michigan Republican party is holding a separate caucus on 2 March to comply with Republican National Committee rules after Michigan’s Democrat-controlled state legislature moved the state’s primary date earlier than the RNC permitted. The winner of Tuesday’s primary will earn only 30% of the state’s delegates – party activists who vote at the Republican national convention to nominate the presidential candidate – while 70% will be chosen at a state party convention on Saturday.Chaos within the state party has further complicated that plan.In early January, a group of party activists held an election to oust the former Michigan GOP chairwoman, Kristina Karamo, accusing the fervent conspiracy theorist of mismanaging the state party’s finances. They later voted to replace her with Pete Hoekstra, a former congressman and Trump’s former US ambassador to the Netherlands. On 14 February, the Republican National Committee declared their support for Hoekstra, recognizing him as the official state party chair.Karamo has continued to claim she is the rightful chair of the party despite what the RNC says, and is forging ahead with her own plans for a party convention on Saturday near Detroit even as Hoekstra plans one in Grand Rapids, a few hours away.“The political oligarchy within the Republican party has done everything possible to destroy me,” Karamo said in a podcast released just days after the RNC officially recognized Hoekstra’s leadership on 14 February.Given the national party’s support for Hoekstra, it’s unlikely Karamo’s convention will carry any official weight. But the courts may have something to say about that.On the same day voters head to the polls on Tuesday, the dueling factions will see each other in Kent county district court. Karamo’s opponents are asking a judge to determine whether she was properly removed from office, in hopes that a legal finding will push her to step down, allow them to seize control of the party’s finances and confirm that Hoekstra’s convention is the official one.All that drama is overshadowing the primary.“A good strong showing for Trump with a high turnout in key areas will bolster the Republican party if they can pull it off,” said Ken Kollman, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan. “But they’re riven by pretty deep splits right now.” More

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      Michigan governor says not voting for Biden over Gaza war ‘supports second Trump term’

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      Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan governor, pushed back on calls to not vote for Joe Biden over his handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict, saying on Sunday that could help Trump get re-elected.“It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that any vote that’s not cast for Joe Biden supports a second Trump term,” she said on Sunday during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union. “A second Trump term would be devastating. Not just on fundamental rights, not just on our democracy here at home, but also when it comes to foreign policy. This was a man who promoted a Muslim ban.”Whitmer, who is a co-chair of Biden’s 2024 campaign, also said she wasn’t sure what to expect when it came to the protest vote.Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat who is the only Palestinian-American serving in Congress, urged Democrats last week to vote “uncommitted” in Michigan’s 27 February primary.“We don’t want a country that supports war and bombs and destruction. We want to support life. We want to stand up for every single life killed in Gaza … This is the way you can raise our voices. Don’t make us even more invisible. Right now, we feel completely neglected and just unseen by our government,” she said in a video posted to her Twitter account. “If you want us to be louder, then come here and vote uncommitted.”Tlaib’s sister, Layla Elabed, is the campaign manager for Listen to Michigan, the group that has been leading the effort to get people to vote uncommitted. The group has the support of 30 elected officials across south-east Michigan, including Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, which has a large Arab American population.“Biden must earn our vote through a dramatic change in policy,” the group says on its website. “President Biden has been a successful candidate in the past by representing a broad coalition, but right now he’s not representing the vast majority of Democrats who want a ceasefire and an end to his funding of Israel’s war in Gaza.”While Biden will easily win the Democratic primary there, Michigan is a key swing state in the November general election. Biden will need strong support of voters who are a part of his Democratic base in addition to support from more moderate voters to win.Acknowledging that reality, Biden dispatched top aides to Dearborn to meet with leaders there earlier this month. During that meeting, Jon Finer, a deputy national security adviser, acknowledged errors in how the administration had responded.“We are very well aware that we have missteps in the course of responding to this crisis since October 7,” he said, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by the New York Times. “We have left a very damaging impression based on what has been a wholly inadequate public accounting for how much the president, the administration and the country values the lives of Palestinians. And that began, frankly, pretty early in the conflict.” More

