This from a dear friend and fellow memo reader.
"Dick:
Your commentary on Democrat marketing skill is 100% accurate, and I speak from experience. Marketing to most Republicans is akin to the unfathomable depths of Quantum Mechanics. For years I have been saying that Republicans, and especially the conservatives, have zero idea about marketing, and compelling messaging. I have tried, with occasional success, to change that in some political campaigns. However, a lesson I learned after thirty more years as a marketing practitioner is that the worst type of client is an uninformed client. Too often, we see novice candidates retaining “consultants” who have sold them the proverbial “Brooklyn Bridge Campaign” approach. This type of candidate is easily wowed by a borrowed interest technique or a momentary diatribe against an opponent. Oh, once in a while in Massachusetts we’ll have a Republican elected governor, but in recent times that office holder is very beholden to Democrats, and, predictably, acts accordingly.
L----"
And
Comment from very dear friend and fellow memo reader regarding my most recent memo diatribe.
.Dick, Terrific write up today!! I believe the conservatives should take a page out of the liberals playbook! Every opportunity with the press should begin by mocking what liberals have said, and should include an emotional evaluation. This should be followed up by simple, factual truths on the matter. An example ... "Chuck Schumer said yesterday the GOP tax proposal is a gift to the rich ... etc., etc. How can he lie like that with a straight face on TV?!!! It is blatantly unethical to lie to the public like that!! It is an obvious attempt to turn people against anything Republican!! The facts are ... " This may not be the best example, but I can't construct an effective response on the spur of the moment ... hopefully you get the idea. Everything Liberals say should be disputed openly and immediately, and mocked!!! We shouldn't let any of their BS sit without rebuttal. J__"
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My very dear friend,Kim Strassel, has given me and you a choice. Believe her or the Clinton's I believe Kim.I also hope and believe, Kim should get a Pulitzer, for her investigative reporting regarding the infamous Russian Dossier. The least she should get is a shovel so she can shovel up the lies and distortions and dump them on the grounds of The Clinton Foundation and possibly the front door of The FBI. (See 1 below.)
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Is Europe out-Trumping America? (See 2 below.)
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The proposed tax reform passes this economist's three pronged smell test. (See 3 below.)
As I have noted in previous memos, the government board that calculates/scores the effect of any tax proposal is not only out of date in terms of methodology/technology but is static.
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One man's view. (See 4 below.)
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More Ross Rant. (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)
Lifting the Steele Curtain
The Fusion GPS dossier was one of the dirtiest political tricks in U.S. history.
The Steele dossier has already become a thing of John le Carré-like intrigue—British spies, Kremlin agents, legal cutouts, hidden bank accounts. What all this obscures is the more immediate point: The dossier amounts to one of the dirtiest tricks in U.S. political history. It was perpetrated by Team Clinton and yielded a vast payoff for Hillary’s campaign.
The Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign hired the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS in April 2016 to dig up dirt on Donald Trump. Fusion in turn hired former U.K. spook Christopher Steele to assemble the (now largely discredited) dossier. That full dossier of allegations wasn’t made public until after the election, in January 2017. And the media and Democrats continue to peddle the line that it played no role during the election itself.
“Details from the dossier were not reported before Election Day,” ran a recent CNN story. Hillary Clinton herself stressed the point in a recent “Daily Show” appearance. The dossier, she said, is “part of what happens in a campaign where you get information that may or may not be useful and you try to make sure anything you put out in the public arena is accurate. So this thing didn’t come out until after the election, and it’s still being evaluated.”
This is utterly untrue. In British court documents Mr. Steele has acknowledged he briefed U.S. reporters about the dossier in September 2016. Those briefed included journalists from the New York Times , the Washington Post, Yahoo News and others. Mr. Steele, by his own admission (in an interview with Mother Jones), also gave his dossier in July 2016 to the FBI.
Among the dossier’s contents were allegations that in early July 2016 Carter Page, sometimes described as a foreign-policy adviser to Candidate Trump, held a “secret” meeting with two high-ranking Russians connected to President Vladimir Putin. It even claimed these Russians offered to give Mr. Page a 19% share in Russia’s state oil company in return for a future President Trump lifting U.S. sanctions. This dossier allegation is ludicrous on its face. Mr. Page was at most a minor figure in the campaign and has testified under oath that he never met the two men in question or had such a conversation.
