Portland’s Willamette Week went door-to-door to find people who aren’t voting for Obama and to ask them why not. The article is fuzzy on why the newspaper did this, exactly — Willamette Week is often fuzzy on why it does a lot of things — but one of the answers they got caught my attention.

It’s from Connie Pashall, age 56, who says she’s an independent. Willamette Week’s summary of her position:

A supporter of President Clinton during the 1990s, Pashall admits that conservative websites have given her pause about Obama’s heritage. “If there’s anything to his Muslim background, then we’d have al-Qaeda working on our country from the top-down.”

Assuming Willamette Week quoted her correctly, this means Connie Pashall is an astonishingly ignorant woman, one of those people you know exist but rarely encounter, like a billionaire, or a hunchback.

First of all, she apparently believes that being Muslim is the same thing as being connected with al-Qaeda. Really? There really are people who actually think this? I mean, I guess I knew there were. Like I said, it’s just weird to actually come across one.

But what’s more, in Connie Pashall’s view, you don’t even have to be a faithful, practicing Muslim now — all you need is a Muslim background, and that’s enough to make you in league with the terrorists.

I hope the “conservative websites” that have given her pause are on the fringe and don’t represent normal, rational conservatives. I don’t think they do. There are plenty of valid reasons not to vote for Obama, but the belief that his possible Muslim background equals a current sympathy with al-Qaeda is not one of them. That’s an invalid reason, a dumb reason, a reason held by dumb people, a dumb reason held by dumb people such as Connie Pashall, age 56, of Portland. Who is dumb.

“Jaws: The Revenge” has been one of the most requested films for Eric’s Bad Movies at Film.com, and I’m pleased to announce that its day in court has finally arrived. My on-the-ball editor over there even went to the trouble of locating the film’s nonsensical, explosive climax on YouTube and has included it with the column.

One of the reasons I put this movie off for so long was that it came out in 1987, and I’ve already covered three films from that year: “Superman IV,” “Over the Top,” and “Masters of the Universe.” The last two were back-to-back and just a few weeks ago, so I wanted to put some distance between them and “Jaws.” Ideally, I’d like to hit a film from every year since about 1980, just to keep things broad and wide-ranging. In the meantime, was 1987 the worst year in the history of film? You’d think so.