Again a nice post! A little sentence comes to my mind, which we have in Germany: "Traue keiner Statistik, die du nicht selbst gefälscht hast". I don't know, if it exists in English, but translatet it would be something like "Don't believe in a statistic which you don't counterfeited yourself". (I just read, that the sentence might originally be from Churchill, but however...)

As you explained, if you read a statistic analysis wrong (intentionally or by mistake), you are able to "prove" nearly anything. I just found a site of three professors who show once a month an "Unstatistik" (maybe it's like "anti-statistic?") and discuss the failures. (Link - German site) I don't have the time now to read it, but it might bring some interesting effects.

But anyway, we should not forget, that statistics are useful as well. And I don't want to impute someone to counterfeit their statistics intentionally!

P.S.: Thank you for advertising my blog ;-)