Comments

Podesta and the “oversampling” on polls — 46 Comments

1. “Do you like being lied to? “

   No. And as part of my political awakening as a man without a party this cycle I feel like I’ve seen it on both sides, not just one.

   For example, recent threads had breathless comments about voting machine fraud. I took the time to look into one and from what I was able to tell it originated at Breitbart.

   Couple that with the GOP’s more amoral view of things (from an alt-right, Trumpian perspective) and the oft-repeated urge to fight dirty because the left does, none of this is surprising to me.

   I maintain that conspiracies only work and remain secret if a (very) small number of people are involved. Rigging an American election is not easy and would require a ton of collusion.

   By the way, I was really hoping you would post on the Podesta emails. Thanks Neo, I really appreciate all the work you put into research for this blog.

2. We all tend to interpret what people say using our past knowledge of them. If a person has a history of lying we stop giving the presumption of innocence to their statements.

   The dishonesty of the media at almost all levels in this election has made us suspect everything they say, and presume guilt until innocence is proven. That’s what our parents meant when they said our reputations were important and we should be careful lest we ruin them.

   I can think of very little that I give the left the benefit of the doubt on anymore.

3. The right does lie because the right is made up of individual people, but there seems to be more of this stuff going on this time around. I link it to Steve Bannon as it follows a similar pattern at Breitbart when he took the helm there, but I have no idea if he is associated or not.

   Unfortunately it is true that many people never take the time to research anythig beyond a headline, so dishonest people continue to do this stuff to get results.

4. “We all tend to interpret what people say using our past knowledge of them.” – Irv

   If we are already predisposed to believing in some vast left wing conspiracy(ies), and to believing that everything we hear from the MSM is lies (and that somehow the “conservative” media doesn’t) …

   IOW confirmation bias …

   Then that will definitely cloud our judgement.

   The best combat for getting a more “honest” view of the world is to have a variety of sources, from a few points of view, even if you disagree with them.

   If we learned anything this election cycle, it is that “conservative” media are not all in it to give us an “honest” view of the world – and we ought to keep that in mind – they are running a business, just like the MSM.

5. ‘I maintain that conspiracies only work and remain secret if a (very) small number of people are involved.’

   But what if people are so afraid of being labeled conspiracy theorists that they ignore real and positive data of a conspiracy? Then a conspiracy could occur in the full light of day since people would be automatically deposed not to believe it.

6. The ethical thing to do is to always tell the truth or, if the truth is harmful and inconsequential, to refrain from telling the whole truth. If both parties embrace that standard, the voter can rely on a fair contest of ideas.

   If one party is consistently untruthful and protected from exposure, then more often than not, the unethical party will win the contest. If that dynamic repeatedly holds true, then the honest party is playing in a rigged game in which winning becomes increasingly improbable, until it becomes impossible.

   When there is no possibility of reform and divorce impossible, only three choices remain; fighting fire with fire, accepting disfranchisement or war.

7. GB:

   “If one party is consistently untruthful and protected from exposure,”

   Untruthfulness is, in my estimation, also a matter of attack propaganda — destroying the reputation of your opponents. I think the USG reached a watershed during the Robert Bork affair, further refined during the Clarence Thomas hearings. Ever since then personal reputations have been systematically shredded by both parties, but particularly by the left. I maintain to this day that GWB’s reputation is far worse than it deserves to be because the left and the MSM attacked him constantly and relentlessly. This is a form of lying that is clearly effective, hence we see it trotted out so constantly during the present campaign.

   We are all worse off for it, and our body politic has been poisoned, perhaps beyond redemption.

8. But the information seems to be factually correct and relevant, and to make sense.

   Would you bet your life on a statement like that??
   I sent you the stuff on oversampling of dems
   It’s well known
   Even before podesta

   Been known for over 49 years
   But why read that old crap I point to
   To long to post
   Sooooooooo you guys lose for not knowing and being incurious

   You realize that simple things like advocacy polling for gain goes back to when the Soviet Union was still a big thing…

   But by the time you guys look this will no longer be a republic
   You already lost ten years of someone cluing you in

9. GB: “When there is no possibility of reform and divorce impossible, only three choices remain; fighting fire with fire, accepting disfranchisement or war.”

   Based upon a flawed premise – no possibility of reform.

   So we either lie like the left, lose all the time, or go to war?

