Two role models to women everywhere are celebrating birthdays today: The feisty Judith Sheindlin (that's Judge Judy to you) is 66. The very modest reality TV personality and sex tape star Kim Kardashian is celebrating her 28th birthday today. Others with a birthday cake in their immediate futures: Marci Klein, Lorne Michaels' right-hand at SNL (and the daughter of Calvin) is 42. Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy is 56. Jade Jagger—socialite, jewelery designer, and offspring of Mick and Bianca—is turning 37. Indie film producer Jason Kliot is 45. Actress Carrie Fisher is 52. And former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is 59.

Bill O'Reilly cares really, really deeply about the little people, especially the unfortunate folks who have lost their homes during the mortgage meltdown. That's why he says he now plans to track down the perpetrators of these outrageous crimes "one by one." Last night's target: Former Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O'Neal, who was evidently leaving his apartment building on Park Avenue when an O'Reilly operative ambushed him and trailed him a few blocks, all the while asking him questions about the $161 million he made last year and whether or not he felt bad for Merrill investors and employees. O'Neal kept his mouth shut the entire time, which didn't exactly make for thrilling television. Hopefully the lack of drama won't deter O'Reilly hooligans from camping outside Dick Fuld's house in Greenwich or bumrushing Jimmy Cayne at his weekly bridge game.

Post: "Reilly will be remembered as the man who... ultimately put together one of the biggest leveraged media companies in the industry in the 1990s." Times: "Mr. Reilly became embroiled in a brouhaha in 1996 when the company fired Kurt Andersen, the editor of New York magazine." (Image)

• Michael Phelps is dating Barbara Walters' assistant "Marina," with whom he went to college. Wait, that's a fake name right?? Is someone playing a trick on poor old Cindy Adams? [Cindy Adams]

♦ Who's helping Madonna cope with her nasty, public divorce from Guy Ritchie? Best pal Gwyneth Paltrow, of course. "You know, she's a dear friend, and I'm supporting her in all [the] ways that I can... she's a very good friend." [Us, AP]
♦ In other Madonna news, Guy Ritchie now believes Madonna is spying on him, Madonna is now suggesting she wants to raise her kids in NYC, and Alex Rodriguez wants to move so he can be closer to the love of his life. [The Sun, People, R&M]
♦ Least plausible rumor ever: "Well placed sources" say that if Obama is elected president, he'll consider making Oprah British Ambassador. [TMZ]

♦ Lawmakers and officials are moving close to ironing out a second stimulus bill after Fed chair Ben Bernanke endorsed the idea. [Bloomberg, NYT]
♦ The Treasury Department is pushing bigger banks to use the rescue package to acquire smaller, weaker rivals. [NYT]
♦ The Dow's 413-point rise yesterday was attributed to signs the credit market is beginning to thaw. [NYT]
♦ Some people are still making out nicely: Peter Kraus, the head of strategy at Merrill, will be leaving the firm after just a couple of months with as much as $25 million. [WSJ]

The Times ran a special editors' note this morning accusing one of its freelancers of twisting the truth "to fit his theme, contrary to the Times' standards of integrity." The writer, Paul Burnham Finney, apparently distorted an American Psychological Association survey to reflect his article's thesis that business travel and the Wall Street meltdown are stressing people out more than anything else. In fact, the survey showed the economy generally is stressing people out. Also, he rewrote a therapist's quote to also be more specific in the same way, the paper said. Having developed something of a history running false stories, the Times seems to have been eager to get out in front of this one, running its correction barely one week after the original article came out — quite a speedy timeframe for deciding one of your contributors is a liar. The full editor's note is after the jump.