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      Protesting Biden in Michigan, Gaza Supporters Warn, ‘Don’t Blame Us’ if You Lose

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      About 100 people turned out on Tuesday at the University of Michigan to urge Democrats to reject President Biden in the state’s primary election, a political gathering that illustrated both the passion and the limits of the effort to pressure him into calling for Israel to stop waging war in Gaza.The rally, held by a group called Listen to Michigan that is urging voters to cast their ballots for “Uncommitted” against Mr. Biden in next week’s primary, called for Democrats to reject the president in the primary.The speakers in Ann Arbor and a crowd made up mostly of students displayed energy, pronouncing themselves livid at Mr. Biden’s stance on Israel, but when the event began there were so few attendees that they could, and did, all stand in a circle and hold hands.Former Representative Andy Levin of Michigan, a progressive Democrat who was at the gathering, said it would be Mr. Biden’s fault if his policies toward Israel and Gaza led him to lose the general election to former President Donald J. Trump, the likely Republican nominee. Mr. Levin nodded to Michigan’s large population of Arab Americans, whose frustration with Mr. Biden along with discontent among young voters and progressives has raised questions about the president’s standing in the state, a critical presidential battleground.President Biden “needs votes from Arab Americans, from people of color, from progressive Jews and from young people,” former Representative Andy Levin said on Tuesday.Nick Hagen for The New York Times“Don’t blame us,” said Mr. Levin, who along with Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan has become one of the most prominent supporters of the Uncommitted movement. “He needs votes from Arab Americans, from people of color, from progressive Jews and from young people. He only won Michigan by 150,000 votes in 2020, so politically we have a moment where we can raise our voices.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib tells fellow Democrats: reject Biden in primary

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      The progressive US congresswoman Rashida Tlaib has called on her fellow Michigan Democrats to vote “uncommitted” in the state’s presidential primary election – at the expense of the party’s incumbent, Joe Biden – in late February.Appearing in a video posted to X on Saturday by Listen to Michigan, a political campaign to encourage the state’s voters to vote “uncommitted” in the 27 February primary, Tlaib justified her stark display of displeasure with Biden by alluding to Israel’s military strikes on Gaza, which local authorities say have killed nearly 29,000 Palestinians since last October.Tlaib – Congress’s only Palestinian American lawmaker – also criticized the Biden White House’s support for Israel, which launched its military campaign in Gaza in response to the 7 October Hamas attacks that killed about 1,200 Israelis.Speaking in front of the Ford Community & Performing Arts Center in Dearborn, which has one of the US’s largest populations of Arab Americans, Tlaib said: “It is important … to not only march against the genocide, not only make sure that we’re calling our members of Congress and local elected [officials], and passing city resolutions all throughout our country. It is also important to create a voting bloc, something that is a bullhorn to say, ‘Enough is enough.’”Tlaib added: “We don’t want a country that supports war and bombs and destruction. We want to support life. We want to stand up for every single life killed in Gaza … This is the way you can raise our voices. Don’t make us even more invisible. Right now, we feel completely neglected and just unseen by our government.“If you want us to be louder, then come here and vote uncommitted” rather than in support of Biden, the Democratic party’s presumptive nominee for November’s presidential election.The congresswoman’s message echoed the calls of Listen to Michigan, whose campaign manager is Tlaib’s sister Layla Elabed.Speaking to Business Insider, Elabed said: “Voting uncommitted is our way of demanding change, and this is going to be our vehicle to return political power back to us.”More than 30 elected officials across south-east Michigan have already pledged to vote “uncommitted” in the state’s 27 February primary elections. Those officials include the Dearborn mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, along with city council members and state representatives.A statement released by Listen to Michigan earlier in February said, “Let us be clear: we unequivocally demand that the Biden administration immediately call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. We must hold our president unaccountable and ensure that we, the American taxpayers, are no longer forced to be accomplices in a genocide that is backed and funded by the United States government.”It also said: “Therefore, we pledge to check the box for ‘uncommitted’ on our ballots in the upcoming presidential primary election. These are not empty words; they signify our steadfast commitment to justice, dignity, and the sanctity of human life, which is greater than loyalty to any candidate or party.”With the 81-year-old president facing increasing pressure over his handling of Israel’s military strikes in Gaza, as well as scrutiny over his age, Arab and Muslim Americans across multiple swing states – including Michigan – have organized campaigns under the slogan #AbandonBiden.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTlaib’s latest video announcement has received mixed responses.The former Ohio Democratic state senator Nina Turner tweeted, “Arab Americans do not want their tax dollars going to kill their family members. It’s unnerving to see the liberal response to that demand. Rashida Tlaib is absolutely justified to endorse this.”Meanwhile, in response to Tlaib’s endorsement of Listen Michigan, the conservative group Republicans Against asked on X who among Democrats would run against the congresswoman ahead of her running for re-election in November.Tlaib last year was censured by the Republican-led US House over her criticisms of Israel. She responded to the censure measure by saying that she would “not be silenced” and that “Palestinian people are not disposable”. More

