Contributing to the "consult your star chart" horror is the fact that Biden's wife and daughter died in a car crash in 1972, which nearly killed his two sons, too. Did Nostradamus have a prediction for world leaders who attract vehicle pile-ups? [NBC-NY]

LeDuff's story today on the murder of a witness to another murder unfolds like a single strand of an unceasing web of violence, drugs, and urban hopelessness; by the time LeDuff's finished, he's detailed two gun murders, a man beaten to death in a nightclub, the vagaries of Detroit's biggest crack gang, multiple crime witnesses terrified for their own lives, an old man beaten and robbed, and one informant convinced the prosecutor of the case he's informing on is going to get him killed. And vice versa!

"Me and my family's dead, know what I'm saying? I mean, the first witness got killed," he shouted. "The prosecutor's desperate for a case but they can't even use that tape. I could have been lying. It's hearsay. If they subpoena me, I ain't saying s—-. I'm taking the Fifth. Who's gonna protect me? BMF runs the streets. I'm f——— dead. I ain't going out without a gun battle. I promise. There's gonna be a war."

The prosecutor wears a bulletproof vest, btw. Detroit: Jesus Christ, what the fuck. Read the whole story. And the upshot of this piece of journalism: LeDuff tells us he's taking precautions with his family. "Let me just say they're staying elsewhere." [Pic: Flickr]

The article (which is incomprehensibly only the second most-read article on the Las Vegas Sun's website) focuses on the "safety" and "decency" concerns raised by locals re: the mobile sin platform, which was devised as an advertisement for Deja Vu Showgirls and is described thusly:

It's akin to a small U-Haul truck but with Plexiglas surrounding the brightly lit cargo area instead of walls. In the middle is a gleaming stripper pole. Swinging around the pole is a scantily clad young woman. Two of her fellow strippers are in the back of the truck too, awaiting their turns.

Puttering up and down Las Vegas Boulevard on Monday night, it was photographed by nearly everyone it pulled alongside, from CityCenter construction workers to an SUV-load of 20-somethings from Colorado.

Yes, that sounds pretty distracting. In fact, I would say if a driver making his way down the Strip was watching a DVD of Wall-E on a television screen that covered his entire windshield while simultaneously breaking up with his girlfriend via text message and solving a complex math problem on an abacus he would be only 76% as distracted as if he was watching the stripper-mobile wend its way through Sin City. Imagine seeing the Pope-mobile driving down the road, only the Pope was stripping in it. That's the level of distraction we're dealing with it.

Concerned citizens have been complaining to city officials about the stripper-mobile. But it turns out, unsurprisingly, that Las Vegas does not have any laws precluding women from stripping in a truck:

Nothing about the women or the truck is illegal, a Metro Police spokesman said. "As long as it's not impeding traffic, it's fine," Officer Jacinto Rivera explained.

Yes, everything is kosher so long as people continue driving their cars while they photograph the stripper-mobile, like in this CNN report:

And if the mere existence of the stripper-mobile does not prove to you that Las Vegas is a gloriously wasted blight upon America from which our eventual destruction will spring, consider the hilarious way councilwoman Chris Giunchigliani went about expressing her concerns about it:

I don't care about the content or that they're female dancers. I'm sick of the women, in fact - let's get some men up there for once. But this is just illegal.

Viva Las Vegas!

UPDATE: A blog calling itself the "Nevada Progressive" is defending the Stripper-mobile as an example of "free speech." Now the stripper-mobile has confirmed my preconceived notions of progressives, too!

(photo via Roadsidepictures' Flickr)

The WSJ says that companies are seeking "A New Compact With Workers." Sounds comforting, does it not? A new compact. A new agreement. A new partnership, so that both of us may move forward, together. And here it is: Lower pay, fewer health care benefits, and no retirement plan.

Thank god that new compact is finished. American business can move on to the real business of American business, which is: business. And you, the workers, can move on to the new business of American workers, which is: moving into your car, now that your home's been foreclosed on.

That will also benefit the US auto industry. Win-win.

Before you go examining this New Compact (Car—heh!) too closely, it's worth considering the pain that companies themselves are going through. It's not just a pity party for you workers, you know. The demand for new corporate jets is still "sluggish." That's a row that corporate titans are forced to hoe; a cross they're forced to bear; a first class commercial seat they're forced to occupy, for the time being.