Yet the press ran with it. On Sept. 23, 2016, Yahoo News’s Michael Isikoff published a bombshell story under the headline: “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.” Mr. Isikoff said “U.S. officials” had “received intelligence” about Mr. Page and Russians, and then went on to recite verbatim all the unfounded dossier allegations. He attributed all this to a “well-placed Western intelligence source,” making it sound as if this info had come from someone in government rather than from an ex-spy-for-hire.
The Clinton campaign jumped all over it, spinning its own oppo research as a government investigation into Mr. Trump. Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign’s communications director, the next day took to television to tout the Isikoff story and cite “U.S. intelligence officials” in the same breath as Mr. Page. Other Clinton surrogates fanned out on TV andTwitter to spread the allegations.
The Isikoff piece publicly launched the Trump-Russia collusion narrative—only 1½ months from the election—and the whole dossier operation counts as one of the greatest political stitch-ups of all time. Most campaigns content themselves with planting oppo research with media sources. The Clinton campaign commissioned a foreign ex-spy to gin up rumors, which made it to U.S. intelligence agencies, and then got reporters to cite it as government-sourced. Mrs. Clinton now dismisses the dossier as routine oppo research, ignoring that her operation specifically engineered the contents to be referred to throughout the campaign as “intelligence” or a “government investigation.”
Making matters worse, there may be a grain of truth to that last claim. If the Washington Post’s reporting is correct, it was in the summer of 2016 that Jim Comey’s FBI obtained a wiretap warrant on Mr. Page from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. If it was the dossier that provoked that warrant, then the wrongs here are grave. Mr. Page is suing Yahoo News over that Isikoff story, but he may have a better case against the Clinton campaign and the federal government if they jointly spun a smear document into an abusive investigation.
To that point, it is fair to ask if the entire Trump-Russia narrative—which has played a central role in our political discourse for a year, and is now resulting in a special counsel issuing unrelated indictments—is based on nothing more than a political smear document. Is there any reason to believe the FBI was probing a Trump-Russia angle before the dossier? Is there any collusion allegation that doesn’t come in some form from the dossier?
The idea that the federal government and a special counsel were mobilized—that American citizens were monitored and continue to be investigated—based on a campaign-funded hit document is extraordinary. Especially given that to this day no one has publicly produced a single piece of evidence to support any of the dossier’s substantive allegations about Trump team members.
So yes, Mrs. Clinton, the dossier—which you paid for—was used in the election. And we are only beginning to understand in how many ways.
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2)
How Europe Is Out-Trumping America
While Washington is stuck in neutral, French and Dutch reformers are pushing radical change.
By Joseph C. Sternberg
When Donald Trump won the White House a year ago this week, it seemed as if Europe would be doomed to look enviously across the Atlantic. Yes, enviously. Europeans told pollsters they would have elected Hillary Clinton if given the chance, but in their own countries they kept voting for unorthodox outsiders—who regardless never managed to win power, thanks to obtuse electoral systems and suffocating political correctness.
A year on, and to the surprise of many, including this columnist, the pupil is excelling the teacher. Europe’s politicians all of a sudden are producing the kinds of changes American voters wanted Mr. Trump to deliver, while Washington increasingly looks like the sclerotic and neurotic European capitals of yore.
It used to be that if you said some country’s ruling party was refusing to overhaul a deeply unpopular entitlement program despite supposedly having won an electoral mandate to do so, people would think you meant France. If you said a government with one of the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world was struggling to cut them, people would think you meant Germany. If you complained that a country’s leader was little more than a flamboyant media personality, thoughts would turn to Italy.
Yet now those gripes are primarily true of Washington. Meanwhile, Emmanuel Macron has overhauled France’s labor laws and slashed corporate tax rates. His next target will be the French pension system. In the Netherlands the new government has committed to cutting its already competitive tax rates on capital and corporate income, and it will take on the pension system over the coming year. By way of reminder, the last American president to contemplate Social Security reform was George W. Bush more than a decade ago, and his effort was over before it began.
