my name is william reese, and i'm a friend of marlene kramer's. i am not a resident of california. i live in chicago, but i am a registered architect, so marlene is a relative, and we're also really good friends, have been for a long time. she -- you know, i don't want to say consulted. she was asking me for some insight over this whole course of this project as to, you know, sounding board and everything else. i don't -- i didn't have any access to the plans until the other day, when we went down to the building department and reviewed the plans. and they are consistently lack of clear scope of what is actually taking place, and that has taken -- that's over the course of the whole project. so when -- when this appeal for the interior room configuration perplans, that is tweaking of little things of the big stuff they already did, okay? so it's little tiny little modifications. i want to speak to the structural concerns here, also. they did remove the retaining wall at the back of the house. there is no -- they also -- when they fixed the crack, they removed the entire slab of the

reese, which let us toward engagement. our parties are institutions as well, and our parties have been divided on the issues we will discuss today, from opposition to internationalism, as wonderfully laid out in william hitchcock's new book about eisenhower. as we will here today, it also obviously implicates international institutions -- the u.n., which was so instrumental. nato, the agreements on tariffs .nd trade, nafta and wto finally, individuals matter. not just those who articulate big ideas like lindbergh, nixon, or alternatively william, roosevelt, truman, and reagan. also thels are personnel that take on to a governing philosophy that inhabits our institution and advances these slogans in the day today and often incremental engagement of policy discussion. a slogan can set a paradigm and a set of assumptions around which an entire sociology of those that govern our country are built. those are long, often beyond the individuals that articulate them. the individuals that inhabit our institutions really take these ideas forward. so perhaps we are at the beginning of a rising generation of individuals who will inhabit our government and see america first as their governing philosophy -- or not