A source embedded in the political world claims Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, has set up a committee to explore a run for governor of California in 2010. The Secretary of State's office doesn't list her as having filed a statement of intention yet, which is required before she can begin raising money for a run. The San Jose Mercury News recently reported that Whitman was looking to hire a political consulting firm in Sacramento. What really has us interested: The prospect of a race between Whitman, whose Internet new-money fortune is estimated at $1.3 billion, and San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, whose family gets its funding from the city's old-line elite. The Hair versus The Sensible 'Do? We're as excited as Whitman's dog about this one.

The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission had plans to build a monument to renewable energy in a project that Gavin Newsom pitched to congress as an example of cutting-edge green building practices. But the mayor's newly appointed SFPUC director Ed Harrington, who sagely noted that The City can't balance the books and the cost of the building might spur protests from ratepayers, has nixed the $190 million proposal. Too bad — would have looked really good on Newsom's CV when he applies for the governor's job in 2010. [Curbed SF]

The irony in Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin's use of a private email account on Yahoo to keep backroom political dealings from becoming public is not that it's a page ripped from the Bush administration's electronic communications playbook. And it's not that Palin ran on an open-government, reformist platform in her gubernatorial campaign. It's that Democrat pundits will work themselves into a lather over a loophole San Francisco's own hunky God-mayor, Gavin Newsom, has himself exploited.Newsom, a Democratic gubernatorial wannabe, has claimed similar freedom from pesky accountability by using a private device to conduct public business. Shortly after an oil tanker leaked crude oil into San Francisco Bay, Newsom flew to Hawaii on vacation, assuring everyone he was in constant contact. However, he refused to reveal any messages regarding the spill that were sent to or from his iPhone. More damning for Palin is how hamhanded her efforts were: She actually claimed "executive privilege" on emails sent via her official account on which she included her civilian husband, Todd Palin, as a recipient. And free Yahoo webmail? Even the people who read blogs aloud to Republican presidential nominee John McCain know that can't possibly be particularly secure. (Photos by AP/Eric Risberg, Tony Avelar)

Hunky God-mayor Gavin Newsom tries out his new stand-up routine at the Unconventional '08 party in Denver, in front of a backdrop featuring Shepard Fairey's Soviet-kitsch Barack Obama propaganda and a hipster mashup of Obama as Illinois Republican Abraham Lincoln. Care to heckle San Francisco's mayor? Best caption in the comments becomes the new headline. Yesterday's winner: "Ask me about our affordable day care plans!" by null. (Photo by Steve Rhodes)

Time magazine gives renewable energy credit to hunky God-mayor Gavin Newsom. None was due. The august journal hails our fair mayor for a nonexistent wind-energy installation:

San Francisco alone consumes 850 continuous megawatts of electricity during the day. How much is that? The two supersized solar arrays planned for 2013 won't be enough to run SF — they'll produce 800 megawatts total. Gavin Newsom's pet project, the tidal power generator, will only piddle out 55 megawatts — one-fifteenth of the city's needs. Meanwhile, the Golden State's two operating nuclear sites each crank out more than 2,000 megawatts — day or night, high tide or low. What really drives the greenies crazy? They're safe.An FYI for everyone terrified of nuclear power: Chernobyl can't happen again. The RBMK model reactors — only used in Russia — were retrofitted for better control, containment and mitigation years ago. Three Mile Island, in hindsight, turns out to be a classic media scarefest. A post-action review at MIT found that "The melted nuclear core was contained and any radiation released was minimal. Thus, the plant design and safety protocols actually worked, despite numerous operator mistakes." Thirty years later, Westinghouse has designed a nuke that doesn't even need backup generators to stay cool if there's a power outage. We should be worried about nuclear waste disposal, not a China Syndrome-style meltdown. Nuclear waste processing has been engineered for the type of waste (LLW, MLW and HLW) that has been produced and effective strategies are working successfully right now. The real problem is that people gladly use the electricity cranked out by nukes, but freak out if there's a waste site within 2,000 miles of their backyards. Meanwhile, I wonder how many greenies know that fossil fuel releases radioactive material when burned? Uranium ore and other radioactive material are stored naturally in coal ore, from which America still gets about half of its electricity. Compared to the old choke factory at Hunter's Point, Diablo Canyon sure is pretty.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom can thank open government sunshine laws for breeding within every hack a dismissive boredom with official communiques, especially when they're delivered in proprietary binary formats within an email attachment. Thankfully, a young hack less jaded than ourselves bothered to open the latest PDF from our hunky God-mayor's communication staff and revealed the following about Gavvy-Gav's plans for today:

How did invited guests from the Bay Area for the Newsom-Siebel wedding make it to tiny Stevensville, Montana on a budget and at the last minute? On a private jet from Google, of course. But not the Boeing 767 with the king-sized bed that you've all come to know and love — it was a slightly smaller 757 that revellers boarded at Moffett field. Besides the regular seats, there were reclining thrones and couches mounted along the side of the plane. Larry Page deigned to join the hoi polloi with his paramour Lucy Southworth on the flight back to California. "So warm, lovely and friendly," said our source of the sweet pair with their Hollywood dentistry. (Photo by Cubbie_n_Vegas)

San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom is running for higher office again, so it was time for another wedding. The latest bride is actress Jennifer Siebel. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were happy to lend the Google party plane to ferry guests from the Bay Area, so apparently no hard feelings about that whole San Francisco-wide Wi-Fi thing.

Why did I let Jackson West take a vacation? While our associate editor was away, we actually wrote something nice about Gavin Newsom — and he only had to save San Francisco from a rogue IT guy to do it! Microsoft's Windows chief, Kevin Johnson, ended up in Sunnyvale, Calif. — but not, as he'd hoped, in the corner office at Yahoo HQ. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg flubbed more media interviews this week, prompting us to suggest he get help. Maybe he could take tips from the Internet-famous Julia Allison, who crashed his developers' conference?Allison's sort-of ex, Digg cofounder Kevin Rose, said he was buying Google. Surely not for Knol, Google's weak attempt at taking on Wikipedia — at launch, its search engine didn't even work. Jackson, come back and help us make sense of this crazy business! (Photo by Jason Calacanis)

Remember Terry Childs, the guy who changed the passwords on San Francisco's government IT network the other week? The Chronicle reports that "a team of code crackers brought in from Cisco Systems had been working around the clock to try to decipher Childs' codes, but with only marginal success." Childs has finally given up the passwords — on the condition that hunky future governor (just you wait!) Gavin Newsom come down to the Hall of Justice and get them personally, and then deliver them to the Cisco consultants, not to the city's IT managers. For those of you convinced that taking back the network should've been as simple as rebooting your Mac with a paper clip, read the full anecdote:

Wealthy eBay co-founder Steve Westly, who campaigned for the Democratic Party's nomination to run against California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in the last gubernatorial election, has kept busy by investing in startups like Akeena Solar, and he's not just helping with venture capital. He's also using his campaign's email database to promote the company to San Franciscans, urging them to participate in Mayor Gavin Newsom's solar power rebate program — by buying products from Akeena Solar:

After EarthLink abandoned a citywide Wi-Fi project for Philadelphia after only 6,000 customers signed up for the $20/mo. service. Now local investors Derek Pew of Boathouse Communications and Mark Rupp, a former Verizon executive, are planning to take over the network, which will be free and ad-supported. When first announced, the project was on of the largest Wi-Fi buildouts proposed. But after being completed, few users signed up because it was slow, didn't reach far into the city's signature row houses if at all, and was not much cheaper than adding Internet to your cable or phone connection. Earthlink had previously attempted to hand the network off an Ohio-based non-profit. But Wi-Fi was never a particularly good technology for these projects, and it's high time to abandon the pipe dream.

The San Francisco Examiner was kind enough to add a quote from visionary God-mayor Gavin Newsom to a short article about Meraki's plans to provide a few free wireless routers to San Francisco residents in order to create free Wi-Fi hotspots in San Francisco neighborhoods. "People act as relays and they are able to be receptors of sorts,” Newsom told the Ex — in a quote that Gavvy-Gave also could have used to describe the local hepatitis epidemic. Meraki's plans, however, won't spread hepatitis-fast:

Hollywood star Edward Norton gleefully shakes hands with San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom at a hearing on green building practices today before the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming on Capitol Hill. Write your own caption, and the winner becomes the new headline. Yesterday's contest drew no winning entries, so do try harder, won't you? (Photo by AP/Lawrence Jackson)

BrightSource Energy, a renewable energy startup that wants to build solar thermal plants which use sunlight reflected from mirrors to heat water to steam and power electricity-generating turbines, has pulled in $115 million. The investment was led by Google.org, Google's quasi-nonprofit arm; VantagePoint; BP; Statoil Hydro; and Black River, and brings the Oakland-based startup's total funding to $160 million. The company has already signed a contract to supply local monopoly Pacific Gas & Electric with 900 megawatts of power by 2016.

On our hunky God-mayor's "Gavin Newsom for Governor" tour that included stops in donor-rich New York and Los Angeles, a stop in Israel got the excitable pol talking about Israeli startup Project Better Place. The company's plan is to build a network of charging stations for a fleet of electric vehicles in Israel. Of course, there's no actual money behind bringing the idea to our shores yet, so you can probably expect it to become a reality about the same time San Francisco turns on the free Wi-Fi network Gavvy-Gav promised. Can't get enough of the hair? Video after the jump.

Really, I wasn't trying to be posh for the book party Arianna Huffington threw Saturday for Oxford scholar Jonathan Zittrain and his new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It." I pulled up to Larry Ellison's Pacific Heights manse in a black Town Car because that's the only vehicle I was able to flag down in North Beach. Huffington, the pundit turned blog mogul, greeted me at the door and extracted a promise of my best behavior before allowing me in. (One wonders what these people think my worst behavior might be, and if they realize how tempting living down to their expectations is.)

Stanlee Gatti, the former San Francisco arts commissioner, produced the event, which drew a crowd mixed with the Valley elite, San Francisco politicos, a gaggle of YouTubers, and oddball geek pals of Zittrain. Oh, and some grubby hacks like yours truly. Melanie Ellison, the romance novelist and wife of Oracle CEO Larry, went to high school with Zittrain, it turns out. That's the kind of it's-a-small-world connection the local press corps loves to make a big deal about. But even if Zittrain didn't have this chance connection to the Valley's movers and shakers, I'd think he'd be drawing attention from its inner circle anyway.

Art Bruzzone, long time local political commentator and host of SF Unscripted, when I asked what he thought of San Francisco's hunky god-mayor: "Gavin Newsom has become a Second Life avatar."

Vanity Fair PR reps hassled Billy Getty, the oil heir, and wife Vanessa, for tickets at the premiere of Gonzo, even though the two were on the publicity email. Billy is the partner of San Francisco god-mayor Gavin Newsom in the PlumpJack restaurant empire, and Vanessa Getty is "our Victoria Beckham," according to SFLuxe, but the well-connected pair went completely unrecognized. (Photo by Drew Altizer via 7x7)