The change in Europe involves politics as much as policy. Centrist politicians are chipping away at the walls of political correctness that used to seal off some issues from debate. Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, won re-election in March in part by co-opting the saner parts of his fringe opponent Geert Wilders’s agenda on immigration. Mr. Rutte signaled to voters that a mainstream Dutch politician is now willing to discuss the country’s struggle to assimilate immigrants.
The transformation remains incomplete in many places, of course. In Germany the far-right fringe startled the establishment with its strong showing in September’s election, in the form of the Alternative for Germany party. But one can make a few observations about why suddenly Europe is faring better than America in responding to the voter disaffection that otherwise drives people to the political edges.
Mr. Trump’s election, and Britain’s vote last year to leave the European Union, scared Europe’s mainstream politicians straight. Centrists who long had ignored their fringe challengers were warned that challengers really can win elections nowadays, and not only in vaguely eccentric places like Hungary.
Another explanation is that Europe’s economic and political crises have lasted much longer and run much deeper than America’s recent stagnation. This has given politicians more time to figure out what to do, even as they failed for many years to do it, while also increasing voters’ receptiveness to radical changes.
Witness the way successive French governments promised to make the same reforms to that country’s labor laws, only to fail once in office. The consensus was born of long and miserable economic experience. What has changed in the past year is that a new sense of urgency has arisen for mainstream politicians to do it before voters turn to someone else. Thank Mr. Trump for that.
Another force at work is the voters themselves. Europeans appear to be undergoing an epiphany as they observe Britain’s Brexit agonies and the Trump circus. They are discovering that protest votes fail if protest politicians prove incapable of governing once in office. Better, then, to reward newly chastened mainstream politicians who have a modicum of competence to make tough but necessary choices.
As a result, French voters who otherwise flirted with the National Front out of frustration with economic malaise decided not to punish Mr. Macron with brutal strikes when he charged ahead with his reform agenda. This enhanced electoral gnosis is the unheralded but crucial element to many of Europe’s recent, if still tentative, political successes.
Mr. Trump’s surprising win a year ago taught Europe’s politicians one thing, and now his political failures are teaching European voters another. The open question is whether the American electorate is learning the same lessons.
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3) Tax Reform Passes the Fairness Test
Myopic conventional fairness measures consider only the current year’s net taxes—that is, taxes paid minus benefits received. They ignore net future taxes, making it impossible to account for phased-in reforms as well as consumption and estate taxes. Moreover, these methods understate the tax burden on the rich who save more relative to the nonrich and thus face higher relative taxes in the future based on their resulting taxable asset income.
Mahmood Hosseini/AFP/Getty Images
3) Tax Reform Passes the Fairness Test
The usual assessments fail to account for the way liabilities change over a taxpayer’s lifetime.
By Laurence Kotlikoff
The GOP tax plan should do three things. It should expand the economy while raising wages. It should pay for itself. And it should be fair.
The new plan’s business-tax provisions will reduce the effective marginal tax rate on U.S. investments dramatically, from close to 35% to under 19%. Depending on the year in question, my global dynamic macroeconomic model predicts a 12% to 20% expansion in the U.S. capital stock, producing an average $3,500 real wage increase for each American working household. Moreover, economic growth spurred by the business-tax cuts will raise tax receipts enough to make the plan revenue-neutral.
That means the plan passes the first two tests. What about fairness? Using conventional methods for assessing fiscal fairness, government agencies and Beltway think tanks have declared the House bill a giveaway to the rich. But these methods were developed before the advent of computer modeling and big data. Their conclusions are unreliable.
Conventional measures also fail to account for the roughly 5.5% rise in pretax income I predict the tax plan will generate. Ultimately inequality is about relative spending, not relative taxes. And what we spend depends on what we earn, not just what share of our earnings we hand over to Uncle Sam. By lumping together people of all ages, conventional fairness measures compare apples and oranges: the young, most of whose taxes lie ahead, and the old, most of whose taxes have already been paid.
To correct Washington’s routine mismeasurement of fiscal fairness, I—along with economist Alan Auerbach and software specialist Darryl Koehler —developed a tool we call the Fiscal Analyzer. It uses data from the Federal Reserve’s nationwide survey of household income and wealth to study remaining lifetime fiscal fairness on a cohort basis. For example, we compare the average remaining lifetime net tax rates of rich and poor 40-year-olds. We calculate these tax rates by dividing remaining lifetime net taxes (measured in present value) by household resources (the present value of future labor earnings plus current net worth).
