Barack Obama was born on this day in 1961, to Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama, Sr. and Malcolm X and a communist named Frank, in Kenya. Happy Birthday, Mr. President! Or, as your parents would say, عيد ميلاد سعيد

Last weekend, the White House made a subtle adjustment to the "issues" page of its web site, eliminating any claims of Barack Obama having accomplished anything and changing it to, basically, "we're working on it."

The 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama, turns 48 today. Judith Kaye, the first woman to serve as chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, is 71. Fashion designer Anna Sui is 57. Robert A.F. Thurman—Columbia professor, Buddhist scholar, and father of Uma—is turning 68. Robert Lieber, the city's deputy mayor for economic development, is 55. Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales turns 54. Legendary White House reporter Helen Thomas is 89. Retired pitcher Roger Clemens is turning 47. Actor Billy Bob Thornton is 54. NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon is turning 38. Law & Order's Richard Belzer is 65. Denim designer Scott Morrison is 37. Frank Vincent, the actor who played Phil Leotardo on The Sopranos, is 70. And '90s model Marcus Schenkenberg turns 41 today.

We all know that the types of people who watch Glenn Beck on Fox News aren't exactly intellectual leviathans, but what does it say about their collective sanity when Beck has to lecture them on-air about the perils of mass-murder.

Jennifer Senior wrote a massive cover piece on the Obama communications machine for this week's issue of New York that is, to put it mildly, a nauseatingly fawning tribute to the communications genius of our president and his advisers.

Add this to your catalog of ways fringe conservatives express their displeasure of having a black president: someone on YouTube has raised the possibility of Barack Obama being the antichrist because Jesus actually, literally said, "Barack Obama is the antichrist."

How many ways can you analyze 30 seconds of silent footage? An infinite number of ways! Over the last 24 hours, cable pundits, our modern Vienna Circle, have explored all the possible meanings of a bunch of guys drinking beers.

Moments from now, Henry Louis Gates and a Cambridge police officer will finally fix racism in America, forever, over beer with Barack Obama. The cable news networks are, of course, already going nuts. We, of course, are already drinking.

As Barack Obama, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge police officer James Crowley get ready to share a beer, the nation finally has an opportunity to discuss racial prejudice and its lasting impact on American society. Haha, just kidding.

Barack Obama will award Harvey Milk a posthumous Medal of Freedom.

Anna Wintour has come up with a genius way to save the dying fashion business: Why doesn't everyone just collude on prices? So what if it's illegal? She has "friends in the White House."

The only political news anyone (well, anyone in the White House press corps) cares about is the White House beer toast between Barack Obama, Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge cop James Crowley. Will a drunken brawl break out? Probably not.

[Barack Obama took his health care townhall tour to a Kroger's in Bristol, Va., where he spoke to supermarket employees; pic via Getty]

The presser was straight out of Bonfire of the Vanities, beginning with an exceedingly strange two-minute-plus introduction from Whalen's attorney Wendy Murphy, who cautioned the assembled press to "leave her alone" before praising her as the "one person whose actions have been exemplary" and implicitly criticizing Barack Obama for failing to invite her to tomorrow's sit-down between Gates and Sgt. James Crowley. "I don't know, maybe it's a guy thing," Murphy sneered. "She doesn't like beer anyway." Then she nominated Whalen, the woman she wants to be left alone, to head a proposed blue-ribbon panel to examine the issue of racial profiling in Cambridge. Murphy is enjoying her 15 minutes.

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.

Sort it out over booze, the old American way, right? Obama offered both Henry Louis Gates and the cop who arrested him to the White House for a beer. Gates - the Ivy Leauge African American studies scholar - accepted.

All hell's gonna break loose on Martha's Vineyard at the end of August when (1) the Obama family descends on the quiet East Coast getaway for two weeks and (2) Chelsea Clinton's wedding goes down. So: where're they living?

By lashing the Cambridge police for arresting Henry Louis Gates at home, the president seems to have upset basically everyone today, even supporters on the left. But at least Republican rage isn't aimed at health care!

At this point, they're just baiting us, right? All conservatives do all day is dream up "funny" racist e-mails about the president to send around to their friends in a race to become Keith Olbermann's Worst Person in the World.