+ Opposition research smeared Gore in the 2000 election campaign, and now it will attempt to smear Kerry in the current election campaign. Opposition research is used to bolster an election campaign by utilizing a room full of professional researchers running queries on anything and everything that comes out of the opposition’s camp. The idea being to find holes and weaknesses that can be exploited via media manipulation. It’s not a new method of campaigning, but…

What was remarkable about the 2000 effort was the degree to which the process advanced beyond what Barbara Comstock, who headed the RNC research team, calls “votes and quotes”—the standard campaign practice of leaving the job of scouting the target to very junior staff members, who tend to dig up little more than a rival’s legislative record and public statements. Comstock’s taking over the research team marked a significant change. She was a lawyer and a ten-year veteran of Capitol Hill who had been one of Representative Dan Burton’s top congressional investigators during the Clinton scandals that dominated the 1990s: Filegate, Travelgate, assorted campaign-finance imbroglios, and Whitewater. Rather than amass the usual bunch of college kids, Comstock put together a group of seasoned attorneys and former colleagues from the Burton Committee, including her deputy, Tim Griffin. “The team we had from 2000,” she told me recently, to show the degree of ratcheted-up professionalism, “were veteran investigators from the Clinton years. We had a core group of people, and that core was attorneys.”

Comstock combined a prosecutor’s mentality with an investigator’s ability to hunt through public records and other potentially incriminating documents. More important, she and her team understood how to use opposition research in the service of a larger goal: not simply to embarrass Gore with hard-to-explain votes or awkward statements but to craft over the course of the campaign a negative “storyline” about him that would eventually take hold in the public mind. “A campaign is a lot like a trial,” Comstock explained. “You want people aggressively arguing their case.”

[via: Arts & Letters Daily].

+ Listening to Noizetest, a shoutcast stream of ?? (varied house and trance and stuff..). I used whois to discover the noizetest domain owner’s email address to suggest that streaming a mix and posting a playlist would be nice, or better yet streaming a playlist. Either way it’s a disappointment to hear so many great tracks and not be able to search out more from their creators.
+update: an hour or so into the set the focus was lost, my interest flattened, then dwindled so much I went back to shoutcast.

+ “Two-thirds of American adults are overweight, and half of these are obese. Overweight means having a body mass index, or BMI, of 25 or greater, obese, 30 or greater: to calculate BMI, a widely used measure, take the square of your height in inches and then divide your weight, in pounds, by that number; then multiply the result by 703. Or calculate it on-line. ”
[from a quite long, thouroughly informative Harvard Magazine piece on obesity with nicely developed sociolgical, political, historical, and biological perspectives.][also via: Arts & Letters Daily].