The Fiscal Analyzer includes some 20 federal and state business and personal taxes as well as transfer programs, including hidden taxes, such as Medicare Part B premiums, and transfers to the poor, such as food stamps and welfare benefits. It also calculates inequality in remaining lifetime spending for each cohort separately. Finally, the Fiscal Analyzer properly weighs all households’ future survival paths, taking full account of all net taxes, including estate taxes, paid along these paths and treating the present value of bequests as part of the spending of the decedents. In short, the Fiscal Analyzer assesses fiscal progressivity and spending inequality based on what economics actually says, not what politicians are used to hearing.
I’ve run the new tax plan through the Fiscal Analyzer assuming a 5.5% increase in workers’ wages. The new tax law makes little difference to spending inequality or net tax rates. The within-age-40-cohort spending share of the top 1% barely rises—to 12% from 11.9%. For those in the bottom fifth, spending share falls to 6.3% from 6.6%. This is a bigger deal given this group’s economic vulnerability. As for the middle 20%, their spending share remains at 13.7%. Remaining lifetime net tax rates are slightly lower at the top and slightly higher at the bottom.
Spending shares and tax rates are important, but not as important as the rise in earning and spending. The Fiscal Analyzer shows a 2.2% rise in remaining lifetime spending for the bottom quintile followed by increases of 5.4%, 6.3%, 6.5% and 7.2% for the next four quintiles. The rise for the top 1% is 7.1%. The poor don’t do as well, because they don’t pay as much in taxes, nor do they have much in earnings. Consequently, the absolute rise in spending is far larger for the rich.
There are many steps, like lifting the ceiling on Social Security taxable earnings, that could make the reform more progressive and produce badly needed revenue. But the new tax plan, while far from what I and other tax specialists would design, will boost the economy, generate more revenue, maintain fairness, and raise Americans’ living standards. It’s imperfect but worth passing.
Mr. Kotlikoff is an economist at Boston University and president of Economic Security Planning Inc
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4) EXCLUSIVE – EXPERT: Iran Already Has Nuclear Weapons, Obama’s Iran Deal A Total ‘Joke’
“I think Iran has already got nuclear weapons mounted on missiles and has the potential to do an EMP attack against the United States right now.”
A former high-ranking government official who is an intelligence expert regarding nuclear weapons told The Daily Wire in an exclusive interview that former President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal is a complete failure as Iran most likely has had nuclear weapons for over a decade.
Dr. Peter Vincent Pry is the executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, and director of the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum, both Congressional advisory boards, and served as the chief of staff on the Congressional EMP Commission, the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, the House Armed Services Committee, and the CIA.
Pry called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — aka the Iran nuclear deal — a complete “joke.”
“I think Iran has already got the bomb,” Pry told The Daily Wire. “I think Iran has already got nuclear weapons mounted on missiles and has the potential to do an EMP attack against the United States right now.”
Pry explained that the U.S. has no credible verification system setup with Iran, and hostile nations have fooled the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) multiple times.
“Even the IAEA in their 2011 report, if people would read it, found things that were so alarming … there’s a virtual smoking gun that Iran already has the bomb,” Pry continued. “The IAEA was reporting it found prior to 2003 that Iran was already manufacturing bridge wire detonators, neutron initiators, they had done an implosion test already, they had done 14 different designs correct for a nuclear warhead to see if they could fit the psychics package for a nuclear warhead into the reentry vehicle for the Shahab-3 high explosive warhead.”
Pry said it was blatantly obvious that Iran most likely already has nuclear weapons, saying that “anyone with half a brain” could see it.
“Because when we were doing things like that back in the Manhattan project days when we were working with 1930s and 1940s aero technology,” Pry continued. “When the United States was doing implosion tests and building bridge wire detonators, and neutron initiators, we were within 3-6 months of getting the bomb.”
“It’s just implausible that Iran before 2003 was at that stage and then never crossed the finish line,” Pry concluded.
