Silicone breast implants.

O.J. Simpson.

A CIA conspiracy to kill Bobby Kennedy.

Lyndon Johnson accusing New York Times reporters of being a “bunch of commies.”

This is news?

I guess this is the best we can do before a holiday. And catching up on old stories can help us understand why some things are the way they are today. Today’s media is tougher on Democrats than Republicans, in part because of the old belief that the media was biased against conservatives. Reporters seem to go out of their way to expose the most minor of scandals within the Democratic Party, while studiously ignoring stories that matter.

Why is that?

Partly, I think, it’s because of the echo-chamber effect. If a paper does a story that reflects badly on the Democratic Party, it will get major play on right-wing blogs, talk radio, and eventually cable TV shows like Hardball. If a serious…

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Election nights haven’t been much fun for my wife and me the past few cycles, so it was nice to go to bed last night knowing the party I support was going to control Congress for the first time since the wipeout of ’94.

But the real news last night wasn’t about the Democrats or Republicans. The key to the whole thing, from what I can tell at 7 o’clock this morning, is that the voters chose the political center.

The politics of polarization stopped working. The emphasis on culture-war issues stopped working, or at least took a breather. The xenophobic attacks on immigrants didn’t work. And Kevin Drum suggests that, after a quarter-century of increasingly negative and sleazy campaigning, that may be over, too:

This might be wishful thinking on my part, but I wonder if this year’s campaign finally got a little too negative? Is it possible that the…

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Here‘s something I didn’t know about the Nazis:

Lebensborn, or spring of life, refers to a series of clinics scattered throughout Germany and neighboring countries, to which pregnant women, most of them single, went to give birth in secret. They were cared for by doctors and nurses employed by the SS, the Nazi Party’s feared paramilitary unit.

One such clinic sits at the top of a gentle hill in Wernigerode, a remote town near the Harz Mountains. The building, long abandoned now, was part of a bittersweet homecoming tour for the 40 or so people who turned out for the meeting of an association known as Traces of Life.

To be accepted into the Lebensborn, pregnant women had to have the right racial characteristics — blonde hair and blue eyes — prove that they had no genetic disorders, and be able to prove the identity of the father, who had to meet…

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If you’ve ever looked for a plumber in the Yellow Pages, you notice a disproportionate number of them begin with the letter A. And not just A, but AA: Aabco, Aakbar, Aardvark … The poor plumber who was actually born with the surname Aaron must be furious at all these phony AA-ers taking his rightful spot at the head of the listings.

Unfortunately, we pick our electoral officials the same way we pick the guy who unclogs our drains, according to Stanford political science professor Jon Krosnick:

Candidates listed first on the ballot get about two percentage points more votes on average than they would have if they had been listed later (flipping a 49 to 51 defeat into a 51 to 49 victory). In fact, in about half the races I have studied, the advantage of first place is even bigger — certainly big enough to win some elections these…

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On my mind this morning:

Jeanine Pirro, the nutbar running for New York attorney general, secretly taped her husband to see if he was having an affair. Not only that, she brought in Bernard Kerik, perhaps the most ethically challenged bald guy on the Eastern seaboard, to do the dirty work.

Then there’s the ongoing saga of Hewlett-Packard’s surveillance scandal, described by one lawmaker as “a plumbers’ operation that would make Richard Nixon blush were he still alive.”

And then there’s our Congress, seemingly modeled on the Galactic Senate from Star Wars (they’re the gang who handed the keys to the galaxy over to the Sith in the interest of “security”), which just passed a law legalizing domestic wiretapping. The Washington Post reporter wrote that Republicans call it “a test” to see if “Democrats want to fight or coddle terrorists.”

So here’s my question: Does surveillance ever actually…

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Follow along with me here:

Crazy Hugo Chavez, sort of a South American Al Sharpton with oil fields, recommends a book by Noam Chomsky, and it rises to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list.

For comparison’s sake, the highest one of my books has ever gone, to my knowledge, is #31; that was Testosterone Advantage Plan, my first book, in its first week on the market. I’ve rarely been inside the top 100 since then with any subsequent books. In fact, if you go to Amazon UK, you see that I’m no longer the principal author of that one. Somebody reversed the names on the listing, so “Andy Campbell” (a misspelling of my friend Adam Campbell‘s name) is now listed first. I also got demoted on the U.S. version of Home Workout Bible; I was the first-named author for four years, but suddenly I’m listed second. Oh, how…

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I don’t mean to turn myself into a fashion-industry critic here, but I thought this New York Times piece was a good follow-up to what I wrote last week about skinny fashion models:

Snejana Onopka, Natasha Poly and Hana Soukupova, models in demand among the fashion designers who showed their collections in New York last week, appeared so gaunt and thin that their knees and elbows were larger than their concave thighs and pipe cleaner arms, and their bobbling heads looked as if a slight breeze could detach them from their frail bodies.

Linda Wells, the editor of the beauty magazine Allure, said there were moments during the shows when she could hear gasps in the audience at their appearance.

“What becomes alarming is when you see bones and start counting ribs,” Ms. Wells said.

Yeah, I’d be alarmed at that.

And this is as good a time as any to catch up…

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We interrupt our coverage of the worldwide obesity epidemic to bring you news from the opposite end of the scale:

The world’s first ban on overly thin models at a top-level fashion show in Madrid has caused outrage among modeling agencies and raised the prospect of restrictions at other venues.

Madrid’s fashion week has turned away underweight models after protests that girls and young women were trying to copy their rail-thin looks and developing eating disorders.

Organizers say they want to project an image of beauty and health, rather than a waif-like, or heroin chic look.

But Cathy Gould, of New York’s Elite modeling agency, said the fashion industry was being used as a scapegoat for illnesses like anorexia and bulimia.

“I think its outrageous. I understand they want to set this tone of healthy beautiful women, but what about discrimination against the model and what about the freedom of the designer,” said Gould,…

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One of the world’s greatest religions is on the ropes:

There is a palpable panic among Zoroastrians today — not only in the United States, but also around the world — that they are fighting the extinction of their faith, a monotheistic religion that most scholars say is at least 3,000 years old.

Zoroastrianism predates Christianity and Islam, and many historians say it influenced those faiths and cross-fertilized Judaism as well, with its doctrines of one God, a dualistic universe of good and evil and a final day of judgment.

While Zoroastrians once dominated an area stretching from what is now Rome and Greece to India and Russia, their global population has dwindled to 190,000 at most, and perhaps as few as 124,000, according to a survey in 2004 by Fezana Journal, published quarterly by the Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America. The number is imprecise because of wildly diverging counts…

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You’ve probably heard about Warren Jeffs, the polygamist leader who was recently arrested.

He’s a 50-year-old guy who had as many as 70 wives and 60 children. When he was arrested, he was driving a 2007 Cadillac Escalade and had $54,000 in cash. Not bad for a guy with up to 70 women who qualify as “the ol’ ball and chain.”

As it happened, on the day he was arrested, I was reading Assassination Vacation, humorist Sarah Vowell’s terrific book about her obsession with 19th-century American politics, particularly the parts that involved shooting presidents.

In the chapter on the assassination of James Garfield, Vowell spends some time exploring the odd politics and religious trends in New York state in the 19th century.

Most of us have heard of the Shakers, an offshoot of the Quakers, who left England and settled in upstate New York in the late 18th century. Today,…

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