Is it ethical for candidates to lie to the electorate? Is it ethical to lie to pollsters?

Hooweee!  Does TPP ever feel popular!  As the midterm elections approach and the campaign for governor of Lincolnland remains neck and neck, the telephone calls are unrelenting. You keep expecting one of them to say, "I'll go away if you just promise to vote for me."  And that's just the candidates, then there are the pollsters, those hired by the two parties, those hired by the different candidates, and those run by students who are learning about politics (3 just yesterday!). Caller: "We are conducting an independent poll.  Do you know who you are going to vote for?"  TPP: "Yes."  Caller: "Will you share with us your decision?"  TPP: "Yes, but understand that I may lie." Caller: "What?"  TPP: "My answer may or may not be truthful.  Do you want to proceed?"  Caller: "If you don't tell the truth then our poll won't be accurate."  TPP: "Yes, isn't that a shame? Please understand that I have no vested interest in the accuracy of your poll." Caller: "Why would you lie?"  TPP: "The candidates lie to us, so let's call it tit for tat."  Caller: "So you answer will be a lie?"  TPP: "It's not that easy, it only may be a lie."  Caller: "Good bye, sir." TPP: "Have a nice day."  Based on the response, it would appear that not many people tell pollsters that they may lie to them. It only seems fair based upon how many times the candidates have lied to us. To curtail the amount of dishonesty during election campaigning, perhaps this nation needs something like a PolitiFact people's court. To borrow from ice hockey, candidates and their campaigners have to spend time in the penalty box for lying about the other candidate, perhaps a number of days of complete silence. So you tell a half-truth or a misleading statement, maybe you get a 1 day timeout. Your statement is judged to be false, and you get a 3-day time out. And if you makeup a complete whopper, a real pants-on-fire falsehood, you get a week in the penalty box of silence. This gives the cleaner campaign a "power play".  Might that not raise the tone of political discourse?  Of course, having the candidates stand on a piece of paper would raise the political discourse significantly. So, please, no more calls from either of you. A vote will be cast, and maybe for one of you.

Failed Experiment in Web Searches

Someone thought it would be a nifty idea to cram a bunch of "hot" keywords into a blog title (Naked truth about sex, gardening, religion, and politics in American government) and then poll people to see which word would be the hottest, get the most hits, and then compare that to the actual keyword data. Part of the rationale was to just try doing a poll. Well, like a number of the Phactor's research projects over the years, this one was an abject failure. In the opinion of 56% of the poll takers, "naked" would be the hottest keyword, but while that sounds impressive, only 9 people took the poll. But then the keyword data could not be recovered from any of the freebe stat counters in use, so the whole thing really was disappointing. Even the number of page views for the "Naked Truth" failed to deviate from the Phactor's average. But you do learn some things from even failed experiments, and some of them are pretty scary. Ever since its posting just over 2 years ago, a blog about whether an artichoke was a fruit or a vegetable has gotten on average the most page views, week after week, and keyword phrases including the term artichoke, even with misspellings, account for over 50% of the subject web searches that end up at on the Phytophactor's blog! That is pretty disturbing. Who knew so many people were so concerned, so curious, about a big old thistle? So do they want to know a cucumber is a fruit?