MARCH 7, 2019

NEWS AND VIEWS

DNC CHAIR TOM PEREZ IS AGAIN BEHAVING ASSERTIVELY. THANK YOU, MR. PEREZ. YOU AREN’T ONE OF THOSE WEAK-KNEED DEMOCRATS. I’VE BEEN WATCHING YOU, AND I LIKE YOUR STYLE.

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/06/700807729/dnc-bars-fox-news-from-hosting-2020-primary-debates
DNC Bars Fox News From Hosting 2020 Primary Debates
March 6, 20192:05 PM ET
Jessica Taylor at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., July 25, 2018. (photo by Allison Shelley) (Square)
JESSICA TAYLOR
Twitter

PHOTOGRAPH -- Following a report about the close relationship between Fox News and the Trump White House, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said the Democratic Party will not allow the network to host any of its primary debates in 2020.
Charles Dharapak/AP

Updated at 7:27 p.m. ET

The Democratic National Committee will not allow Fox News to broadcast any of its 2020 presidential primary debates, citing a recent report about the close relationship between the Trump administration and the conservative cable network.

"I believe that a key pathway to victory is to continue to expand our electorate and reach all voters. That is why I have made it a priority to talk to a broad array of potential media partners, including FOX News," DNC Chairman Tom Perez said in a statement Wednesday.

"Recent reporting in the New Yorker on the inappropriate relationship between President Trump, his administration and FOX News has led me to conclude that the network is not in a position to host a fair and neutral debate for our candidates. Therefore, FOX News will not serve as a media partner for the 2020 Democratic primary debates," the statement adds.

POLITICS
Initial Democratic Primary Debates Will Accommodate Up To 20 Candidates

The decision comes after a lengthy article by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker detailed the increasing coziness between Trump and the network, which has long had a conservative tilt but which one source in the piece calls simply "propaganda" and effectively Trump's "own press organization."

The president responded on Twitter on Wednesday evening to the DNC's announcement, suggesting that he might block media outlets that he disfavors from holding debates during the general election phase of the 2020 campaign. "Democrats just blocked @FoxNews from holding a debate," Trump wrote. "Good, then I think I'll do the same thing with the Fake News Networks and the Radical Left Democrats in the General Election debates!"


Donald J. Trump
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@realDonaldTrump
Democrats just blocked @FoxNews from holding a debate. Good, then I think I’ll do the same thing with the Fake News Networks and the Radical Left Democrats in the General Election debates!

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Former Fox News President Bill Shine is now the White House communications director, and Trump has given dozens of exclusive interviews to Fox while eschewing other networks, often deriding them as "fake news." Host Sean Hannity has appeared as a special guest at Trump rallies, and in the New Yorker story, he is referred to as essentially "a West Wing adviser."

Among many other details in the New Yorker article, Mayer also writes that former Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes, who died in 2017, had tipped Trump off to some debate questions during the 2016 cycle. This includes a now-infamous clash with then Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly over his past comments about women, though Kelly has said she does not believe Trump received the question in advance. Another source had allegedly alerted Trump that there would be a question about whether he would eventually support the Republican nominee.

In a statement, Fox News Senior Vice President Bill Sammon pointed to the network's intent to have a debate hosted by its news anchors, as opposed to its prime-time opinion hosts, as evidence of why Democratic Party leadership should rethink the decision. Fox News was set to host one Democratic primary debate in 2016, but it was late in the primary campaign and never happened.

"We hope the DNC will reconsider its decision to bar Chris Wallace, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, all of whom embody the ultimate journalistic integrity and professionalism, from moderating a Democratic presidential debate," Sammon said. "They're the best debate team in the business, and they offer candidates an important opportunity to make their case to the largest TV news audience in America, which includes many persuadable voters."

Wallace, who also hosts Fox News Sunday, has often pushed back on the Trump administration, including a recent inaccurate talking point over how many terrorists were coming through the Southern border.

Party committees expressing their frustration over news coverage by denying networks debates is nothing new. In 2015, the Republican National Committee announced it was suspending NBC News from hosting any future debates, citing "inaccurate or downright offensive" questions during a CNBC primary debate.

