I’ll give him this much. Yes, there are quite a few angry people out there who say a lot of odd and ugly stuff about Obama. The thing that I have to laugh at is the way this tone is such a revelation to so many liberal talking heads and bloggers!

It’s like the years 2000 to 2008 never happened!

A Rasmussen poll in 2007 (2007, mind you!), showed that 35% of Democrats believe that President Bush knew about the specific 9/11 attack and choose not to stop it.

A number of tabloids and partisan bloggers pushed the theory that Bush had become mentally unstable and began drinking again. Kitty Kelly put out a book that described Bush using cocaine at Camp David during his father’s term in office. A Chicago-based artist exhibited an Artistamp painting of Bush with a gun pointed at his head. A British film-maker created a documentary-style movie depicting the assassination of Bush (and won an award at a Toronto film festival). You can go to the blog at zombietime and see some truly heinous protest signs, t-shirts and bumper stickers.

I could go on further, but I think you get my point.

Some also may say that death threats against Obama spiked as high as 400 percent higher than the average amount around the spring of 2009, but a Newsweek article in November of that year indicated the the threats had since lowered to the same levels of the Clinton and Bush years. It may have risen again over the last year, but I’ve seen no data to confirm it.

Anyway, my main point is that part of this polling regarding conspiracies involving Obama and Bush can be attributed to one thing. And it is basic Psychology 101. The halo effect. A person with one perceived trait, good or bad, is assumed to have a range of other such good or bad traits. People may not even be sure it is true, but if it is a negative halo, they refuse to give the person the benefit of any doubt. Dislike of either President can often translate to other negative perceptions across the board.

I will say this too: Eugene Robinson (also on Hardball) did admit one thing that I’ve felt that Obama flubbed a long time ago. He has never picked a church to attend in the D.C. area. Even if it is mainly for show, the media clip of a President leaving church and shaking the minister’s hand has become a fairly standard and “comforting” (for lack of a better word) scene for many Americans. As Eugene says (and I agree), some (not all) of this “Is he a Christian” stuff could have been tamped down early on.

Many of you may say “who cares”, but an astute politician should.

Update: Some followup items inspired by Knarly’s comments in the comments:

• Pertussis Epidemic 2010
• How to make a difference – Responsible vaccine advocacy

I hope you said the Malibu. From Dragonrock posting at the JREF Swift Blog: Of Cars and Conspiracies.

I went to view the video on Youtube and saw the different copies have hundreds of comments claiming everything from the Bel Air had the engine removed to the frame of the older car was rusted and simply broke. Others say that something was done to the Malibu because the new plastic car wouldn’t have a chance against one made of sheet metal.

These conspiracies spread because of what “everyone knows.” The list of things everyone knows is long and includes things like: Toilets swirl one way in the northern hemisphere and the other way in the southern; Silencers turn the loudest gunshot into a quiet “fffffttt”; that Bogey said “Play it again, Sam”; and, of course, older cars are stronger than newer ones. But, in all these cases, what “everyone knows” is actually wrong.

[snip]

I suspect that this conspiracy will fade rather quickly while the JFK, moon hoax, 9/11 truthers will be around for a while.  But the root of all of them is the same and that’s a lack of critical thinking.  I’m of the opinion that the hard core conspiracy theorists are a lost cause, but educating children, not on conspiracies, but on basic critical thinking will cause belief in these stories to die a slow death.  It’s hard to fix our world, but maybe we can keep our children from screwing up theirs quite as badly.

That assumes, of course, that each generation gets its own world to screw up fresh. Unfortunately, for certain kinds of long-lasting screwups, the generational inputs are additive.

Some forms of scientific error, like poor record keeping or even mistaken results, are forgivable, but fabrication of data, if such a charge were to be proved against Dr. Hauser, is usually followed by expulsion from the scientific community.

“There is a difference between breaking the rules and breaking the most sacred of all rules,” said Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia. The failure to have performed a reported control experiment would be “a very serious and perhaps unforgivable offense,” Dr. Haidt said.