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      At Rally in Michigan, Trump Lashes Out at Judge Who Fined Him $355 Million

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      Former President Donald J. Trump vented about his latest legal defeat to freezing supporters at a Michigan rally on Saturday night, a day after a New York judge fined him nearly $355 million plus interest in his civil fraud case.The Republican front-runner for his party’s presidential nomination, Mr. Trump denied that he had conspired to manipulate his net worth, which he was found liable of by Justice Arthur F. Engoron in a ruling that could wipe out Mr. Trump’s entire cash stockpile.“This judge is a lunatic,” he said in his opening salvo at his rally, held inside an airport hangar in Oakland County about 30 miles from Detroit.Mr. Trump used a similar line of attack against Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, who had accused him of exaggerating his wealth in the lengthy case. Barred by the judge for three years from serving in top roles at any New York company, including portions of his own Trump Organization, Mr. Trump cast aspersions on the justice system and said he had been persecuted.Mr. Trump’s visit to Michigan overlapped with the first day of early, in-person voting in the state, which is using both a primary and a caucus-style convention to award delegates for the first time in Republican Party contests.At the rally, the Trump campaign placed large signs urging supporters to take advantage of early voting.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Michigan’s G.O.P. Nominating Process Appears Headed For Chaos

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      As early in-person voting began on Saturday in Michigan, a fight for control of the G.O.P. in the crucial battleground state plunged Republicans there deeper into a political maelstrom, with rival factions potentially barreling toward hosting dueling nominating conventions.As if things weren’t already confusing.In a little over a week, the state will host a traditional primary on one day, and then a caucus-style convention a few days later. Now, it seems, there could actually be two conventions, in different parts of the state, each claiming legitimacy.Former President Donald J. Trump is headed to Michigan on Saturday night, with a campaign rally in Waterford Township, about 30 miles northwest of Detroit. While he has made it clear which faction he is supporting, and so has the national party, that has done little to dissuade the Trump-styled election denier attempting to hold on to power.The feud, already being waged in state court, appears to be only gaining intensity.Pete Hoekstra, whom the Republican National Committee recognized on Wednesday as the state party’s rightful chairman after his election last month, said he was moving forward with plans to hold a statewide nominating convention on March 2 in Western Michigan.But Kristina Karamo, defying the R.N.C.’s determination that she had properly been removed as party chairwoman earlier in January and Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. Hoekstra, has also indicated that she will continue hosting a convention on the same day, for the same purpose, but in Detroit.At stake at the convention will be 39 of Michigan’s 55 Republican presidential delegates. The other 16 will be decided during the state’s Feb. 27 primary, which includes at least nine days of early voting. The hybrid process, new this year, was adopted by Republicans in order to comply with R.N.C. rules after Michigan’s Democratic governor moved up the primary date.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More