Correction
March 6, 2019
A previous version of this story misspelled Jane Mayer's last name as Meyer.


BERNIE SANDERS SIGNS THE PLEDGE.

POLITICS
Bernie Sanders Signs Democratic Party Loyalty Pledge For 2020 Run
March 5, 2019 5:18 PM ET
Jessica Taylor at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., July 25, 2018. (photo by Allison Shelley) (Square)
JESSICA TAYLOR

PHOTOGRAPH -- Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has signed a pledge that he will govern as a Democrat if he is elected president in 2020.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders has signed a loyalty pledge, promising to run and govern as a Democrat if he wins the presidency in 2020, a new requirement for candidates that largely grew out of his own 2016 campaign.

The pledge Sanders signed was given to all active Democratic presidential campaigns last week. It affirms to the DNC chairman that they "are a Democrat ... are a member of the Democratic Party; will accept the Democratic nomination; and will run and serve as a member of the Democratic Party."

It's an issue that arose during Sanders' first presidential run, with concerns among some Democrats that the longtime independent and self-described democratic socialist, might run as a third-party candidate after losing the nomination to Hillary Clinton.

At the same time that the party adopted the loyalty pledge for presidential candidates, it also made changes to the nominating process that were sought by Sanders and his supporters, like minimizing the role of superdelegates.

POLITICS
Bernie Sanders Files To Run As A Democrat — And An Independent

ANALYSIS
Are Democrats Ready To 'Feel The Bern' Or Is Sanders The 'MySpace' Of 2020?

The party rules state that a candidate must "be a bona fide Democrat whose record of public service, accomplishment, public writings, and/or public statements affirmatively demonstrates that the candidate is faithful to the interests, welfare, and success of the Democratic Party of the United States who subscribes to the substance, intent, and principles of the Charter and the Bylaws of the Democratic Party of the United States, and who will participate in the Convention in good faith."

In the Senate, Sanders caucuses with Democrats. But after his first run for the White House, Sanders seemed to suggest going forward that he would run as a Democrat instead of an independent, saying in 2015 when he filed for the New Hampshire primary that he would be on the ballot as a Democrat in future elections.

POLITICS
Which Democrats Are Running In 2020 — And Which Still Might

Sanders ran for and won re-election in Vermont in 2018 as an independent. He even declined the Democratic nomination after he was offered it, as he has in the past, but Sanders was backed by the Vermont Democratic Party in his independent effort. Sanders has already filed papers for his 2024 Senate re-election bid — as an independent, even as he once again seeks the Democratic nomination for president.

The ambiguity in Sanders' party ID highlights the lingering tensions between Sanders and the DNC after his bruising primary fight with Clinton almost four years ago. Clinton alleged in her book What Happened that Sanders only ran to "disrupt the Democratic Party," not to "make sure a Democrat won the White House," and that his bid did "lasting damage" to her campaign.

POLITICS
Former New York Mayor Bloomberg Decides Against 2020 Presidential Bid


HERE IS ANOTHER REALLY GOOD ARTICLE ON POLITICS FROM THE ATLANTIC. WE DEMOCRATS ARE IN A MUCH BETTER POSITION NOW, I THINK, THAN LAST YEAR; THE IDEA THAT HE’LL “FADE” DUE TO HIS ADVANCED AGE IS JUST WISHFUL THINKING ON THEIR PART, I BELIEVE. HE’S STRONG, AND VERY INTELLIGENT. I DO HOPE I WILL GET TO GO TO ONE OF HIS EVENTS AND ACTUALLY MEET HIM THIS YEAR. I’LL BUY ONE OF HIS BOOKS AND GET IT AUTOGRAPHED.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/02/bernie-sanders-democratic-frontrunner-president/583066/
POLITICS
Bernie Sanders Is the Democratic Front-Runner
Even though many Democrats blame him for Donald Trump’s election—and his rivals think he’ll fade
EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE
FEB 19, 2019

PHOTOGRAPH – SANDERS SPEAKING, YURI GRIPAS / REUTERS

He’s a 77-year-old socialist who’s abrasive when he’s in a good mood, and who’s still blamed by many Democrats for Hillary Clinton losing to Donald Trump. But go ahead, try to argue that Bernie Sanders isn’t the front-runner in the 2020 Democratic race right now.