Wow, who would have guessed??! It turns out Michelle Obama didn't order Iranian caviar, two whole lobsters, a lobster hors d'oeuvres and champagne from room service the other night, as the Post's Page Six claimed. The wife of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama ate an entirely different treasonous elitist meal (probably) somewhere else. In fact, she wasn't even staying at the Waldorf-Astoria, as Page Six had it. Whoops. The gossip section so did not see this coming, because why wouldn't you run with something so plausible? "We regret the mistake, and our former source is going to regret it, too," it said today. To really make up for it, the paper went ahead and smeared conservative Ann Coulter, by way of trashing McCain:

The plight of sad Rachel Maddow of MSNBC was revealed in the Times this weekend, as expected. The clearly underpaid anchor splits her time between a 275-square-foot tenement in New York and a 140-year-old cabin in a remote corner of Massachusetts, where she is forced to moonlight as garbage hauler. She has no proper shoes, or even a television, so she drinks fermented "sugar-cane juice" and dreams of a bygone "golden age." But things are looking up!

The last days of the presidential campaign were about to make Keith Olbermann's head explode, what with the racism and Islamophobia and calls for death and so forth, so the MSNBC Countdown host is suspending the specialness of his special comments and just doing them every night until he feels like stopping. He knows he "frequently insisted he would never" do this, and he's sorry, but "I suspect this will be the first of nightly pieces, most shorter than this one, until further notice." In other words, the special comments will be regular for a special period, until they go back to being special, as they regularly are. (Olbermann explains in a video after the jump.)

The Hollywood brain trust is trying to figure out why millions of people prefer to see the talking dogs of Disney flick "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" to "Body Of Lies," an Important Movie about terrorism starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe that got murdered a the box office. The working theory: Everyone is depressed from the near-total-collapse of the Western economic system, and canine dancing helps them forget. So studios are now rushing out escapist movies, according to the Times. Including musicals! Also, to give the foreclosed-upon middle class some catharsis, screenwriters are fast-at-work on Wall Street villain characters:

John McCain's presidential campaign won't let Time columnist Joe Klein aboard its campaign plane because, according to an official statement, " we don't allow Daily Kos diarists on board either." Translation:

Economic meltdown or not, certain nightclubs still seem to be blessed with celebrities who will show up for free drinks, supermodels who will show up for the celebrities, and billionaires who will show up for the supermodels, black Amex cards at the ready. We know this thanks to writer and costume-lover Hud Morgan, who bravely traded his fruitinis for passionfruit shots and infiltrated 1OAK on behalf of Men's Vogue (a scan is after the jump). Illustrating how magazine publishers, too, are defying the recession and financing the posher forms of writerly hobnobbing.

Good news, Barack Obama supporters: Your Democratic presidential nominee is winning the campaign for newspaper endorsements in a landslide, with 112 newspapers to rival John McCain's 39! By circulation it's 13 million to 4 million. Sadly, however, those endorsements are almost definitely useless.

Madonna's messy divorce from Guy Ritchie gives the pop star a chance to recast herself for the better, but at the moment her public image is that of a voracious celebrity monster, steamrolling Ritchie and turning Alex Rodriguez into a glaze-eyed cult follower. The Sun is reporting for tomorrow's paper that Madonna is supposedly spying on her ex, "using her huge staff to report his every move," and that director Ritchie is desperately trying to counter gossip spread by the singer's PR machine that he's a bad father. Over at the Daily Mail, the dirt is about how Alex Rodriguez is said to be spending 40 million pounds (which sounds high) to buy an apartment two blocks away from Madonna, after pleasing her with his dedication to Kabbalah:

· This recent round of Wheel of Fortune is the most excruciating thing we've sat through in quite some time. "Hmmm....'blank-O-O-D BURNING STOVE.' Jeez, I'm stumped, Pat. Mood? Mood-burning stove? No? Fiddlesticks!" · Madonna and Guy Ritchie would do it about once every 18 months, and when they did, "it was like 'cuddling up to a piece of gristle', Ritchie is said to have told friends." Having, in one of our lonelier holiday moments, spooned a picked-over turkey carcass a week after Thanksgiving—we feel for him. We really do. · "Will Smith used a madame to procure male companionship!" says Internet. · The McCain tongue-flapping grab-ass pic has its own Photoshop contest. We award the top prize to the A Christmas Story homage, replete with an adorable Barack in a duffel coat. Here's another take in animated gif form. · And finally, ladies and gentlemen: Your Ten Most Humiliating Dog Costumes of Halloween 2008.