The 2011 IAEA report that Pry referred to said the agency has expressed “deep and increasing concern” over Iran’s nuclear weapons program:
Agreement, as Iran did not provide the necessary cooperation, including by not implementing its Additional Protocol, as required in the binding resolutions of the Board of Governors and the United Nations Security Council, the Agency was unable to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran and, therefore, was unable to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran was in peaceful activities.The Director General decided that the time was right to provide the Board of Governors with the Secretariat’s detailed analysis of the information available to the Agency which had given rise to concerns about possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme. This analysis was published in an Annex to the Director General’s November 2011 report to the Board. The Secretariat’s analysis indicates that Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device. It also indicates that prior to the end of 2003, these activities took place under a structured programme and that some activities may still be ongoing.
Pry highlighted one of the most significant dangers of Obama's Iran nuclear deal — a lack of oversight of Iran's military facilities.
"All the IAEA does is inspect the peaceful part of their nuclear program," Pry said. "They have no access to their military facilities where the military program would be going on."
Pry also noted the complete ignorance of politicians and policy makers in the nation’s capital.
“Most people in this town [Washington D.C.] believe [that Iran does not have nuclear weapons], because I think they are ignorant, the level of technological ignorance among Washington policy makers, who are mostly lawyers, is so astonishing that we can find ourselves in a treaty like this,” Pry continued.
“When Obama signed that thing, he let them off the hook, to prove that they didn’t have the bomb yet — and I think it was on purpose because he was so anxious to get that deal to set up his legacy and everything,” Pry explained. “He didn’t want to be the president where Iran goes nuclear on his watch.”
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5) Ross Rant
Finance
There are several changes to the top leadership of the Fed, but it is not expected that much will change as to monetary policy or timing of interest rate increases. Powell is a very good choice and will keep it steady as she goes. Where he will make a difference is in deregulation which he believes is needed. He will be a positive force for unwinding the excessive regulations imposed in 2009 and later, and he will leave a regulatory protocol which is reasonable and limits bank risk, but let’s banks be real lenders again. This is all good for the growth of the economy. The combination of tax reform and much lower corporate taxes and less bank regulation, will help grow the economy at over 3%. The change at the Fed is a positive, not a concern.
It is one year since the election and the Dow is up 25%. To my point that being all equities was where to be. Where else could you earn 25% in one year in a liquid asset. Nowhere. What was the return on your whole portfolio if you have bonds and annuities? Earnings were still quite good and some companies had very good earnings. Balance sheets are solid, banks have more than enough capital, the world economy as a whole is doing better than it has for decades, central banks are well coordinated and cooperative, and China is much more cooperative on currency and possibly will be more so on trade after this week. The US is once again leading the world and rebuilding the military to go back to the Regan policy of peace through strength. Everything in the Middle East is different now with Obama gone and Tillerson and Mattis making US policy clear. China has to worry that Trump really means it when he says he will not allow N Korea to have a nuke threat to the US, and it is in their interest to not allow that to happen. China can no longer just make believe and ignore the US as it did with Obama. All of this matters to the stock market because the VIX, which is the fear trade, is at a record low since 1990 when the VIX was created, because investors seem to believe in Trump being able to resolve many of the world crisis without going to war. You may think you do not approve of the Trump policies and rhetoric, but it is changing the world balance of power, and that is good for investors as well as the world in general. Major increases in military spend and strong geopolitical power does translate into a stronger market.
US shale production has exceeded by a wide margin, what OPEC and others forecast. As usual Texas wildcatters were resourceful and simply lowered their cost of production when bad times hit, and now can produce oil at below $50 which changes all of the dynamics of world oil and US energy costs. The US now has some of the lowest cost energy in the world thanks to fracking, and with less regulation of all industry, and lower taxes, this is one more very good thing to grow the economy, and to compete with the rest of the world. The US is now one of the biggest oil and gas producers, and that is growing rapidly. OPEC can no longer dictate to us. Fracking is the whole difference, and the left trying to stop it is severely detrimental to the US economy and security.