After making his second presidential run official on Tuesday, Sanders blew past every other announced candidate’s early fundraising numbers—$3.3 million in the first few hours, more than double the huge $1.5 million Kamala Harris raised in the whole first day—and he’s expecting to easily hit the 1 million website sign-ups he asked for as a first show of support for his campaign.

Then there’s where he stands in early polls, behind only Joe Biden. Or the argument Sanders’s own pollster has been making: that he will have surprising strength in parts of the country where he connects with many of the same disaffected voters who backed Trump, or who were too turned off by what’s become of politics to vote at all in 2016.

“Short of Joe Biden entering the race, Sanders on paper starts off with more advantages than anybody else. He’s got the largest list; he’s got the most intense following that has stayed with him since 2016; he has a proven ability to fundraise from his small-dollar base,” said Brian Fallon, a Democratic strategist who was the spokesman for Clinton, leading the public charge against Sanders last time around. “He’s in the exact opposite position that he started off the 2016 campaign in.”

The Democrats running against him assume that this won’t last. But he’ll raise millions, get 20,000 people at his rallies, and make them all look junior varsity in comparison. Still, they’re confident that he won’t be able to maintain that over the next year.

Peter Beinart: Bernie Sanders offers a foreign policy for the common man

Sanders running when he’s part of a big field of enticing candidates is a whole lot different from Sanders running as the single fresh alternative to a candidate who never inspired much passion throughout her entire career. He could burn out He could burn out, get eclipsed by some of the newer forces in the party, and have to answer for all the parts of his record and background that didn’t get full scrutiny when he was a novelty nowhere near winning in 2016.

If nothing else, there could certainly come a point late in the game, much like what happened with Howard Dean in 2004, when Democratic voters look at him and say they just can’t take seriously the idea of Sanders actually beating Trump, or actually being the commander in chief and sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office as the 46th president of the United States.

At least that’s what his rivals are telling themselves. Because that’s how races have always gone up to this point. Except, that is, for 2016, when Sanders became a bizarre breakout sensation and the country put Trump behind that desk as the 45th president.

No matter what, his candidacy seems set to reshape the dynamics of the race.

Sanders has moved quickly in an attempt to show that he’s a more serious candidate than four years ago, when he announced his campaign during a break from the Senate floor, gave a few harried answers to the questions from the few reporters who had showed up, and then said he had to get back to vote.

This time, he started with a carefully constructed rollout, with a slick announcement video, a sit-down interview on CBS This Morning, and a media tour. “Sisters and brothers,” he wrote to his huge email list Tuesday morning, “together, you and I and our 2016 campaign began the political revolution. Now, it is time to complete that revolution and implement the vision that we fought for.”

A full operation is being put together, with the assumption that he will have well over $200 million in online fundraising to draw from. That includes top leadership of the campaign meant to illustrate the diversity of his support, demographically and geographically. Faiz Shakir, a former aide to Harry Reid, is leaving his job as the political director of the American Civil Liberties Union to be the campaign manager. In addition to his deep political experience, he will be the first Muslim presidential-campaign manager in history. Analilia Mejia, an organizer of Colombian and Dominican descent who most recently directed the Fight for $15 and Earned Sick Days campaigns in New Jersey and previously worked for the New Jersey Working Families Party, will be the political director. The deputy political director will be Sarah Badawi, who was most recently the government-affairs director for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a liberal group that led the effort to draft Elizabeth Warren into the 2012 Senate race, and later worked on her campaign.

Their organization will send out an array of emails, videos, and Twitter-friendly GIFs, which Sanders and his team hope to use to capture the sensation of his 2016 campaign and turn it into an overwhelming movement.

All this will build to a big kickoff rally.