   OK, here’s a deal. We got the nominee all the “fight dirty” people wanted. He’s not following those wimpy “Marquis of Queensbury” rules Romney followed.

   If Trump wins – your point is made. We needed to fight dirty (I won’t be part of “we” anymore, but that’s a side issue)

   If Trump loses, I’ll be interested in by how much. If he gets as smoked as the polls are suggesting, I’m going to suggest that our problem hasn’t been that we don’t fight dirty enough. In fact, the logical premise will be that fighting dirty was counterproductive.

   You can choose the path of despair if you want. You can think people like me are delusional for having hope that we can have a true conservative party that sticks to its principles and still wins. I just won’t be following your advice on any of this.

10. Neo:
    “I think it is important to realize–as most here do–that the left lies…But it is also important to realize that the right sometimes lies too”

    When the main players in the arena are the Left and the Left-mimicking alt-Right, in place of mainstream conservatives of the Right, the difference shrinks.

    Neo:
    “Enough bad things about the left were revealed by the Wikileaks email dump that there’s no need to make stuff up or mislead about it. But it seems they just couldn’t help themselves.”

    “make stuff up or mislead about it” helps the Dems Left obfuscate, and they already don’t need any help to disinform.

11. People lie. People do many things, good and bad.

    The current, extreme political tribalism has led to many people suffering the delusion that only the other tribe does bad things, and that they, “good people”, don’t do them, but rather those acts are the domain of “them”.

12. 1) “Experts told us….” Those “experts” are not identified.
    2) The director of the Marquette University Law School poll says….
    Marquette is a pretty Leftist institution.

    “Oversampling” and then normalizing that back down is not OK with me.

    Podesta further wrote “I want to get this all compiled into one set of recommendations so we can maximize what we get out of our media polling.”
    Maximize what we get. Out of OUR media polling.

    Get it? I do. Do you?

13. Frog

    Did you read Neo’s post?

14. F:
    “I maintain to this day that GWB’s reputation is far worse than it deserves to be because the left and the MSM attacked him constantly and relentlessly. This is a form of lying that is clearly effective, hence we see it trotted out so constantly during the present campaign.”

    For example, contra the prevailing narrative, Bush’s decision for Operation Iraqi Freedom was substantively and procedurally correct; the US case versus Saddam is in fact substantiated.

    As far as I can tell from the aspects I’ve studied, Bush was competent, dutiful, and faithful to his Office. Not perfect but he rose to distinctive challenges. A worthy President, a better one than I thought he was before I studied it.

    Bill:
    “So we either lie like the left, lose all the time, or go to war?”

    Mimicking the Left isn’t the only way to play the activist game.

    Adding an acceptable option to that unappealing set of options is why I like to cite the Ivy ROTC advocacy as a stark example of a counter-Left movement that competed head on versus elite Ivy SJWs on campus, reputedly the Left’s home turf. The bad guys played dirty, ie, according to leftist SOP, but the good guys won to undo the signature achievement of the Vietnam War campus leftists.

    While they learned from their odious opponents, the Ivy ROTC advocates didn’t mimic the Left like the Trump-front alt-Right does.

    The activist game, just like any other kind of competition, has parameters, so some characteristics will be shared by at least the serious competitors. But within those parameters, there’s room to tailor your game play to suit your preferences.

    I thought the Tea Party movement was on the right track before they got distracted from their essential purpose in the activist game.

15. Bill: Yeah, I read it. That’s where the quotes came from.
    Did you?
    You don’t get it.

16. Frog,

    Well, you came to the opposite conclusion from Neo is all I was saying.

    The good news is that in 2 weeks we’ll know if the polls were right.

17. On conjecture, the reference on the one hand to “our polling” (taken as internal campaign polling), and on the other to “our media polling” which can be taken as a short-hand expression of **[our] effort at comparison of external [media] polling in analysis (“what we get out of”) with the internal [our] polling** before referenced, using these explicit differences in oversampling as a ‘solvent’ through which to make the comparisons as apples to apples. That is, there may (stress may) be a reading which isn’t necessarily sinister.

    But again, this is only conjecture.

18. I am not sure what the motive is supposed to be in all these rigged polls. Surely any possible gain would be canceled out by the problem of people staying home and not voting because after all, polls say it’s in the bag for Hillary. If I had fake-polling superpowers and was willing to use them, I’d fake a tight race so people showed up.

19. And people act like this is supposed to be “new” or some kind of high level whistleblower event… come on, people have known this for years if not decades.

