Joy Behar, the View fixture and host of her own show on HLN as of last week, is turning 67. Former Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O'Neal turns 58. American Idol judge Simon Cowell is 50. American Idol winner Taylor Hicks is 33. John Mellencamp is turning 58. Toni Braxton turns 41. Rachel McAdams is 33. Nation editor-in-chief Katrina Vanden Heuvel is celebrating her 50th. Famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma is 54. Russia's most powerful man, Vladimir Putin, is 57. Sex columnist Dan Savage is turning 45. Tico Torres of Bon Jov turns 56. Nobel Prize-winning activist and cleric Desmond Tutu is 78. And Oliver "Ollie" North turns 66 today.

Haha, unshaven website-launching PR man Dan Abrams went on his old network, MSNBC, today, and some lady tried to "lecture" him about the media! Hey lady, shut up!

Tim Geithner's plan for rescuing the financial sector isn't "seize the banks and feed their executives to wolves" so it's stupid and no one likes Geithner. The Nation has a great idea, though:

The View's Joy Behar turns 66 today. Maybe she and her fellow co-hosts will take a break from bickering for long enough to eat some cake. Others celebrating: American Idol's Simon Cowell is 49. Taylor Hicks is 32. Toni Braxton is turning 40. John Mellencamp is 57. Rachel McAdams is turning 32. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma is 53. Vladimir Putin is 56. South African icon Desmond Tutu is 77. And Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel is 49.

• Esquire's editor-in-chief David Granger says he never got a call from Bill Clinton, as the former president suggested in his comments last night when he was asked to respond to the incendiary Vanity Fair story by Todd Purdum. Turns out it was a measly staff editor who emailed. [Politico]

Vanden Heuvel is the editor, publisher, and part-owner of liberal bastion The Nation.

Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel just became maybe the first invited guest to publicly decline to appear on a strike-hobbled Colbert Report, which returns to the air without its writers on January 7. It's going to be a sad January for a lot of liberals totally unaware of their dogmatic humorlessness. [NYO via No Fact Zone]

Former White House spokesbot Tony Snow will be the keynote speaker at the American Magazine Conference in Boca Raton, Florida at the end of the month. Men's Health editor David Zinczenko, the AMC 2007 chairman, is super jazzed about it. But should he be? Former keynote speakers included former President Bill Clinton, former future presidents Barack Obama and John McCain. Tony Snow was a regular guest host for the Rush Limbaugh Show and frontman for the band "Beats Workin'." He did, as Zinczenko made sure to mention, survive the cancer that God so unjustly gave him. Who else is speaking in Boca, and why?

Either Katrina Vanden Heuvel is fucking with Dan Rather or she's got a deep-seated personal desire to see him come to harm. Her advice for the disgraced former CBS anchor?

MediaCitizen, Timothy Karr, dissects the secret to marketing female pundits to the masses:

There are several notable facts in a "Media Talk" blurb on The Nation in today's Times. First is the peg, that liberal lion Victor Navasky, who has been the magazine's publisher since he led the group of investors who bought it from Observer moneybags Arthur Carter in 1995, is stepping aside in favor of its editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel. Next is what Navasky will be focusing on instead: "his other job, as chairman of The Columbia Journalism Review," a fact that will make rightie press-crit sorts even more dyspeptic than usual. Then there's a notable financial reality, the magazine's current and unprecedented status as profitable, which, boosted by its oppositional prominence in the Bush years, it has been since 2003. Finally, and perhaps most interesting, is this: Even in light of that last fact, Navasky's beloved chestnut — "What's bad for the country is good for The Nation," quoted repeatedly as though it's new and fresh — makes no appearance at all.