After Glenn Beck got sooooo much attention for it, boring Sean Hannity decided to go after a "Czar" too. Beck's was too black, so Hannity set his sights on one who is too gay. Look who's joining the cause!

CNN's least likable anchor is celebrating his birthday today: bigot and birther enthusiast Lou Dobbs is turning 64. Former cable news personality (and now radio host) Alan Colmes is turning 59. Actress Nia Vardalos is 47. Karen Brooks Hopkins, president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, turns 58. Actor Kevin Sorbo is 51. Jessica Lucas, a member of the cast of the new Melrose Place, is turning 24. Ross Matthews, the guy better known as "Ross the Intern" from the old Tonight Show, is 30. And the WWE's Stephanie McMahon, daughter of wrestling mogul Vince McMahon, celebrates her 33rd birthday today.

• As expected, ratings for Jay Leno's new show are falling fast. [THR]
• Bloomberg LP appears to now be in the lead to buy BusinessWeek. [NYP]
• Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol sold 1 million copies its first day. [NYT]
• Don't try to talk to Vogue publisher Tom Florio about what changes are in store for the mag now that those McKinsey consultants have finished their review. (He's not talking about it.) Meantime, McKinsey's final report will be handed over to Condé Nast's management next week. [NYO, WWD]
• Fox News boss Roger Ailes collected $24 million in compensation last year, which is $2 million more than his boss, Rupert Murdoch, took home. [BW]
• Jay-Z has his 11th No. 1 album. That puts him ahead of Elvis Presley as the solo artist with the most chart-toppers. But he's still behind the Beatles. [LAT]

In your willful Wednesday media column: Meghan McCain is the queen of all media, BusinessWeek's sale grinds on, Lou Dobbs catches a boycott, and you can finally find political opinions, on the internet.

• The next top editor to fall victim to budget cuts at Condé Nast, at least according to Keith Kelly: Architectural Digest editor Paige Rense. [NYP]
• The first guest on Jay Leno's new show on Sept. 14: Jerry Seinfeld. [THR]
• Jay, Conan, Jon, Jimmy, Jimmy, or Craig? Now more than ever, celeb (and their publicists) are being forced to choose between late-night hosts. [THR]
• At least a dozen advertisers have abandoned Glenn Beck's show now that he's established himself as the most vile human being on television. [NYT]
• A big group of media companies—including CBS, NBC, Disney, News Corp., and Viacom—have teamed up to give the Nielsen ratings a run for its money. [NYT]

• All is not well at ABC. The hoped-for comeback of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? didn't happen and ratings have been so low, the network is now occasionally falling behind Univision. Yes, Univision. [NYT, B&C]
• The owners of Uptown magazine are in talks to acquire Vibe, which shut down in June. What they plan to do with it is anybody's guess. [AdAge]
• Tina Brown's Daily Beast is on the move: She's planning to launch a U.K. version of the Barry Diller-funded website within months. [Telegraph]
• Not every magazine in America is struggling, apparently! [Newsweek]
• Is MTV planning to leave Times Square? Quite possibly. [NYP]

In your motivational Tuesday media column: CNN sensibly bans Lou Dobbs types, Tina Brown spans the Atlantic, America's stupidest magazines flourish, and Times Square is getting .03% less irritating.

• News Corp. posted a hefty loss for the most recent quarter, reporting that profits were down by 30 percent, although things would have been worse if weren't for Roger Ailes's cash machine, Fox News. In related news, Rupert Murdoch seems to think he can get people to pay for content on the Internet and plans to give it a shot over the next year. [NYT, BN, NYT, Guardian]
• Not to be outdone by Keith Olbermann's anti-Fox News rant on Monday night, Bill O'Reilly took aim at NBC's parent company, GE, on his show last night. This truce thing sure is working out beautifully, isn't it? [Gawker]
• Time Inc. is shutting down Southern Accents, a luxury lifestyle title. [NYP]
• Twitter was crippled by a big denial-of-service attack today, which you know full well if you happened to try and log into Twitter today. [CNET]
• If you don't watch Charlie Rose's self-indulgent talk show on PBS, now you can not watch it on Bloomberg TV, too. How convenient. [NYT]
• The Post's Page Six may be hiring Emily Smith, formerly Britain's Sun and Life & Style, to replace the recently-departed Paula Froelich. [Gawker]