Shared sacrifice. It's a phrase that means something, at certain times. At other times, it's a meaningless phrase used to obfuscate a fundamentally unjust situation. That's not the point. The point is that we're all in this together. The boss will settle for Net Jets; you, the average poor bastard living in Flint Michigan, plant a vegetable garden on abandoned urban lots, to give you sustenance through the harsh, jobless winter. In both cases, it's about people, and doing things. Whatever you do, don't start a revolution.
[Pic: AP]

"How would you like to use your mobile device to see a map of available parking spaces in your neighborhood," Mayor Bloomberg asks in a Daily News op-ed, "and also use it to pay your meter?" That would be amazing, if we had a car. (Though we don't think people should be using their "mobile devices" while driving around our neighborhoods maybe?)

Then Bloomberg promises to get rid of the dreaded alternate-side parking in the nicer Brooklyn neighborhoods, and announces that "soon, we'll begin a pilot program in the Riverdale section of the Bronx."

Oh, good. A pilot cell-phone parking meter project will begin soon, in the Bronx.

Man, that reminds us, what were we just reading about the Bronx again? Oh, right, it remains America's poorest urban county with more than a quarter of the population living below the poverty line. And that is not counting the homeless!

"Last year, according to the Coalition for the Homeless, there were more than 110,000 people who spent at least one night in a shelter," said Joel Berg of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger.

The report also found 26 percent of Hispanics are at poverty level — the highest of any ethnic group in the city. The Bronx and Queens are the only boroughs that saw the overall number of poor go up between 2007 and 2008. The Bronx came in with nearly 22,000 people.

"One of the reasons that is, is poor people are being pushed out of places like Manhattan and forced to relocate to the Bronx," Berg said.

Well, hopefully the 2009 numbers will show the effects of Mayor Bloomberg's ambitious, poverty-fighting "mobile device parking meter pilot program."

Eberhard has suddenly dropped his suit, the San Jose Business Journal reports. It seems safe to assume some sort of settlement was reached; the $465 million in federal funds Tesla received from the Department of Energy after Eberhard filed could have freed up other cash for a payout, or convinced Eberhard that Tesla had the resources to mount a protracted fight. Or maybe Tesla was simply scared: it just lost a preliminary motion to throw out the case.

Tesla's money also helped it secure land in the Stanford Research Park, not far from Facebook's new headquarters, replacing a San Jose parcel it had planned to acquire but lost in January thanks to its lack of capital.

Now the company can turn its attention to the real challenge: Fighting off Nissan, which just rolled out its "Leaf" electric car, which it plans to introduce in 2012. Nissan, which will lease the battery pack separately, has said its car will compete with gas-powered vehicles costing $25,000-$30,000. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, meanwhile, has staked his company's future on the Model S, which is a full-sized sedan to the compact Leaf but starting around $50,000. In addition to an apparent price gap, Tesla must also wrestle with the recent departure of its science director, in charge of the critical battery system. And it must site and build a factory to manufacture the S itself.

Like most startups, Tesla has been through its share of booms and busts. Right now it's on a roll; the question is whether it can build up enough momentum for the inevitable crash back to reality.

[lawsuit news via Business Insider]

Mike Puerto quit a Wall Street trading gig in 2000, started driving a taxi, and now is almost set to put his own TV show pilot into production. He's found success in the most bootleg way possible!

After finishing the script — a Wall Street drama — he taped a sign behind his driver's seat: "If you are a TV producer or executive, I have a pilot ready to go into production."

Okay, so his producer and photography director are volunteers and he's planning to buy airtime himself to run the show. Still! Dreams can come true! This will also work for laid off journalists, who should be much better writers than former Wall Street guys anyhow. For example, Justin Rocket Silverman, who wrote this story for the NYP, could drive a taxi and hawk a pilot script about a guy who quits a reporting job to become a taxi driver and sells a pilot script. And when it's slow the guy fingerbangs his girlfriend, in the cab.
Winner!