Makes for an interesting contrast, doesn’t it? You could compare it, say, to the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, where allegations of misdeeds following the theft and selective release of emails led to three independent investigations, all of which found that researchers acted with honesty and integrity, and that their results were scientifically valid.

Like every family, we’ve had our food battles with our 10-year-old daughter. With great dismay, we watched a pre-schooler who amazed us with the range of her palate (she couldn’t get enough Altoids or wasabe peas) morph into a bratty pre-teen who turns dinner into a slugfest with a litany of foods she refuses to eat.

“What’s for dinner?” is no longer an innocent question, but the opening salvo of our nightly culinary donnybrook.

For the rest, see: My daughter, grass-fed rib-eye fanatic.

I was especially interested in this passage:

Jay Coakley, a sociologist and the author of “Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies,” said that he had no doubt that Mr. Armstrong was guilty of doping, but that it did not matter. For athletes, he said, the line between performance enhancement and medical treatment has become so fuzzy that it is impossible to discern.

“Deciding to use performance-enhancing substances and methods has nothing to do with lack of morality,” Mr. Coakley said. “It has to do with normative structure of elite sport, and the athlete’s commitment to his identity as an athlete.”

I don’t have any personal knowledge as to whether or not Armstrong used illicit doping during his career. But overall, I think the explanation that there is, in fact, a high-level conspiracy among elite cyclists to conceal the extent of doping in the sport, and that Armstrong’s statements over the years have been carefully calibrated to avoid exposure to perjury charges should the truth come out (“I’m the most-tested athelete in the world”, “I’ve never failed a test”, etc.), appears more likely to me than the competing explanation: that professional cycling is essentially “clean”, with a few outliers like Floyd Landis being exceptions rather than typical.

Or, more briefly, I think Armstrong is probably lying, and Landis is probably telling the truth, at least about whether or not Armstrong doped while on the US Postal Service team. But the evidence I’ve seen is fairly inconclusive as to specifics, and my belief has more to do with the overall context of professional sports, and the relationship between money and performance when even the tiniest advantage can have huge financial consequences.

I’m normally pretty resistant to conspiracy theories. But in this case, the situation seems tailor-made to nurture an actual conspiracy, with strong financial incentives both to cheat in the first place and to engage in a conspiracy to conceal the prevalence of cheating afterwards. To have a whistleblower you pretty much need what we have with Landis: Someone who knows he’s out of the sport, and really doesn’t care anymore, and has enough of an ego to be willing to make himself even more of a pariah by going public. The only piece missing is the smoking-gun evidence that a whistleblower trying to take down a huge commercial enterprise pretty much has to have in order to weather the storm of countercharges that are the predictable result.

Update: Fairly hilarious: Lance Armstrong Wants To Tell Nation Something But Nation Has To Promise Not To Get Mad.

See also the update, in which Davidson’s campaign manager takes the blame: Bessemer mayoral candidate’s campaign manager admits he lied about endorsement from Alabama Coach Nick Saban.

Phil Plait – Don’t Be A Dick from JREF on Vimeo.

If you can’t accept the conclusions of 98 percent of the scientists whose FIELD IT IS, then why even bother with science? If that high a percentage of field of study is to be discounted ENTIRELY, then we are in deep trouble, which, of course, we are. It would be so simple if it were just a matter of ignoring the yelping commenters hereabouts: “Move on, Mr. Cartoonist! Chill out Tommy! There are more important things to worry about!”

Really? Which would those things be? This may be the only political issue whose results could be catastrophic PERMANENTLY. But the deliberate dust storm thrown up by fossil-fuel-centric interests has succeeded in contaminating and paralyzing the American response. Quite a victory for the deniers! It looks like mass-suicide to me.

Iranian intelligence officials, Ms. Soltani said, pressured her to come forward publicly to show that she was alive and denounce the shooting as faked, and threatened her when she did not comply.