• Funny People debuted at No. 1 at the box office this weekend, although it was still the worst opening for an Adam Sandler movie in five years. [Reuters]
• Mort Zuckerman is selling shares of his real estate company to pump $50 million into the Daily News to pay for new printing presses. [WSJ]
• Lou Dobbs has become a PR nightmare for CNN. Presumably the fact that Media Matters is airing an anti-Dobbs commercial won't help matters. [AP, HP]
• Is the peace pact between Olbermann and O'Reilly a sham? [TDB]
• Google CEO Eric Schmidt has resigned from Apple's board of directors. [BN]

• Détente? The feuding between Fox News and MSNBC has grown so fierce that News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch and GE's Jeff Immelt met up recently "to figure out how to defuse tensions between the two channels." [LAT]
• The Boston Globe reports that two groups of investors have submitted preliminary bids to buy the newspaper from the New York Times Co. [AP]
• Breathe easy: Oprah has not been harmed. The suspicious package outside Winfrey's Harpo Studios this morning turned out to be harmless. [AP]
• All that idiocy on Lou Dobbs' part over the past couple of weeks hasn't done much to boost his ratings on CNN. His numbers continue to fall. [NYO]
• Those McKinsey consultants are paying off! Editors at Condé Nast were told yesterday they'll no longer be reimbursed for newspapers. [Daily Intel]

Bill O'Reilly recently agreed to let fellow Mexican-hater Lou Dobbs onto his show to talk about how Barack Obama is from Kenya. But Dobbs' employer CNN apparently wouldn't let him appear on its chief competitor, Fox News. Imagine that.

This is what happens when a sad old CNN anchor embraces wingnuttery in order to try to siphon off viewers from Fox News: The bottom falls out of his Nielsen ratings, very rapidly.

In his on-going quest to relentlessly shame Birther-sympathizing, race-baiting conservative talking heads, Jon Stewart introduced a hilarious new Daily Show competition segment last night called, "So You Think You Can Douche."

Lou Dobbs, CNN's resident immigrant-hating xenophobe, has provoked a good deal of controversy in recent days for indulging those wacko conspiracy theorists who seem to believe that Barack Obama was not actually born in the United States, but instead came into this word at a fanatical madrassa in Indonesia or wherever. But is President Obama the black man that Dobbs should be most concerned about these days? We think not.

With Glenn Beck running loose spouting all sorts of crazy-talk, you just knew at some point he'd say something to cause enough of an uproar that the Fox News brass would have to address it. Beck finally did that today.

Tonight Bill O'Reilly, apparently oblivious to the fact that others at his own network have contributed greatly to inflaming the Birther madness, attacked Lou Dobbs for pushing the story. He then turned around and defended Dobbs' shameless Birther ratings pandering.

CNN president Jon Klein has had just about emotherfuckingnough of this "Birther" shit on his network. Klein sent out this email last night telling Lou Dobbs et al that "this story is dead."

• How's the New York Times Co. planning to lift itself out of the financial mess it's been in? Times Co. chief Janet Robinson says more cuts are on the way and the company is planning to sell off more assets. Also, there's some sort of paid membership model in the works, apparently. [WSJ, Gawker]
• Related: The paper says it will sell its stake in the Red Sox by January. [BG]
• What you missed at Walter Cronkite's funeral yesterday. [NYT, WaPo]
• Best-selling author E. Lynn Harris has died. He was 54. [NYT]
• More magazine is teaming up with Candace Bushnell on a new Web series starring 90210's Jennie Garth and Talia Balsam from Mad Men. [MW]
• After a ten-year run, today is Paula Froelich's last day at Page Six. [NYM]

Well you just knew this was coming! Jon Stewart devoted a Daily Show segment to the Birther movement and its enablers in the media last night, a segment he used to eviscerate them thoroughly and hilariously.

Oh for the love of God when will the Republican's extra-chromosome wing let this go?! Sadly, not anytime soon, what with Lou Dobbs beating back Alan Keyes and Sean Hannity to take over as captain of the USS Dipshit.