20. If Trump loses, I’ll be interested in by how much. If he gets as smoked as the polls are suggesting, I’m going to suggest that our problem hasn’t been that we don’t fight dirty enough. In fact, the logical premise will be that fighting dirty was counterproductive.

    Bill: Quite right.

    Trump supporters of the “Trump Fights!” persuasion keep ignoring that Trump has done worse than Romney did against Obama 2012 — a far stronger opponent in a stronger year for Democrats.

    Trump is running against a tired, old face known for her deceit and corruption. Even Democrats aren’t keen on voting for her. But Trump is such a terrible candidate he is losing to Hillary handily.

    It was never a mystery Trump would do poorly in the general election. And the cherry on top is that after Trump loses, the Republican brand will be damaged for years.

    Why should anyone cross over to vote Republican when the GOP apparently has no principles except the Trumpian “Winning!” and can’t deliver on that either.

21. Bill @ 5:45,

    I said, “When there is no possibility of reform…”

    “When” being the keyword. The individual’s determination of ‘when’ occurs will of course be spread across a spectrum of opinion.

    I’d suggest when we have an insurmountable liberal/leftist SCOTUS that consistently views the Constitution as a ‘guide’ rather than a constraint, when the dems possess an insurmountable demographic advantage that disenfranchises any viewpoint other than their own and when various other measures have basically gutted the bill of rights… then “when” has arrived.

    I fully support the hope that “we can have a true conservative party that sticks to its principles and still wins.” I just find the societal dynamics that oppose that eventuality increasingly dominant and approaching a tipping point from which peaceful and legal recovery becomes impossible. I certainly hope that you are right but I would remind you that ‘hope’ is a prayer, not a strategy.

22. Artfldgr:

    Once again, you appear to not be reading what I actually wrote.

    When you asked me “Would you bet your life on a statement like that?? [referring to my statement “But the information seems to be factually correct and relevant, and to make sense”], you apparently neglected to read the very next sentence of mine, which went like this:

    Until evidence comes up to the contrary (which certainly could happen; these things are not written in stone), I would tend to believe it, and to assume that it correctly describes that particular Podesta email.

    You’re a smart man with very good reading comprehension, and I think I made it crystal clear that I am very far from “betting my life” on the statement you were quoting. I even explicitly said that “I would tend to believe” the Politifact description; note the word “tend,” which is hardly a word that conveys absolute and incontrovertible belief. I also wrote that further evidence could change my mind.

    You then also wrote:

    I sent you the stuff on oversampling of dems
    It’s well known
    Even before podesta

    Apparently you also ignored or did not understand this sentence in my post:

    Enough bad things about the left were revealed by the Wikileaks email dump that there’s no need to make stuff up or mislead about it.

    Therefore, nothing in my post precludes the idea that some sort of shenanigans is going on with polls and the left. However, I have concluded that that is NOT what Podesta was referring to in this particular email, from the best evidence we have.

    However, I have also written several posts on the topic of supposed oversampling in polls, and I have come to the conclusion that most of the supposed evidence that purposeful oversampling exists and is consistently anti-Republican is incorrect. It certainly was incorrect in 2012, when “skewing” was the constant cry of those who predicted Romney would win and that the polls were rigged against him.

    Didn’t happen that way. But of course, for people who say the polls are skewed and who then find out that the polls appear to have been correct after all, and their candidate has lost, those people can always save face by saying that the polls were skewed AND the election was fixed.

    That’s the way I expect many Trump supporters to go if he loses, just as the “Unskewed Polls” guy did in 2012 for the Romney loss.

    I have long maintained that the average of polls over time has mostly been correct. I’m not going to fight that war again right now in the comments section. But I refer you to this post as well as this one for what I’ve written before about skewed polls.

    See also this:

    This evidence suggests that polling bias has been largely unpredictable from election to election. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, the polling was biased against Democrats in 1998, 2006 and 2012. However, just as certainly, it was biased against Republicans in 1994, 2002 and now 2014. It can be dangerous to apply the “lessons” from one election cycle to the next one.

    And see also this:

    Nonetheless, we’ve reached a stage in [the 2014] campaign season when Democrats have begun to complain that the polls are biased against them. There’s a long tradition of this sort of “unskewing.” The trailing party will say that its internal polls tell a different story or that its turnout operation will save it. It will critique each poll’s demographic cross-tabs. (Because most polls report breakouts for a dozen or more demographic groups, all with small sample sizes, there’s almost always something to argue about.) The party will point toward previous instances when it outperformed its polls. As a last resort, it’ll claim that this election will be different somehow.