Paramount/DreamWorks, the studios behind the franchise, set the movie to premier in 2011. The director said he wants more time, and maybe take some time off. Maybe our hulking iron behemoth will get his creative juices flowing.

The gigantic machine has treads because driving it to its home in a German open-air coal mine was cheaper than having to ship the behemoth there. Couldn't they have just attached rockets and had it fly there like Optimus Prime? Bay will show them how!

More pictures and stats here.

We don't know! We asked our tipster and he said he couldn't see since he pulled up so close to snap the pic but added, "I have a feeling she's controlling the driver with her mind." Ha!

So, who knows what clear is riding around Tinsel Town in a metallic vehicle? Has Tom Cruise bought his extraterrestrial child her own Lexus hardtop convertible already? Or does automaton bride Katie Holmes have the help ferry Miss Suri around town in it when she thinks she can dance? Maybe a fellow cultist fan who wants to get in good with the boss? The ghost of L. Ron Hubbard?! If one of you out there has the answer, leave us a comment or send us an email.

Facebook's policies on usernames state that "Facebook username should have a clear connection to one's identity." But it's not been entirely clear how that would be enforced. Now we have an example; one user wrote in to tell us Facebook has revoked his "BMWUSA" username, which he claims he picked because he loves the German automaker's luxury cars.

"Now,] I am forced to pick a username that is left over after millions have already picked their names."

Well, sure, but our sympathy is limited: BMWUSA sounds an awful lot like a username intended for sale; we wonder if our tipster didn't hold out hope for a payday when the care company decided it wanted to get ahold of "facebook.com/bmwusa". When Facebook opened the doors to new usernames, it prompted a land-grab not unlike the early rush for dot-com domains. BMWUSA marks an early showdown in this new namespace between corporations and purported domain squatters.

Even if the username was selected in earnest, Facebook's response was predictable. Facebook is not an open system, like the internet; it's a privately held, often censorious social network.

Other apparent Facesquatters, beware: In its notice below, shown to our tipster, Facebook writes, "If you see other people with usernames hat do not accurately represent their real names, it is only because they have not yet been removed for misuse." We've called and emailed the Facebook press team to ask if a crackdown is imminent and are waiting to hear back.

(Top pic by wolfwhite99 on Flickr)

At around noon today, the same time Sgt. Dennis O'Connor, president of the Cambridge Police Superior Officers Association, gave his press conference trying to push back against perceptions that the Cambridge cops aren't exactly racially enlightened, Harvard student Seth Bannon spotted this cop pull up to a deli on Massachussetts Ave. in what appears to be his personal SUV with a hilarious license plate: WHY-TEE.

We asked Bannon, who first Twittered the picture, to tell us more:

I was eating breakfast at the Gourmet Express Market and Deli (1868 Mass Ave, Cambridge), when around NOON the black SUV pictured backed into that space and parked illegally. The police officer pictured exited the SUV, walked into the Deli, ordered a sub, got back into the SUV, and drove off. I took the picture as the officer was getting back into the SUV.

I'm not nearly as disturbed by the (entirely unnecessary) illegal parking job as I am by the utter crudeness of the plates, especially in the aftermath of the Gates debacle.

I've attached two additional photos I snapped. In one you can see the officer holding the delicious sub he purchased.

Cheers,

Seth Bannon

No, seriously, you're way too distracted. I know I am. Things I can do while driving, at the same time:

• Use a stick shift,
  
  
• smoke a cigarette,
  
  
• change CDs,
  
  
• drink a slurpee,
  
  
• and talk on the phone.

But isn't that talent, though? I could probably eat a cheeseburger, too-which some places actually encourage, especially on the West Coast, where In-N-Out will hand you your food in a box to eat "in your car"-but it wouldn't go well with the Cig and the Slurpee. Apparently, this kind of thing isn't appreciated by The Olds at the Times, especially when teenagers do it:

"Extensive research shows the dangers of distracted driving. Studies say that drivers using phones are four times as likely to cause a crash as other drivers, and the likelihood that they will crash is equal to that of someone with a .08 percent blood alcohol level, the point at which drivers are generally considered intoxicated. Research also shows that hands-free devices do not eliminate the risks, and may worsen them by suggesting that the behavior is safe. "

So I guess what they're saying is that it's better to get behind the wheel kind of drunk than be on your phone. Oh, and some places, it's illegal.