The Iranian secret police seem oddly inept in some of their propaganda efforts. There was that obviously photoshopped image of the rockets being test fired, for example, where you could clearly see where the billowing smoke clouds had been cloned to make it look like there were more rockets than there actually were. Or this story, in which they took an unrelated English-literature teacher and, after Western media sources mistakenly identified her as the woman shot and killed in that heart-breaking YouTube video, pressured her to participate in their weird propaganda effort to undercut the video’s impact.

These days Neda (the Neda who was not shot and killed), with the help of Amnesty International, has fled to Germany, where she has been granted political asylum. But she’s “haunted”, says the NYT:

“Both sides have destroyed my life, the Western media and the Iranian intelligence,” said Ms. Soltani, staring out the window of her apartment. “But I still have the hope that at least the media will realize what they have done.”

So: lessons for today:

1. Crappy journalism, even in the days of the Web when no one really expects journalists to have professional standards, has a price, and it’s paid by people like Zahra “Neda” Soltani.

2. The Iranian intelligence service are the Keystone Kops of government propaganda. But maybe they don’t care. Maybe, like the people pushing global warming denialism, it doesn’t matter if their shtick is ludicrous and transparent to anyone with an active bullshit detector. Because people with active bullshit detectors are not their intended audience. They’re looking for the low-hanging fruit: people who want to believe what they’re pushing, and won’t bother checking the facts.

Sigh.

Except the operators of Fail Blog say the image was a fake created by the Whitman campaign; they never ran such an item: Honesty Fail.

This isn’t a huge transgression, obviously. But in the context of some of her other comments (challenging reporters to research her voter registration record, when she actually hadn’t been registered; asserting that the incident in which she shoved an employee at eBay was a verbal dispute), it starts to look like a pattern.

I’m especially struck by the extra meaning imparted to the lyric, “and when you are dead I will be still alive” by having it sung by young children to an audience of adults.

If you like this, be sure to click through to their new video with a better camera.

Measure J lost big: Of 3,262 votes cast, there were 2,284 “No” votes (70%) and only 978 “Yes” votes (30%). The Gulf oil spill was a factor, obviously; Carpinterians still remember the 1969 wellhead blowout that fouled local beaches for more than a year. With the benefit of hindsight, I’m sure Venoco CEO Tim Marquez wishes he’d picked a different time to try to get Carpinteria voters to set aside local oversight and grant his company carte blanche.

Even without the Gulf disaster, though, I think Measure J would have lost. It might have been able to get 40% of the vote, and maybe even 45%, but I don’t think it could have reached 50%. Among informed voters Venoco started off way behind; we saw that clearly in the No on J campaign. The company’s only hope was to dramatically outspend us (which it did; Venoco spent about $600,00, compared to about $80,000 spent on our side), and hope it could pick up most of the late deciders. But amidst all the news about oil-soaked beaches, undecideds broke the other way. Live by the low-information voter, die by the low-information voter.

One aspect of Venoco’s campaign that was particularly interesting to me was the company’s repeated charge that the No on J campaign was lying. Venoco wasn’t able to make that charge stick, mainly because it wasn’t true; it was Venoco that consistently made misleading statements, statements that were routinely knocked down, in accurate and devastating detail, in the letters section of the Coastal View News, our local paper.

I heard a story (third-hand, so I don’t know how accurate it is) that in the wake of Measure J’s defeat, Gary Dobbins, publisher of the Coastal View, has been threatened with lost advertising from pro-Venoco business interests unhappy with the paper’s coverage. From my perspective, though, the Coastal View did an admirable job throughout the campaign, and served its readers really well — not by slanting its coverage, but simply by doing what a newspaper should do: reporting the facts. It’s just that in this case, the facts had a strong anti-Venoco bias.

A few days before the election, Venoco distributed a faux “newspaper” called Carpinteria Coastal Preservation News. I haven’t seen a copy, but others in the No on J campaign who have say it looks a lot like the Coastal View — misleadingly so. One thing the mock newspaper did that particularly incensed many in the No on J campaign was to accuse our side of engaging in a Nazi-style “Big Lie.” No on J volunteer Niels Johnson-Lameijer wrote in his blog:

Taking a closer look at their publication a quote on page 5 caught my eye. It is a quote by Adolf Hitler’s Propaganda Minister J. Goebbels: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Venoco Inc. states a little further: “Opponents of Measure J seem to have perfected this technique to such an extent that even J. Goebbels would have been proud.”