    Usually this doesn’t end well for the unskewers. In 2004, some Democrats asserted that John Kerry would outperform his polls because undecided voters would break toward him. Instead, George W. Bush won by a slightly wider margin than the polls predicted. Throughout 2012, conservatives argued that the polls had a Democratic bias. The polls did have a bias – but it was a Republican one.

    Democrats may not be wrong. The polls could very well be biased against their candidates. The problem is that the polls are just about as likely to be biased against Republicans, in which case the GOP could win more seats than expected.

    In a number of elections, including 2012’s, Senate polls had a systematic bias toward one party. But the direction of the bias has been inconsistent, favoring Democrats in some years and Republicans in others.

    Please read the whole thing.

    Pollsters are trying to do something (predict party distribution of turnout in a particular election) that is very difficult to predict. That accounts from most of the fluctuating errors in sampling. But those errors—and such errors will continue to occur—are fodder for the candidate who is behind in the polls to cry “oversampling” and “skew” and to claim it’s intentional

    By the way, this comment only refers to reputable, bona fide polling companies in public polling of the more traditional type. There are also push polls, online polls, all sorts of less reputable polls that are at least partly propaganda.

23. Geoffrey:

    When something is “insurmountable” it means you can’t climb it, or conquer it. Consider the old irresistible force and the immovable object conjecture, exciting to watch but futile, and fatal. So it would seem all you can do is pray, if you hold that viewpoint, since no plan or strategy can work against something that is insurmountable.

    I don’t consider my political opponents all powerful and insurmountable, that would be defeatist, it seems to me.

24. Frog Says:

    You don’t get it.
    This seems to be the new meme. Did you get it from another retarded Claremont article?

25. The problem with tipping point thinking is that it leads to desperate gambles like Trump 2016.

    Now what do we do? If 2016 really is the tipping point, I guess it doesn’t matter.

    But if it isn’t the tipping point, the GOP not only lost the Presidency that a moderate like Rubio might have — IMO likely — won, the GOP has damaged its brand and torn open a bloody civil war within the party.

    I can’t believe people didn’t seem to consider how likely and terrible the risks of Trump were set against the minimal possiblility that Trump could win and might actually help the country.

    But tipping point thinking blinded people to putting all their money on a bad casino bet.

26. IMO the ‘tipping point’ is not political, its fiscal. Not just here, but all around the globe. The clues are everywhere, but very few want to know what can be easily known as 95% want to believe it is all just business as usual. This is not Alex Jones paranoia, its the rusty nuts and bolts of the perils (or black swans) gathering right before your eyes.

    It does not happen all at once, up to the point where it does happen all at once. Then its too late. We (humanity) have been here before. Deja vu all over again. The big difference from the past is that the more complex the global financial system becomes the deeper the crash. HRC will need a quadtrillion reset buttons.

27. IMO the ‘tipping point’ is not political, its fiscal.

    parker: Agreed.

    The US will drift into an unpleasant combination of the EU and Mexico. There will not be a civil war or a revolution, because however short we fall from our peak, the US will still be a pretty good place to live considering the alternatives.

    However, barring some big tech revolution like cheap fusion power, the current financial system will collapse and it’s hard to say what emerges on the other side of that.

28. Neo has done a good job in sleuthing out what Podesta meant in his e-mails. Congratulations. That took some leg work by a smart woman.

    I’m not sure the conservative bloggers are really lying as Neo indicates. They may well have missed the finer points of Podesta’s statement which Neo has picked up and they may honestly believe that they have found the smoking gun proving that there are rigged polls.

29. Dennis:

    Don’t think so, although I suppose the disagreement between you and me is a version of the old “knave vs. fool” argument.

    If you are correct, they are being overwhelmingly negligent and/or stupid, failing to research stuff and just repeating propaganda without thinking about it or checking it out. That would be the “fool” part. I prefer to think they are fully smart enough to realize that they are wrong—and fully capable of Googling the subject, even after the fact, and offering a retraction—but that they choose to perpetuate a self-serving lie in order to rally the troops.

    I also think Trump is smart enough to know the difference between internal polling and regular polling.