“Bernie Sanders is always an underdog because he is fighting against large special interests who don’t want to see his agenda succeed. He’ll be the underdog until the day he wins,” said Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat enthusiastic about Sanders’s announcement. “He’s the front-runner in terms of grassroots energy and a small-dollar army—we’ve seen how decisive that is.”

The darkness settled in at Warren’s headquarters weeks ago, and by Tuesday morning, Warren advisers were thinking that the upside of Sanders’s candidacy is that at least there will be two strong voices for real structural reform in the economy and political system. While her goal remains winning the White House, she and her aides have had to rethink how she’s going to get there. Sanders will massively out-raise and outperform her for months, Warren advisers think. But over time, if she is able to build up the staying power, there might be a chance for her to have a late second wind, particularly if Sanders collapses under either his own weight or late skepticism about him becoming the nominee, people around her believe. In that scenario, she’s like John McCain in the 2008 Republican primary, able to surge as an acceptable alternative once people try out Sanders and other candidates and realize they don’t like any of them. Sanders could serve as a buffer for anyone who thinks that Warren is too left, or too old, or doesn’t have enough of a claim on the women’s vote given the other female candidates in the race.

Khanna argued that the two won’t split votes.

“Running for president is something deeper. I don’t think you have just a cut-and-paste Let’s see who has what percent of the base and how they overlap. I think it’s about do you meet the moment, and does your vision inspire people?” he said.

A Warren spokeswoman declined to comment on what impact Sanders’s presence in the race would have on her campaign.

In the meantime, several other candidates are salivating over how they expect the two to destroy each other. Among those potentially positioned to do best over a scramble on the left flank are Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, who both have progressive credentials but are campaigning to build strong and more diverse foundations of support.

Or as Harris greeted the news of Sanders’s entry on Tuesday morning while at a campaign stop in New Hampshire, “The more the merrier. I think it’s great.”

That will likely leave little room for some of the more left-leaning potential candidates who have been considering jumping in, most prominently Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii will likely face the same problem distinguishing herself now that Sanders is in the race.

But the moderates will rejoice, hoping that voters take notice of how the Trump campaign quickly responded to the Sanders launch: “Bernie Sanders has already won the debate in the Democrat primary, because every candidate is embracing his brand of socialism. But the American people will reject an agenda of sky-high tax rates, government-run health care and coddling dictators like those in Venezuela. Only President Trump will keep America free, prosperous and safe.”

If beating Trump is the priority, the moderates want primary voters to think that nominating Sanders would be playing right into Trump’s clear plans to spend the next 20 months pumping up his modern-day Red Scare. That’s the theoretical space for Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who is pitching herself as a pragmatist. She said at a CNN town hall on Monday night that she won’t support Medicare for all and that she would only support free college tuition “if I was a magic genie.”

But the person most closely watching Sanders’s announcement is probably Biden, who’s been going over polling data and election results he believes show that votes are not as far left as the media attention to things such as Medicare for all and the Green New Deal would suggest.

The former vice president is deep in final deliberations about whether to run again, but he feels sure that Sanders’s agenda will be both the wrong policy for the country and the wrong politics to defeat Trump.

“To be sure, there’s anxiety about what the future holds, and caution about what our rapidly changing world means to families who are being left behind,” Biden said on Saturday at the Munich Security Conference, in a speech full of lines that could have been from an announcement. “This fourth industrial revolution is causing great anxiety, and I think is part of the reason for so much of our uncertainty.”

The Biden spokesman Bill Russo declined to comment on how Sanders’s announcement shapes his thinking.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE is a staff writer at The Atlantic.


https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/03/what-does-mueller-want-paul-manafort/584389/
IDEAS
Five Unanswered Questions About Paul Manafort
His time at the helm of the Trump campaign remains mysterious.
3:28 PM ET
Franklin Foer
Staff writer for The Atlantic

What did Robert Mueller want from Paul Manafort? Last September, the special counsel cut a deal with the former chair of Donald Trump’s campaign: If Manafort truthfully provided guidance to prosecutors, they would suggest a less onerous sentence for his crimes. There was a clear assumption in the trade, that Mueller believed Manafort had information valuable to his broader investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. In the months that followed the deal, Manafort became a regular visitor to Mueller’s office, often sitting for six hours at a time.