As you may know I am Dutch, and my home country (the Netherlands) was occupied by Goebbels’ Nazi-regime from April 1940 to May 5, 1945. All of my grandparents fought in the resistance and I grew up hearing first hand WWII stories. We all know about the terror the Germans spread over Europe and I can tell you it has left deep marks on Dutch society that are still visible now, almost 70 years after the first Germans marched into the Netherlands.

I am sad to say that with comparing their opponents with one of the masterminds behind the Nazi’s Holocaust, Venoco Inc. has crossed a line, a line I never thought they would even come near. I don’t know who is responsible for comparing the “No on Measure J”-voters to a regime that resulted in an estimated of 50-70 millions deaths and millions more people severely traumatized, but I suggest they pay a visit to the Ann Frank Museum in Amsterdam. This will for sure help give them a little more perspective.

Ultimately, I think Venoco overplayed its hand with the whole “the other side is lying” angle. Maybe the company’s strategists felt they didn’t have any choice, but the reality is that many of the most prominent people in the No on J campaign have reputations in Carpinteria for honesty and fair-mindedness. Former mayor Donna Jordan came out of retirement to fight Measure J. So did former mayor Dick Weinberg. Current mayor Gregg Carty, a lifelong Carpinterian whose family has strong ties to Venoco, such that many of them publicly supported Measure J, nevertheless elicited gasps of surprise from the crowd attending a packed City Council meeting in February when he announced that after careful consideration, he was encouraging the public to vote against the initiative.

Donna Jordan, Dick Weinberg, and Gregg Carty are three of the most honest people I’ve ever met. They have demonstrated — for decades in some cases — that they are willing to listen to all sides of an issue, set their own interests aside, and make the decision that they honestly believe is in the best interests of Carpinteria.

I live in a small town. In some ways it feels like a throwback to an earlier time, which can be both good and bad. But one of the good things about it is that people here tend to relate to each other as individuals. We know Donna Jordan, Dick Weinberg, and Gregg Carty. We know them not as public figures, but as neighbors. We know their character.

These are the people Venoco was calling liars. Maybe that could have worked in a big city, but I don’t think it was ever going to work here.

At first glance the composition appears unintentional and the construction shoddy. But further investigation reveals a clear delineation between indoor/outdoor space with a design focus on protection through the use of barrier. Planes are shifted off the orthogonal to accommodate function; as a side effect it relieves inhabitants from a harsh Euclidian geometry. Grade B

All denialisms appear to be attempts like this to regain a sense of agency over uncaring nature: blaming autism on vaccines rather than an unknown natural cause, insisting that humans were made by divine plan, rejecting the idea that actions we thought were okay, such as smoking and burning coal, have turned out to be dangerous.

This is not necessarily malicious, or even explicitly anti-science. Indeed, the alternative explanations are usually portrayed as scientific. Nor is it willfully dishonest. It only requires people to think the way most people do: in terms of anecdote, emotion and cognitive short cuts. Denialist explanations may be couched in sciency language, but they rest on anecdotal evidence and the emotional appeal of regaining control.

My big sister M’Liz sent me an email the other day. “I am surprised,” she wrote, “that Lies.com has not addressed the oil spill in the Gulf.” I guess she has a point; it’s the kind of thing I would normally say something about. I’ve been following the news (like everyone). The May 11 Senate hearing where executives from BP, Transocean, and Halliburton pointed fingers at each other was certainly a lies.com moment.

Since then there has been a parade of spin and counter-spin, with events in the Gulf providing an ongoing (and depressing) fact-check, culminating most-recently in the “top kill” failure, with Obama pronouncing the news “as enraging as it is heartbreaking.”

