The hug and kiss they exchanged at last year's Democratic National Convention could haunt Pelosi, a Bay Area millionaire who more or less bought her way into office and whose shady fundraising activities, including paying her husband with political action committee funds, have repeatedly drawn rebukes.

Stanford's brokerage firm, Stanford Financial, marketed CDs offering rates well above the market which, SEC investigators allege, he secretly plowed into risky real estate and private equity deals instead of the safe investments he promised. The FBI had also been investigating him for possible investment in money laundering for Mexican drug cartels.

It only makes sense that Stanford, with so much to hide, would seek safety in the arms of a powerful politician who has controlled the House of Representatives since the Democrats regained the majority in 2006. Before Pelosi was in power, Stanford cozied up to then-Speaker Tom DeLay, flying the Texas congressman on his private jet 16 times. Money and power always find each other attractive. We're just not sure who came away from this embrace more tainted.

(Video stills via ABC News)

• Age: 39. Marital status: Single, though we hear Bulick may be his live-in girlfriend. Residence: San Francisco's Marina district.
• Last year, Men's Vogue called him the "rising prince" of a "new political dynasty." He's so green it hurts, refusing to wash his clothes during peak hours of energy use. He also rides San Francisco's electric Muni buses, which predisposes us to like him.
• Pelosi is president of San Francisco's Commission on the Environment, a powerless advisory group. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is his cousin, and they're supposedly good buds. But Pelosi was appointed by Newsom's predecessor, Willie Brown.
• Pelosi fling Nicole Bulick isn't what you'd call a professional model; she donned lacey underclothes in her part-time, contract position as "Arbiter of Zeitgeist" for Moxsie, a San Francisco online-fashion startup. Bizarrely, when Valleywag reported on Bulick's brief modeling career and mentioned her relationship with Pelosi, she sent us a threatening email claiming that she neither worked for Moxsie nor dated Pelosi. In fact, their relationship is well-known and she's frequently found on his arm at San Francisco society events.
• Pelosi earned three degrees at Georgetown University — which kept him conveniently close to mom, who was first elected to Congress in 1987. Georgetown received hundreds and his thousands of dollars from his mom and dad. (Paul Pelosi, Sr. is a wealthy real-estate investor who's been involved in some questionable deals.)
• His LinkedIn profile is a bit incomplete. It discusses his investment-banking work for Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase. And it mentions his job at Countrywide, for example, where he worked as a loan officer — at one of the mortgage companies most scrutinized for its role in the housing bubble and ensuing collapse of Wall Street.
• But it pointedly omits his $180,000 a year job as a senior vice president at InfoUSA, a marketer of consumer databases, which he started less than one month after his mother became House Speaker, while simultaneously holding his job at Countrywide. InfoUSA CEO Vinod Gupta also paid Bill Clinton millions of dollars as a consultant, so many suspected Pelosi's job was an attempt to win influence with Nancy Pelosi. Paul Pelosi's explanation: He got to know Gupta as a client for whom he refinanced a house, and his experience as an investment banker was useful in evaluating acquisitions.
• InfoUSA is best known for peddling lists of seniors with gambling addictions and serious diseases like Alzheimer's or cancer to opportunistic telemarketers. Gupta resigned as InfoUSA's CEO in July 2008. Pelosi is not listed on the company's investor-relations website as an officer of the company.
• Which raises the question: What was a former investment banker doing working as a mortgage loan officer, anyway?
• Pelosi is currently working as an advisor to NASA on environmental issues, and he's joined the board of Blue Earth Solutions, a recycling outfit. So basically, he dabbles in a lot of green work, but isn't holding down anything resembling a full-time job at the moment, as far as we can tell.
• Know more about Pelosi? Tip us off.

(Photo of Pelosi via Men's Vogue; photo of Pelosi and Bulick by Drew Altizer via SFLuxe)

Girald, a corporate lawyer at Skadden Arps turned Fashion Institute of Technology student, had found a tech team, secured seed funding for Moxsie, lined up five designers for an online trunk show, and built the website. But there wasn't money left to pay a model. So she donned the Lucy B lingerie herself. On the site, her head's cropped out, but she provided this photo for Valleywag:

I'm not sure what to make of this online-designer trend. Gilt Groupe, which launched last year, hasn't set the world on fire. And Girald's site? "Love the jewelry, hate the '80s-inspired wrinkled metallic clothing, meh on the rest," was one female friend's insta-review of Moxsie.

I'm mostly interested in the notion that Girald had to step in front of the camera. Sure, Cyan Banister, the founder of Zivity, a softcore, user-created porn site, stripped, but she needed to demonstrate she really used the product. Fashion is a different business; amateur models don't suggest a site that's going to display designers' wares at their best.

If Moxsie is really so low on cash it can't afford models, it doesn't speak well for its prospects of surviving the recession. If it's just a publicity stunt, well, I suppose it worked, at the cost of a little dignity.

What do you think? Is Girald cynical, brave — or a little of both?

Bonus trivia: The other model on the site is Nicole Bulick, a Moxsie contractor who's dating Paul Pelosi, Jr. He's the son of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Mom will be so proud! Here's Bulick:

Rush Limbaugh: "This would get somebody laughed out of a high school classroom. Yeah, not anymore maybe."

John C. Dvorak: "Even Bush knows better."

Naturalgas.org: "Natural gas is the cleanest of all fossil fuels."

(Photo by AP/Richard Drew)

Pickens and Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon are about to convince California voters to fork over $5 billion in a ballot proposition called the "California Alternative Fuels Initiative." It's really a giveaway to natural gas developers like Pickens and McClendon.

Good thing he's sticking to energy, an industry he understands. When last we heard from the iconic corporate raider, he was busy losing piles of money on Yahoo and cursing the company's management.

That debacle forgotten, of late he's has been getting more media attention for his role in massive projects under the catchy "Pickens Plan."

Part of that plan is California's Proposition 10, due for a vote in November. Pickens and McClendon have spent only $3.7 million so far promoting the $5 billion bond measure, according to the Wall Street Journal. If it passes, that's one heck of a return on investment.

The plan will ultimately cost taxpayers $8.9 billion and raise sales taxes with no guarantees that the state will actually see much of a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. You'd think environmentalists would have seen through Pickens "reformed oil man" facade, but you'd be wrong: With less than three months until the issue is due for a vote, no formal opposition has emerged.

Pickens is a pro at bending state politics to his will. His plan to drill for groundwater in the Texas panhandle and sell it to Dallas residents met with opposition from ecologists and landowners, since it required a 250-mile straw to drink up the Ogallala aquifer's milkshake.

So Pickens slapped some wind-turbine generators onto the plan, and with the help of some changes to local laws, managed to place himself at the head of a new water district with the power of eminent domain in order to seize the necessary land across the dusty Texas plains for the pipeline. It's the kind of move that you would think would provoke bipartisan disgust — natural-resource exploitation, to offend the liberals, with the abuse of eminent domain for private gain, to piss off the conservatives.

Instead, the longtime Republican who helped swiftboat Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry is winning green points amongst conservatives by promising "energy independence" from foreign oil. And Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D.-San Francisco, is an investor in Pickens's Clean Energy Fuels. As such, she stands to profit from the deal as well, effectively silencing the state and national Democratic Party on the issue

Our ten-gallon hats are off to the man for suckering both sides of the aisle into giving him what he wants and the public into thinking he's motivated by anything more than greed. Well played, Mr. Pickens, well played.