    But you may be right. They may just be fools. I’m not talking about blog commenters, by the way; I don’t expect them to do that kind of research. But I expect it and in fact demand it from presidential candidates, and from other bloggers. If Trump is that stupid, and if his advisors don’t inform him of the facts, then that’s even more strikes against him as a possible president.

    Here’s Trump’s more complete statement, milking it for all it’s worth. I don’t think he’s stupid or ignorant; I think he knows what he’s doing and is lying.

    Do you think Rush Limbaugh is that stupid? I don’t, but look what he says about this. He spends a great deal of time talking about the oversampled polls, and then at least has the honesty to mention that Podesta is talking about internal polls, and then Rush completely ignores the meaning of what he himself has just said. In other words, he acknowledges these are internal polls, but then goes on and on about fixed polls as though they are the polls the public has access to. He knows that the public doesn’t see the internal polls. He knows he’s talking apples and oranges here and leading his listeners on.

    Then later he hedges and says he doesn’t really know if the polls are fixed. But that’s after he’s gone on and on, mixing up internal polls and regular polls in a way that misleads his listeners.

    That Limbaugh transcript is long and I haven’t read the whole thing carefully, just skimmed it. But that’s what I’ve gleaned from it in a quick reading.

30. If a group backs someone as immoral and mean-spirited as Donald Trump because “he fights” and “he can win,” then that group is going to have ends/means problems guaranteed.

    That group will predictably resort to lies and bullying.

31. It is sad Neo that Limbaugh has thrown away what credibility he had for such a con man. Means and ends once again?

32. OM:

    Rush Limbaugh has been doing this for many years. I’m not a regular listener by any means, but I’ve checked in on him now and then, and he’s been distorting things a long time, particularly in regard to drumming up hatred against the GOP “establishment” (a propaganda tactic that has helped lead to nominee Donald Trump in 2016, by the way).

    I first wrote about this problem of Rush’s in 2012.

33. Huxley,

    When, not if, the financial collapse occurs, it is very difficult to guess what the aftermath will be like. We can game it, as I have, but it is an unknown unknown. What I do know is it will not be just another global depression circa the 1930s. Beyond that, no one knows. Glad to be in flyover country.

34. I wish to add prepare ladies and gentlemen to defend yourselves.

35. Neo:

    One of the good things about my present work environment is being in a steel building with a lot of radio frequency interference is that AM radio reception is pretty much zip. This election cycle has taken the masks of quite a few “standard bearers.”

36. Parker:

    Just hope Yellowstone doesn’t uncork. It’s at a tipping point!!!! /jk 🙂

37. Parker:

    Sorry, it’s Guam that at the tipping point. I heard a congressman say that a few years ago,

38. Make America Guam Again! No more tipping?

39. ” He spends a great deal of time talking about the oversampled polls, and then at least has the honesty to mention that Podesta is talking about internal polls, and then Rush completely ignores the meaning of what he himself has just said.“ – Neo

    Tuned him in briefly while driving, back in the spring…

    This just echos him saying something like “I’m not sayin I’m voting trump… I’m just layin out the facts!”. He always gives himself plausible deniability (to his listeners anyway).

    It was clear by tone and direction he was very much presenting a case for trump, but it wasn’t clear then that trump was going to win the primaries.

40. I try to read all the posts here on Neo’s great site, and appreciate the honesty shown by our hostess.

    It’s possible that some of the over sampled polls are being reported wrongly, along with many which are being normalized correctly — but this would mean that, on polls, both sides are lying a bit. Which I think likely. It’s also likely that some polls which really were accurately done and reported, will nevertheless be quite far off — because of last minute changes.
    Especially in 2016.

    Rush is careful, like most Dems most of the time, to clearly support one policy but have a rhetorical escape clause to allow deniability about “explicitly” supporting it.

    On tipping points, Venezuela provides a good example of how a slippery slope towards socialist decay can become an unstoppable slide — when a country dependent on oil exports sees US oil prices drop.

    One of the underreported issues in this election is how fortunate is Clinton & Obama on the success of the US fracking (which they mostly oppose). This HUGE success has made the US economy far more able to absorb failing Obamacare social policies economically. Thanks to the Reps in Congress mostly stopping most other economic socialist policies (gridlock saves!), the US economy continues the (new normal?) slow growth but no recession trend.