I’d like to talk to my brother-in-law Steve (M’Liz’s husband) about all this, partly because he works as a safety engineer for BP, and partly because he’s a really honest, decent, thoughtful kind of guy. But I haven’t had a chance to talk to him.

Joe Romm at Climate Progress reposted an interesting item today (I think it was originally written by Craig Severance, but it’s not completely clear to me which parts are Romm’s and which are Severance’s). Anyway: What will it take to end our oil addiction?

I also enjoyed reading self-described “modern day Thoreau” Barbara Tomlinson’s write-up of the training she received from BP as an oil-spill cleanup worker: Emergency vs. Post-Emergency.

Update: Also entertaining, in a depressing kind of way: Fishgrease: DKos Booming School.

Closer to home, I’ve been working as part of the effort to defeat Measure J, the local oil-drilling initiative placed on the ballot by Venoco. Steve McWhirter, a neighbor of mine and would-be politician (he was narrowly defeated in a run for city council last election, and says he’ll run again in November), forwarded the following video to me. It shows Tim Marquez, the CEO and majority shareholder of Venoco, talking about why Measure J would be such a great deal for Carpinterians:

Tim Marquez One on One Interview from YES on Measure J on Vimeo.

I think Marquez is probably a more or less decent guy, and that he honestly believes that what is good for Venoco (and himself) is good for Carpinteria. But as with my previous fisking of his ad in the local paper, I think he’s making misleading statements in an effort to get low-information voters to support the initiative.

The biggest issue I have with the video is when Marquez talks about environmental review. He says that even if Measure J passes, his project will still need to undergo “the same environmental review process” it would have faced without Measure J. That’s simply not true. Yes, there are a number of agencies that would need to approve the project either way. But if Measure J passes, the project will bypass the city’s review, as well as any oversight and mitigation measures the city might have imposed. That’s pretty much the whole point of Measure J.

When Marquez talks at 13:10 in the video about the “misperception out there; some of it’s intentional, some of it’s accidental” concerning the effect of Measure J on the environmental review process, he’s being disingenuous. Marquez has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to create the misperception in the minds of voters that Measure J will not let Venoco bypass environmental review. (Other arguments I’ve heard from Measure J supporters: Measure J would merely initiate the environmental review process, the environmental review by the city has already been completed, and the project described in the initiative is the same as the environmentally preferred alternative in the city’s environmental impact report. All untrue.)

I think it’s human nature that the farther away someone is, the less likely we are to rank their concerns ahead of our own. That plays out in various ways: The image of an oil rig burning can be awe-inspiring, even beautiful to look at, except that people were killed and injured in that fire, and for them, and for their families, that image is associated with horrible suffering and pain. Should I not look at it?

Tim Marquez, and Venoco’s contractors (like Steve McWhirter) are just trying to put food on the table and help themselves and their families get ahead in the world; should I really be willing to tell them no, they don’t get to rewrite the city’s planning laws to place their own interests ahead of those of the community, generally?

M’Liz mentioned something else in her email to me. She said that the ongoing disaster in the Gulf might at least contain “some good news for Carpinteria in a small way,” in terms of the impact the story will have on the Measure J vote. I’ve heard the same thing expressed, quietly, by people in the No on J campaign. I confess there is a part of me that, while not actually rooting against BP in their efforts to stop the undersea gusher, takes a measure of grim satisfaction in their failure: See? That’s what I was talking about. You can’t trust these companies. It’s a reaction that reminds me of the emotional response I had while tracking the Iraq war body count: I hated the lies that led us to war, and sympathized with the victims on both sides, but there was still an element of satisfaction in seeing it go so wrong. See? That’s what I’m talking about. You can’t trust these politicians.

I’m not defending that reaction. I’m appalled that I feel it. It’s wrong. But it’s part of me.

I wish the Deepwater Horizon blowout never happened. I know that any impact it has on the politics of a little town 2,000 miles away is completely insignificant compared to the suffering it is causing, and will continue to cause, for those who are closer to it, for many years to come.