With apologies to Jimmy Hatlo and his comic strip of two generations ago, and all the articles, blogs and even books of this title which have followed it since, I'm going to use Hatlo's 'toon-title for a new category in this blog.
The category will propose actual laws to control the outrageous behavior of politicians, mostly, but everyone, generally.
My first submission in this category was prompted by this blog-post over at Random Nuclear Strikes blog.
Paul Krugman, of course, disgraces the op-ed page of my local blatt, so I can read him over at RNS or right at my own breakfast table.
To defeat one's enemy, you must have an understanding of how that enemy thinks, especially how that thinking is different from yours. Then you can develop strategies and tactics to take advantage of weaknesses in the enemy's plans caused by their logical failures, or their logical predictability for that matter.
Paul Krugman, an economist by trade, and for now, an important advisor on money matters to the Obama Administration, could benefit from re-learning his old academic lessons on the purity of statistics.
So, without further review, I propose a Constitutional Amendment to end such shameful lying with statistics.
First, it's easy to prove statistics are bad, if they are. Proving such bad stats can be done with mathematical precision which easily fits into the requirements of proving the probable cause of a criminal case.
The law would honor the First Amendment by NOT making it a crime to present such statistics, but to only make it illegal, in three steps, when someone gains a money profit by use of such lying figures.
I don't have the time or space to detail all such liars here, but Krugman would obvious be wearing Federal Prison Khakis if the law existed.
