The extensive bashing of Matt Lauer has left him with few fans, but Kathie Lee Gifford — in her own goofy way — wanted to make sure everyone knew he still had friends at the Today show. The New York Daily News reports that her plan was to buy a full page ad in USA Today, featuring signatures from “hundreds” of Today staffers.

The idea of a pity party didn’t sit well with Lauer, so he asked her not to do it. Instead, she told the Daily News all about it, and now everyone knows about the ad anyway. Well done.

Here’s the ad’s cheesy copy:

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After the last few head-spinning Wednesdays at Michael’s kept me ricocheting between Hollywood A-listers (Meg Ryan) and tabloid targets (Rachel Uchitel), it was something of a relief to turn my attention to the restaurant’s core constituency of authors and their agents (remember books?) who have always viewed the dining room at 55th & Fifth as a de facto company cafeteria. When I arrived a few minutes before noon and overheard Tom Connor telling L’Oreal Sherman he was meeting Gretchen Young for lunch, I just had to go over and introduce myself. Gretchen was my editor at Hyperion, and we worked together on two bestsellers: I Love You, Mom! a collection of celebrity essays I edited and Objection! which I co-wrote with Nancy Grace. Like I always say, in certain circles, all roads lead to Michael’s.

Now vice president and executive editor at Grand Central Publishing, Gretchen recently signed Tom’s clients Willie Geist and his father Bill Geist to write a father-son book scheduled for publication next year to coincide with Father’s Day. When Willie (who, it should be noted, is quite the snappy dresser) arrived, I asked him if the dapper duo had ever worked together before. “Aside from some yard work, no,” he told me. The yet-to-be-titled tome does have a subtitle: Birds, Bees and Other Conversations We Never Had. “It’s not going to be one of those super earnest father-son books,” says Willie. Bill describes the book as something “born out of our experiences and what we’ve learned from each other.”

“It’s really our humorous take on things,” says Willie, which seems only fitting since his first book, the bestselling American Freak Show, was a send-up of our tabloid culture featuring imagined conversations with characters like ’President’ Sarah Palin. The upcoming title will chronicle life growing up in the Geist household through a mix of essays and interviews. “I think we’ll both write things and then bounce it off each other,” says Bill. Sounds like there’s no shortage of material. “There’s the time the Christmas presents were accidentally locked in the trunk of dad’s company car and a sledgehammer was wielded,” recalls Willie. “And then there was the summer I was sent off to what was supposed to be an idyllic summer camp in New Hampshire, and I’m not exaggerating when I say the counselors were fresh-out-of-rehab juvenile delinquents, and there were literally knife fights going on around me. We’ll basically write about what not to do.”

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TVNewser: Willie Geist and Al Roker kissed on Today this morning. How weird, right? And funny! Two guys kissing is just so silly!

AppNewser: Durex has launched an app that allows users to have condoms discreetly delivered to them. It could be argued that if you insist on discreetly delivered condoms you probably aren’t mature enough to have sex, but alas…

AgencySpy: An ad agency convinced a priest to bless their website. That’s almost as exciting as someone convincing priests to stop molesting kids, but not quite.

TVSpy: An anchor in Cincinnati called Rachel Maddow “an angry young man,” then apologized for it. The anchor also said the statement didn’t reflect her “firm beliefs in equal rights.” She sounds like a great person.

GalleyCat: Helen Fielding is going to write a new Bridget Jones book. Hugh Grant and Renee Zellweger deny having paid Fielding to do so.

TVNewser: The Today show officially begins the Willie Geist era. It’s going to be crazy! Not really.

The Menu is celebrating four months this week (also we’re international-ish, since I am calling in from snowy Toronto this week) and MSNBC’s Willie Geist was nice enough to make a return appearance to talk with us about, among other things, Blago!

“He’s like the greatest performing player ever…he always delivers!…I think riding Space Mountain is about the best thing I could have imagined him doing as he is indicted on a litany of felony charges back in his home city.”

So perhaps a Blago ghost twitter is in Geist’s future? Not so! “Only Blago can speak for Blago,” says Geist.

On a more serious note, Geist expresses amazement over the shockingly fast demise of newspapers nation-wide, and we talk about whether the NYT Co.’s threat to close the Boston Globe is a bargaining tactic. Also, questionable world records, and(!) if you don’t see Geist on Morning Joe tomorrow it’s because his (somewhat shadowy) bracket came through. You can listen to all the past podcasts at BlogTalkRadio.com/mediabistro and call in at 646-929-0321.

Today on the Menu our fearless better half Steve Krakauer roams the Morning Joe green room and encounters a cast fabulous characters!

First off is Ari Melber, who was there to “talk GOP and a new poll” but also, it would seem, to walk Willie Geist through his Twitter jitters (and possibly the Starbucks line).

Next Steve runs into NBC White House Correspondent Chuck Todd who says he was “shocked, just as an observer, of [Jim] Cramer’s criticism of the President.”

And finally we catch up with TVNewser Summit headliners Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. Brzezinski, who recently shut down her Facebook account “If I know you well enough I will pick up the phone and call you.” She also says that she’s “not sure yet about Twitter…I think it could be a very interesting forum…It was actually a useful tool…People were sending articles and you can kind of get into an intellectual community and start exchanging ideas. I’m intrigued.”

Joe says he was much impressed by the White House’s invitation to come broadcast there, “My takeaway from that was what type of White House we have now. Mika and I have been very critical of the stimulus package…and yet the White House invited us to be the first show on in there, and it shows a much more open minded approach to the media.”

He also notes that he is able to express more personal views on the radio show the two have recently launched at WABC: “We’ve noticed the calls have changed, at the very beginning it was predictably right wing. And what we’re finding now is it’s a lot more people in the middle who haven’t listened to radio an awful lot.” Also, somewhere in there Scarborough says the GOP is being run by a “bunch of hacks.” You can listen to the past podcasts at BlogTalkRadio.com/mediabistro and call in at 646-929-0321.

Today on the Menu: Willie Geist of MSNBC’s Morning Joe joins us, fresh out of the studio (make-up and all!) to discuss yesterday’s Superbowl ads, and whether Blago, Palin, and Kennedy’s botched time in the media spotlight has done them irreparable damage.

Also, could Blago have a television career ahead of him? Says Geist: “I think he’s too crazy.”

You can listen to the podcast live every morning at 9amET on BlogTalkRadio.com/mediabistro and call in at 646-929-0321. You can also subscribe to the iTunes feed of the podcast by clicking the “iTunes” button.