World Events
The events in Saudi are all very good, although could be very risky. 70% of Saudis are under 30, and many get educated here and in London. They see what the real world is like, and it is not old Saudi religious stricture. If the Crown Prince had not begun to change the situation, there would have been serious problems. They may still occur, but he now seems to have proven he is the boss and don’t screw with me. To have arrested, and possibly stripping out their wealth, is a giant step to prove to the population that massive corruption and lavish living will end, and ordinary Saudis can maybe begin to have a modern life, and especially women. This is an earthquake in culture, but one that was needed. Trump played it right when he went to Saudi and gave that speech which was the direct opposite of what Obama said in Cairo, and now Sisi has said the US is once again a major player in the region. Now the Saudis, Egypt and Israel are working together to defeat Iran, and the other gulf states are also working with Israel. This means Israel no longer needs to worry about a mass attack from all sides, and can focus on Lebanon and Gaza and Iran. That is another massive shift in power in the region. Trump seems to have won over the leaders of the middle east and to have been able to get them to recognize that Iran is the enemy, not Israel. Exactly the opposite from Obama and Kerry. Now Trump is welcomed in the region and the US is no longer the Iranian patsy. It is going to be very messy and unstable for a long time, but with Israel and the Arabs now on the same side, it will be a very different situation. This will allow us to pressure Iraq to work with us, and not Iran over time, as the Saudis and UAE can pressure Iraq to cooperate in exchange for cash to rebuild. Had Obama not give Iran $150 billion and lifting of sanctions, we would be able to do a lot more to end Iranian terror. But Obama did what he did, and the world is going to pay a high price now to undo the severe damage. Even the Iranian people have begun to protest openly lately because they feel Trump has their back, as opposed to Obama who abandoned them in 2009 when the revolution could have succeeded, but Obama ignored the people. One of the great lost opportunities of history.
US
When I joined the Navy we were ingrained that if you deserted you get shot. Bergdahl should have been shot. He caused the death and wounding of numerous of his fellow soldiers, which is exactly why they shot deserters before now. When I was aboard ship if someone went AWOL we sent the police after him. It was considered a major violation. If he was treated badly by the Taliban- that is good. He voluntarily did what he did. How that judge could have let him off after seeing and hearing the wounded soldiers, is unexplainable. He walked away, and his lawyer has the audacity to appeal the discharge, but many of the heroes who tried to get him back did not get that opportunity to enjoy their life and family. Let’s recall Susan Rice said this deserter who cost American lives served honorably and Obama traded terrorists for him. It makes me disgusted.
Now we have multiple confirmations that the Clintons are totally dishonest crooks, and Wasserman Schultz was their stooge. Comey apparently played clumsy politics, which was his norm, and when this is all over, it is going to show it was the Clintons and DNC who colluded. They had a lawyer launder the cash that was eventually paid to the Russian agents to create the false dossier. That is not opposition research, that is illegal manipulation of the media and the justice system. The foundation was well known as the laundry for money to employ the Hilary campaign staff until the election campaign could hire them, and it was the foundation that supported the Clinton lifestyle. Just go look at how little money went for real charitable uses in the early years, until the end period when it was obvious what was happening and they suddenly shifted to make it look like a real charity. How did the Clintons, who claimed to be broke when they left office, get to be worth over $100 million, when neither was actually employed until she became Sec of State, which pays very little. Did you ever wonder how two basically unemployed people, with no money when they left the White House, and not in any business other than the foundation, got so rich so fast.
Some facts about Robert E Lee. Lincoln asked him to be the Union general in charge. He said no, he had to be loyal to his state and his heritage. He agonized over this and was trying to do what he could to avoid the war. He talked of the cruelty of war and agonized over the suffering. He called slavery a mortal evil and in 1863 one day after the emancipation proclamation he freed his slaves. That was 2 years before the end of the war. Near the end he tried to form a former slaves fighting unit. At the end of the war a black man knelt at the altar of St Paul’s church to take communion. When the pastor paused, Lee stepped up and knelt beside the black parishioner. When the war ended at Appomattox, there were still very active battles and a Confederate army in the field. There was no instant communication then. Jefferson Davis fled and tried to wage a guerilla war. Lee stopped that. He saved the union in the end by doing this. He also condemned Lincoln’s assassination. In 1865, some in the south accused Lee of treason because he was working hard to reunite the nation. Unfortunately the stupid people who want to tear down statues never read history, nor care what reality is. They just want to make political points, but the reality of history is, Lee was a key player in the country reuniting and becoming a great nation. We should be honoring him if someone will just take the time to put out the true story, not that any college these days would teach that history.
Joel Ross
Citadel Realty Advisors
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