    Finally, on conspiracies, look at the UK sex ring: “An official inquiry into exploitation in Rotherham in 2014 by Professor Alexis Jay concluded that 1,400 children had been raped, trafficked and attacked between 1997 and 2013 by gangs of largely Asian men, and that the victims were effectively ignored.” (8 men guilty of abusing 3 girls… express.co.uk)

    This “conspiracy in plain sight” was real, was terrible, and was because of the Dem pushed ‘political correctness’ that will become more entrenched with a new Pres. Clinton, where the FBI, DoS, and DoJ all ignore crimes by top Dems.

    Voting fraud is real, has been real, and continues in the US election. It is very likely to have caused at least one close Senate election to go Dem rather than Rep. How many elections need to be fraudulently won by Dems before you agree that (some) US elections are “rigged”?

    Neo, have you done a “what we know” about Clinton’s email? I saw this 2 year old summary: http://ijr.com/2015/03/264655-3-federal-laws-hillary-may-violated-secret-email-accounts/

    Perhaps there’s been a few posts which I missed, or merely glanced at since I already believe she is a crook.

    I actually find laws & violations & timelines of actions more interesting than poll speculations, altho the “lies of the Dems and Reps” is a sad reality.

    It does seem that many Reps are tired enough of Dem lies, and Dems winning, that they are willing to “lie a little” in response; in order to win (against a worse evil). This is sad.

    But there are no real “lies about the future” — only about what was done or said, or not quite done, in the past. He will build the Wall; he won’t — only one of these is true, but neither is a lie right now.

41. At this point, the election is largely about voter suppression (discouragement).
    The left want Hillary’s lead to seem insurmountable.
    Cons want Trump to be within the margin of error.
    Cons want voters mad that they are being manipulated by the media.

    I agree, I don’t like our side distorting facts. I think we should be able to persuade on the facts.

    But does this rise to the level of deceit Hillary displayed when she said the Benghazi attack was the work of an internet film? Is this as egregious as claiming 39 times in a deposition that she couldn’t recall, making a mockery of the judicial process?

42. “But does this rise to the level of deceit Hillary displayed when she said the Benghazi attack was the work of an internet film? Is this as egregious as claiming 39 times in a deposition that she couldn’t recall, making a mockery of the judicial process?”

    No it doesn’t. The most disgusting thing I ever saw w Hillary was when she stood by the caskets and vowed to “get the guy who made that internet video”.

43. Political science is not science.
    Polisci people do play numbers games, as with polls and voter turnout, but they are numbers games. Those games are not science.

    I frankly think we would do better without polls. But instead polls have become an essential and irreplaceable fixture of the political landscape, even as we question the validity of their quantifiables, their polling methods.
    And so we can have announcements like “The AP calls X the projected winner in Y based on 1% of the votes cast”, which is in itself a poll.

    Ask yourselves, why do the putatively “reliable” public (non-private) and nominally disinterested polling organizations like Gallup do their polling? Why? Who pays? Done just for PR purposes, and they recover the costs thereof from private polls?

    Wiki says (and Gallup probably wrote):
    “Gallup provides research and strategic consulting to large organizations in many countries, focusing on analytics and advice to help leaders and organizations solve their most pressing problems.
    “Some of Gallup’s stated key practice areas are employee engagement, customer engagement, talent management, and well-being.
    “Gallup has 30 offices in more than 20 countries, employing about 2,000 people in four divisions: Gallup Poll, Gallup Consulting, Gallup University, and Gallup Press.”
    Gallup is employee-owned.

    Engagement? Talent management? Well-being? Large organizations in many countries?

    Always follow the money.

44. Frog:

    I think you need to take a look at some of the quotes in this comment of mine, as well as at this post and this one.

45. TomG:

    “On tipping points, Venezuela provides a good example of how a slippery slope towards socialist decay can become an unstoppable slide – when a country dependent on oil exports sees US oil prices drop.”

    An example of a country headed for ruin, true. Now there are a few (S) significant differences between the US and Venezuela, but why bother with trivialities when a meme is so much more fun.

    Make America Guam Again! No More Tipping!
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNZczIgVXjg

46. Neo,
    I admire and envy that quality you have, to sit back from the table, analyze what is on it, keep a cool head, and present the results in a thoughtful and reasonable way. This post is a gem. I enjoy, and more importantly TRUST your judgment and perspective because (based on the ample evidence of your past posts) I trust your faculty for searching out the facts, the realities and the evidence. Thank you.

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