Get the latest issue now.

But Manafort proved to be the archetype of the unreliable witness. Last month, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who had initially approved Manafort’s plea agreement, accused him of a pattern of “withholding facts if he can get away with it.” With his lies, Manfort scuppered* his plea deal and apparently doomed himself to spend the remainder of his days in the slammer.

Read: Paul Manafort, American hustler

On Thursday, a judge will sentence him for bank and tax fraud—and next week, another sentencing hearing awaits him for his failure to register his Ukrainian lobbying and what the government calls “conspiracy against the United States.” A prison uniform represents the long-delayed and fitting epilogue to Paul Manafort’s life story. It would be misleading, however, to declare this a moment of closure.


SCUPPER* -- https://notoneoffbritishisms.com/2016/12/20/scuppered/
https://www.google.com/search?q=scuppered+define&oq=scuppered&aqs=chrome.4.69i57j0l5.8062j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

scup·per2Dictionary result for scupper
/ˈskəpər/Submit
verbBRITISH
past tense: scuppered; past participle: scuppered
sink (a ship or its crew) deliberately.
synonyms: sink, scuttle, submerge, send to the bottom, open the seacocks in
"the captain decided to scupper the ship"

INFORMAL
prevent from working or succeeding; thwart.
"plans for a casino were scuppered by a public inquiry"
synonyms: ruin, wreck, destroy, devastate, wreak havoc on, damage, spoil, mar, injure, blast, blight, smash, shatter, dash, torpedo, scotch, mess up; More



THIS SECOND FRANKLIN FOER STORY LOOKS VERY INTERESTING TO ME, ALSO. MORE BY FRANKLIN FOER:
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The collected documents from the Manafort trials make it obvious that prosecutors believe that Manafort attempted, on many occasions, to leverage his leadership of the Trump campaign to salvage his disastrous personal finances. What they have described is a state of desperation, but they haven’t fully articulated where, precisely, this desperation led him. While they have ended his life as a free man, they have let linger a long set of important questions about his time at the helm of the Trump campaign.

Who Is Konstantin Kilimnik?

For nearly a decade, Manafort was trailed by a diminutive aide de camp, a Ukrainian named Konstantin Kilimnik. In Manafort’s world, foreign names were often truncated to more easily spelled initials, so Kilimnik went by the moniker KK. According to colleagues, Manafort described KK as his “Russian brains.”

Prosecutors have routinely asserted that KK was an “asset” of Russian intelligence—although it’s not exactly clear what they mean by this, or what evidence supports that conclusion. Over time, however, prosecutors have slowly revealed details about KK. They have shown that KK remained in contact with Manafort during the campaign. One meeting appears to have especially fascinated Mueller: On August 2, 2016, Manafort, Rick Gates (his other longtime deputy), and KK met at the Grand Havana Room, a cigar bar in Manhattan. Manafort supplied Kilimnik with a sheaf of the Trump campaign’s internal polling data. (The blogger Marcy Wheeler has pointed to a footnote in a Mueller filing indicating that Manafort and Gates passed KK 75 pages of polling.) Apparently, the polling was intended for Manafort’s old financial benefactors in Ukraine, the two oligarchs who funded the political party that Manafort represented. Did they actually receive it? (They have denied ever getting the data.) And did KK give anyone else the closely guarded information?

Manafort, Gates, and KK certainly behaved as if they were engaged in nefarious activity. According to Mueller’s team, the troika left the Havana Room separately, through different exits. Andrew Weissmann, one of Mueller’s lawyers, told Berman Jackson that this meeting at the cigar club goes “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating.”

Read: The loud silence of Mueller’s Manafort memo

Getting “Whole” With Oleg Deripaska?

One of Manafort’s most important consulting clients was the Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska. Earlier in his career, Deripaska was commonly referred to in the media as “Putin’s oligarch.” Manafort advised Deripaska on political matters, but he also became an investment partner with him. In 2007, Deripaska gave Manafort approximately $20 million to manage in a private-equity fund, intended for investment in properties across Ukraine and Russia. According to court documents, Manafort failed to account for what happened to these funds. Deripaska has accused Manafort of stealing them—and has said that Manafort stopped responding to his requests to reach him.