Even after our heartfelt appeal for someone, anyone to stop the pimped-out madness that has overtaken Ed McMahon's life, the 85-year-old was featured in an interview this morning of Fox Business, shilling once again for his latest benefactors. But when the chat turned from McMahon's evidently in-demand personal finance tips to his reported bailout by the archangel Donald Trump, the pitchman and ex-Carson sidekick shrugged. "Everything that seems like its wonderful becomes unclear," he said, noting that he still had some Trump-work to do upon returning to Beverly Hills from his East Coast sojourn. "That has not resolved itself yet." No way! Ed explains more after the jump, and while we know the popular warning in investing is that past results are no guarantee of future performance, this really might be just the deal for the short seller in you. [YouTube]

Doggone It: Though he once compared Sarah Palin to George W. Bush, Alec Baldwin aided her cameo appearance on Saturday Night Live this weekend, and the blowback he got for the guest spot has him stymied. "Don't put her on SNL? With all of her exposure and the Tina Fey performance? What reality are you in?" he says on the Huffington Post. "If you think an appearance on Saturday Night Live would sway voters and actually affect the outcome of the election, you may have more contempt for the electorate of this country than the Republican National Committee does. And that's a lot of contempt." Still, we must admit to some surprise that the outspoken, anti-Palin actor was able to bury the hatchet for SNL; what's next, an olive-branch cameo on My Name is Earl? [HuffPo]

We eventually managed to crawl out of the filthy puddle of our own tears on Friday afternoon, but let's face it—life just isn't the same without Molly. We're going to continue To Dos starting today as they originally ran: as a straight-up, text-only feature. Undoubtedly, her legions of admirers will gag at the precipitous stumble in quality; we welcome your outraged complaints in the comments. Meanwhile, people need stuff to do, and stuff is being done, so we continue with this Defamer public service: · Music round-up: Pinback, Mr. Tube & the Flying objects are at the Echoplex, Girl in a Coma play a free show at Amoeba at 7, and Andrew Bird is at Largo.· Well, here's something that might lift your spirits: Duncan Trussell Saves the World: An Exploration of Happiness is "an actual exploration of happiness that will even include a pre-show puppy adoption in the lobby." It's at the Steve Allen Theater. · The Academy's Linwood Dunn Theater offers the fourth part of its Oscar Docs series, screening a double feature of movies from 1992: Educating Peter—about a third-grader with Down syndrome entering his first classroom—and The Panama Deception, about the U.S. invasion of Panama. Panama producer-director Barbara Trent will be on hand for a discussion following the screening.

There are ways to kill projects you don't want to work on without saying no. You can give the project "death by price tag," as did Alaska's state IT guys when ordered to produce evidence that could only hurt their home state's image. Examining one state employee's inbox for emails sent to Sarah Palin's husband, Todd, would take six hours, they told the Associated Press, which asked for the emails under public-records laws. Multiply that by 16,000 employees, at $73.87 an hour, and you get $15,364,960. It's the kind of math that will only fool a journalist, not an IT guy who's familiar with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, SMTP logs, and journaling file systems. By the time the media figures out what it should really cost, the election will be over. But think twice, guys.Billionaire George Soros once pledged to use his wealth to get Bush out of office. Yeah, we knew he'd bail early. But what happens if the Obama-struck news media decides to foot the bill? If you're right that there's nothing to see, you'll be searching her mails until you retire. Wrong, and you'll need another excuse soon. (Photo by AP/David Zalubowski)