Larry Winget: bald person, financial guru, Hyundai pitchman. He's one of several financial authors who appear incongruously in Hyundai's current ad campaign, which features some "normal" people who, upon seeing an anonymous man in a tie pop up behind them at a car dealership and offer advice, react by saying excitedly, "Hey! Aren't you [financial author] of [personal finance advice book]?!" Whereas a real person would probably kick them in the nuts. The funny thing is that bald financial guru and Hyundai pitchman Larry Winget now says he doesn't necessarily want people to buy Hyundais at all!

Arianna Huffington has reportedly been BANISHED by NBC news—including MSNBC!—because her new book savagely criticizes NBC political honcho Tim Russert. Keith Kelly reports: "Sources said that Huffington was at a dinner in the home of Barbara Walters on Tuesday night when she heard that word had come down from on high that she no longer appear on NBC or MSNBC, where talk show hosts Keith Olbermann, Joe Scarborough and Dan Abrams were all interested in booking her." NBC's Phil Griffin claims to not know anything about it. We'd argue Arianna was just playing up a rumor she heard to publicize her book, but Griffin adds: "I know some people have issues with her as a guest, but it has nothing to do with the book." Say what you will about Arianna, but she's generally a great guest. So we'll take that as a confirmation. Arianna used to appear on Olbermann's and Dan Abrhams' shows fairly regularly, but her media schedule shows no forthcoming appearances. [NYP]

Earlier this month, American Lawyer Media laid off 42 staffers across the board. The company is also "scaling back" plans to expand the scope of one magazine, and moving another to an all-digital format, according to an internal memo. One insider says all of the laid off people are gone, but a sense of nervousness still pervades the office. What, lawyers can't afford to buy magazines any more? Cheap bastards. The full memo from ALM CEO Bill Pollak is below.

Former White House correspondent and current MSNBC host David Gregory just may be taking over for Chris Matthews once Matthews' very expensive contract is up next year. It is hoped, by MSNBC brass, that the kinda well-liked Gregory will be less of a headache than the notorious diva Matthews. But maybe he'll be just as bad! We asked for your stories about Gregory, and you delivered. As we said yesterday, his reputation in DC was not particularly bad for a TV "star." But that town is sycophantic enough to forgive a lot. So far, you all agree that David Gregory is, in fact, a jerk. Your personal stories of jerkdom, after the jump (and feel free to send more).

This whole Miley Cyrus incident, a young pop star being immodestly scandalized by Vanity Fair photos: it's so complicated! How should you feel? Who should you blame? Who is the biggest jerk in this whole sordid incident? Where should America direct its momentary outrage so that it can return to playing video games, eating snack foods, and conducting imperial conquest? Allow us to help. After the jump, a roundup of all the reaction from our most important opinion leaders to the Biggest Media Celebrity Scandal Of The Final Quarter Of April 2008. Was Rosie O'Donnell right, that we all need to lay off the heroic and intimidating Annie Leibovitz? Or is Germaine Greer, a Guardian critic, correct in predicting the beginning of Miley's existential decline? It's quite the heated argument:

"I fear what this might look like," says a tipster of CosmoGIRL!'s newest initiative, an Inside the Actors Studio -style "intimate discussion session with a popular musical act." That popular musical act will be Phantom Planet, "an alternative rock band whose song "California" became a hit on the popular TV series, The O.C." Nope. We've had nothing to "intimately discuss" with them since that hottie drummer of theirs, actor Jason Schwartzman, left the band.

Not content to simply line the subway station entrances, station walls, station signs, and interior of buses and trains with advertisements, New York City transit is reportedly set to enter the final frontier: ads on the outsides of subway trains. They're already testing out the idea with Continental Airlines ads on the 42nd St. shuttle [NYP]. Subway officials think this idea will go great with their existing "brand cars," where one advertiser takes over the interior of a whole car. As terrifying as this practice sounds, we know they need the money. So we'd like to strike a compromise: they're allowed to sell every last inch of the trains to advertisers, but in return they have to bring back this practice:

Rabid New York Post attack columnist and X-ray pornographer Andrea Peyser finally weighs in today with her take on the Miley Cyrus uproar, and a breathless city exhales. She's upset! Now she has to add Miley to the list of pop stars "not welcome in my house" (you're on there too, Jamie Lynn Spears). But she reserves most of her contempt for Miley's dad Billy Ray Cyrus, a "one-hit wonder who lives like a leech off his billion-dollar baby." Zing! We agree the photo of the two together was a little weird. But Peyser is also mad that Billy didn't stop his teen daughter from being such a freaking idiot when she opens her mouth:

Hip-hop journalist Harry Allen has unearthed a 10-minute video of disgraced memoirist Margaret Seltzer — remember her? two months ago? — back when she was still pretending to be an ex-gangbanger and drug-runner. The video was likely made to promote Seltzer's fake autobiography, Love And Consequences, and "may be the only existing footage of Seltzer in her full-on 'hood' persona," Allen writes. Seltzer dishes some fun-to-watch lies in the video, like when she talks about the violent death of a fabricated nephew (Allen notes Seltzer calls the supposed dead boy "it" and "thing"), and sometimes Seltzer abruptly halts or chokes up, as though her guilt or fear of exposure about lying has tripped her up. Some of the better moments, including Seltzer talking about "homies" on death row toasting her graduation, are excerpted in a two-minute summary video after the jump.

MSNBC took away Tucker Carlson's show because it was terrible and no one watched it. They gave to former White House correspondent David Gregory (the tall guy). We're not sure if his show is terrible or not, because no one still watches it. But regardless, rumors continue to fly that Gregory is being "groomed" to take the place of Hardballer Chris Matthews. Matthews is a network star, but he comes with a lot of baggage, like accusations of sexism, embarrassing magazine profiles, and his inability to deal politely with his staff. Gregory—famous for, in addition to his height, his testy and sarcastic exchanges with Bush press secretaries—doesn't have the ratings to justify any of this yet, obv, but supposedly CBS wants him so therefore NBC needs him even more because that's how TV works with its "talent." But would replacing Matthews with Gregory be even more of a disaster?

Fashionista spotted the recently ousted Elle editor (and Project Runway judge) "leaving the Hearst building, sprinting across the street before hailing a cab and trying to avoid eye contact with anyone as she left." Maybe she had a job interview! (Hearst publishes lots of ladymags, but not Elle.) [Fashionista]

This email has been floating around for a week or so, but we're going to run it as a public service. It was first circulated by a PR guy named Peter Shankman as a classic "How Not To Pitch A Reporter" lesson. In this case, the email pitch below was sent to a hedge fund reporter. That is to say, a professional journalist who spends his days chronicling the ins and outs of the secretive high finance world. So one might have expected that a PR firm would cull its email blast list just a bit before it went to work on behalf of its "Long Island based car shop" client. But no! Pitches like this are why reporters hate PR people. CAN YOU GUESS WHICH PR AGENCY THIS CAME FROM? The full pitch (to, again, a hedge fund reporter), and the stunning reveal of the agency's identity, after the jump.

Bonnie Fuller, who oversees Star magazine and is therefore the arbiter of American media standards, has a question about this whole Miley Cyrus thing, and its connection to the current Texas polygamy scandal: "Is it OK to sexualize a fifteen-year-old if it is in the pages of a high falutin' magazine and her parents seem OK with it? Or is this really not much different from parents in a cult acquiescing to having their teen daughters wedded and bedded?" Ummm... can we say 'No' to all of the above?

"College students today enter a low hook-up culture when they leave the classroom," warns Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield in his WSJ review of the newest overwrought book about college kids fucking. "In case you don't know, a hook-up is a brief sexual encounter between two partners who don't necessarily know each other before and who don't necessarily want to know each other after." Sounds costly. "And it's free." Well, that's a bonus! "The sort of transient sex that once was available to men only for money can now be had, without paying, from college women - as long as the man is a fellow student and minimally artful about his approach." Good lord, is that new? I don't remember that. "If he is thwarted in one overture, he may try another with a reasonable prospect of success." That, sadly, is just the intro paragraph.

NBC nightly news anchor Brian Williams blogged yesterday about how he's totally unsurprised that the Sunday New York Times is suffering rapidly dwindling circulation. 'Cause BriWi picked up one of these Sunday papers the other day and was totally unimpressed. "I must admit that on Sundays it becomes a tough paper to figure out. While this week's paper featured an op-ed piece by Elizabeth Edwards bemoaning the lack of serious, in-depth coverage of the political race, it's tough to figure out exactly what readers the paper is speaking to, or seeking." Then he sorta writes a Gawker post about it!

Michael Roberts (pictured, probably pointing to something refined and beautiful) was the fashion and style director on Vanity Fair's creepy Miley Cyrus shoot. And instead of letting the fiasco die out quietly, he spoke out to WWD to reveal the real reason behind the outcry: sour grapes, and a bunch of American clods with an insufficient sense of sophistication! Europeans aren't like that, he'll have you know:

You might have missed it, but Warner Bros., the film studio, created a television network in the 1990s called "The WB." The network's biggest star was Katie Holmes, before she accepted the role of mother to L. Ron Hubbard's heir. Then in 2006, the studio pulled the plug — folding it into CBS's failed network, UPN, and calling the new redheaded stepchild The CW. Well, now the brothers are back with TheWB.com, "an online video Web site combining short original series with classic shows," reports the AP. As you can tell from the screenshot, it's not quite operational yet. Though you're free to join the The WB fan page on Facebook!

Amnesty International, well known whiners for freedom, released a new anti-torture ad last week. And it's really good! The ad, not torture. At the very least, it's the most stylish portrayal of waterboarding America has seen since it became the hot new YouTube trend. There's also a nice, subtle nod in here to overblown bottled water ads; both are bad things that will kill you. Through economic paralysis and environmental degradation. Oh, the waterboarding will also kill you by drowning. The ad, which Dick Cheney doesn't even realize is supposed to be disturbing, is after the jump.

Here on day two of the Roger Clemens Infidelity Scandal And Schadenfreude Festival Of '08, it's becoming more clear that the brawny former Yankees ace pitcher and full time jerk did in fact cheat on his wife with the wild country singer Mindy McCready. Because now she's admitted it! McCready said the two did have an ongoing affair, although the sex didn't start until she was of legal age. They first met when she was only 15, (Miley Cyrus joke). But the most entertaining aspect of this scandal is how Clemens—heroic, honored, self-righteous, dismissive of critics, a King of New York—is turning into an uncanny baseball version of another recently fallen hero: Eliot Spitzer.

Harvey Levin, you clever dog. The amoral TMZ founder is helping to launch on online version of the People's Court, called PeoplesCourtRaw.com. It features pairs of videos, one arguing each side of an issue, which users can vote on to pick a winner [Mixed Media]. See how he plucked a concept from TV and put it right on the web? It could work! Levin used to work for the People's Court on TV, so he has the scholarly background needed to pull this off. After the jump, one example of the site's work: a couple debates whether the boyfriend should shave his back hair. Well, Judge Wapner never had any important cases either.