Soon after Manafort joined the Trump campaign, he asked KK to send Deripaska media clips about his new role. In emails obtained by The Atlantic, Manafort asked KK if there was a way to use his position to get “whole” with the oligarch. He even offered to provide Deripaska with private briefings. What became of these entreaties? There’s no evidence that Deripaska ever received them.

The Russian dissident Alexey Nalavny has stoked suspicions that information traded hands. He produced a long video that began as a so-called shaggy-dog story, but then took a pointed turn. The video culminated in footage of Deripaska on a yacht in Norwegian waters discussing U.S. sanctions against Russia with a Kremlin foreign-policy hand. The video came from a Belarusian escort who was on the yacht and stealthily captured the scene. In an absurdist plot twist, Thai authorities arrested the escort for hosting sex-instruction clinics. From her Thai cell, the escort claimed that she could provide more information about Manafort’s relationship to Deripaska. That might prove to be a story fabricated story in desperation, but the evidence of Manafort’s desire to reach Deripaska is unambiguous.

The Ukraine Peace Plan

When Michael Cohen testified before a House committee last week, he wasn’t asked any questions about his efforts on behalf of a Ukrainian legislator’s peace plan—a document he delivered to the White House in the administration’s earliest days. Securing American support for a version of this plan was a longtime desire of Paul Manafort’s old clients. War in eastern Ukraine meant that the electoral base of their political party was living in a war zone, unable to participate in national elections. This significantly damaged their prospects for ever reclaiming their country’s presidency.

Did Manafort play any role in promoting this agenda? Manafort’s own lawyers have conceded that he discussed a peace plan with KK at the Grand Havana Room meeting.

Read: The mysterious return of Manafort’s “Russian brain”

A Banker Named Calk

In August 2016, an obscure Chicago banker named Stephen Calk appeared on a list of Donald Trump’s economic advisers. Soon after Paul Manafort left the Trump campaign—when Trump quipped, “I’ve got a crook running my campaign”—Calk’s bank began loaning Manafort money. What’s strange is that the bank loaned Manafort $16 million, which amounted to 22 percent of the bank’s total equity capital. As prosecutors proved in court, these loans were procured on the basis of fraudulent information that Manfort provided. But were they also procured on the basis of a promise? During Manafort’s trial, Robert Mueller introduced an email in which Manafort tried to get Calk a job as secretary of the Army.

Soon after Manafort left the campaign, he received another set of loans from a group called Spruce Capital. One co-founder of Spruce had been a partner in the development of Trump Tower Waikiki. (Spruce says that it received the loan request through a broker.) Why would these Trump connected entities continue to lend to Manafort after he had been fired?

The Godfather and the Super PAC

When Manafort arrived in the Trump campaign, he famously promised that he would work for free. This seemed strange given his persistent efforts to monetize every aspect of his existence, not to mention all the money he owed banks and Oleg Deripaska. We now know Mueller doesn’t believe that Manafort received nothing for his efforts. He has accused Manafort of lying about money he received from a Trump super PAC called Rebuilding America. Trump created the group to entice elite donors, who had initially shunned his campaign. Manafort dispatched his daughter’s godfather to organize the effort. The godfather received at least $830,000 for running the operation. Even after Manafort left the campaign in disgrace, the super PAC arranged to pay $125,000 of Manafort’s debts. According to The New York Times, prosecutors are interested in foreign donations that flowed through the super PAC.

Finally, why did Paul Manafort put himself in this position? He could have cooperated truthfully with Mueller and lightened his sentence. But he attempted to keep vital chapters of his story shrouded in lies. He wanted them to remain a mystery. Perhaps Mueller has already filled in those gap and has gleaned a complete narrative. But there’s another possibility. Without Manafort’s cooperation, we might never gain clarity about some of the most disturbing questions that still hover around him.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.


FRANKLIN FOER is a staff writer for The Atlantic. He is the author of World Without Mind and How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization.