Yes, Jennifer is one of those Siebels — her dad, Ken Siebel, is a cousin of Tom Siebel, the founder of Siebel Systems. The father of the bride is also chairman of Private Wealth Partners, which manages a $444 million fund. But Newsom might find it difficult to pry any campaign contributions from his new father-in-law, since the elder Siebel has donated only to Republicans in national elections since 2000, including George W. Bush, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani.

Newsom did at least convince the bride's family to host the wedding in Stevensville, Montana, where the groom wore a casual linen suit and the bride wore Vera Wang and rode down the aisle bareback on a white black stallion. By far the best blow-by-blow of the nuptials was from Newsom's predecessor at City Hall, Willie Brown. Siebel and Newsom plan to tour Africa on their honeymoon — no word if they intend to indulge in the hot celebrity trend of adopting a child as a souvenir.

Being in the family way might help burnish Newsom's image after an adultery scandal in 2007 and a public admission of the entrepreneurial wine salesman's drinking problem. The timing of this marriage eerily reflects that of Newsom's first in 2001, when the then-Supervisor wed Kimberly Guilfoyle months before he announced his candidacy for mayor of San Francisco.

But the couple divorced a year after he was elected amidst talk of a new "Camelot" couple rising in the Democratic Party ranks. You can expect the eternal flame of the media's love for Newsom to be rekindled along those lines, though I doubt the newlyweds will be posing in any oil-money mansions this time around.

With Newsom now fielding an exploratory committee to run for statewide office, longtime superfan and San Francisco Chronicle blogger Beth Spotswood was generous: "I give them two years, that's my wedding gift to Gavin." Which is just long enough to last until June 8, 2010, when the votes for Governor will be tallied.

Hopefully Siebel can continue to steer clear of commenting on blogs in the meantime. Siebel's first publicity challenge will be to show up California attorney general Jerry Brown's longtime partner and current wife Anne Gust in the primary, followed by Maria Shriver, wife of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Photo by Getty Images/Meg Smith)

Any California customer of the five ISPs already signed on in New York is included in the restrictions. For customers, the initiative's inability to target porn-serving newsgroups means the loss of access to many innocent newsgroups. But there are countless workarounds for Usenet users, a demographic dominated by technical types, to get access. For Cuomo et al., the initiative sounds so good on paper that they don't have to even bother making it work.

A photo op in front of "world's sexiest and best high-performance electric car" was a rare chance to earn some bona fides from both sides of the aisle and demonstrate his sentiment that postpartisanship is the new black. It's another example of how desperate Californians are to have their cake and eat it too: We'll still have erotically-charged automobiles, but they'll be zero-emission! Never mind that luring businesses with expensive corporate welfare means more potholes to ruin the suspension on Schwarzenegger's own Tesla Roadster.

• Japan and France both have one: If there's anything Californians love more than stuff from France and Japan, I'd like to know what it is. Hell, even China has a bullet train, and they're supposedly Communists.
• Breakfast and dinner at home, meetings in LA: Woo Hollywood talent away from the studios with promises of stock options without having to abandon the family for the night. Hell, invite them down to meet you in San Diego after work.
• It keeps transportation spending in California: We don't manufacture our planes or our cars, why not build trains? Like Tesla's effort to make California an electric-car hub, a bullet train here would breed engineers and contractors with experience in high-speed rail projects for an untapped North American market.
• It's actual cleantech, no greenwashing necessary: No traffic idling, no planes circling, no highway-induced sprawl. Atherton residents would probably even approve a new nuclear reactor to power it. In Nevada.

The train makes all sorts of sense for the Valley, and the fact that it'll probably end in a boondoggle doesn't concern me — I just want it to end, soon, with a wicked fast train. (Photo by Clayton Parker)

What's the reality of privacy, beyond all of the Internet-activist scare campaigns? Consumers want their information protected, in theory, and yet sell out their privacy in a heartbeat to save a buck. Businesses have to worry about keeping data safe from hackers while making it available to employees.

California state legislators crafted a Draconian bill and made data protection the responsibility of businesses. Governor Schwarzenegger would prefer the state government work with business to establish a standard and allow self-regulation. Self-regulation seems like a reasonable goal because the businesses themselves have learned to use privacy as a marketing issue — a smart ploy, again, when you're falling behind in actually exploiting private data.

Microsoft and rival search engine Ask have tried to disparage Google for the search engine's use of consumer data to target ads. Never mind that they'd like to do the same, if they could only figure out how. Google is willing to take further steps to protect user data — but only if everyone agrees on a universal standard. And so the competition continues to bash them. Consumers fret over Street View photographs on Google Maps displaying their butt cracks, while they happily sign up to personalize Google searches.

In politics as well as business, a free market should reign. Google's competitors can nip at its heels and tie up its lobbyists in fighting privacy-protection bills. That's the way our money-driven democracy works, after all. The statehouse, in the end, is just another field of battle.