Anyway, the only part of this Times article that's revelatory in any regard (because the entire thing is basically "if you're doing anything but driving you're going to crash," which I think they teach you in Drivers Ed but don't remember because I was napping) is that the New York Times makes crafty videogames!

Amazing. Basically, you have to use the numbers at the top of your keyboard (not your keypad, because that would be cheating) to pick out the "gate" your call will drive through while clicking letters on a phone with your mouse to simulate texting. It's pretty fun and you will laugh at how many times you crash into the gates, but also, how terrible of a simulation texting and driving is, particularly because the game has you changing five lanes every two seconds, but mostly because texting and driving is way easier than that, duh. Besides which, it's like your parents say: it's not you you're worried about. It's the other drivers.

The US Atlas Of Texting-While-Driving Laws [Jalopnik]

Drivers and Legislators Dismiss Cellphone Risks [NYT]

Silly New York Times Driving Video Game [NYT]

Take Roger Ebert's scathing review for the Chicago Sun-Times:

If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

Oh, sad robot.

Ray Bennett at the Hollywood Reporter is equally dismissive:

Bay's team of four editors stitch together smashing but meaningless images, though it's as difficult to make out which machine is which as it is to tell what anyone is saying. The noise level — not helped by Steve Jablonsky's relentless score — is super-intense and everyone yells lines at high speed. Because nothing they're saying makes any sense, it's hardly important.

LaBeouf gets little chance to show what charm he might have. Meanwhile, Fox has little to do except look great in a tank top and tight jeans while running in slow motion through flying sand.

Variety and a couple other pubs actually enjoyed the thing, if only for the slickness of the stupidity. But while we're fully expecting the movie to ravage the Fourth of July holiday box office like so many crazed alien robots ravage the lurid curves of Megan Fox, we also wonder how long this dumb-but-bracing genre of summer action pic can last. What with a big, big hit like Star Trek earning glowing notices and being zingy and CGI-packed. Can a schlockist like Michael Bay continue to tread water when more and more talented directors—both visualists and storytellers—successfully raise the bar?

Let's hope not. We mean, watching a toaster come alive and eat Shia LaBeouf may have its place in the world, but it's also nice to at least begin to care about characters and revel in a witty turn of phrase here and there. "Run, oh God, run! The angry space Egyptian robots are coming," barely even counts for camp value these days.

Brian Dooda, a Brooklyn film archivist, was riding his bike on East Dr. in Central Park at about 5 p.m. on Thursday when he says a grey SUV cut him off, nearly swiping his front tire. Angered, Dooda caught up with the car, which had "NYP" license plates designating its driver as a media representative, at the next red light. He positioned himself in front of the SUV and told the driver to slow down and observe the park's 25 m.p.h. speed limit. Here's what happened next, according to an account Dooda gave to the NYPD and posted on a cycling message board:

The driver then accelerated, lunging straight into me, knocking me and my bicycle to the ground and to the left side of his car. I quickly got to my feet and positioned myself in front of his vehicle to prevent him from fleeing the scene. I called out to bystanders to call the police and yelled at the driver that he was insane, he just hit me, and he can't leave. The driver again accelerated into me, with no intention of stopping, forcing me, prostrate, onto the drivers side hood of his vehicle. Riding precariously with a 4,000 lb wheel inches from pulling me beneath it, I screamed for the driver to "Stop!!! Please Stop!!" over and over. He continued to ignore my pleas for some 200ft. keeping a steady 5 or 10mph. He then stopped suddenly allowing me to fall off the side of the hood. Just as quickly as he stopped he violently accelerated again knocking me to the side. This time I managed to stay standing. The driver then sped off Northbound. At this point several witnesses came to my aid and reported his license plate.

Dooda emerged from the ordeal with only a scraped elbow, but another poster to the message board who claimed to witness to the incident, painted a pretty scary picture. (In fact, it was her post that originally prompted Dooda to come forward with the statement he gave to police):

It was a bizarre sight ... a cyclist was on the hood, shouting at the driver, to please please stop the car. That cyclist kept shouting to the guy to stop, he was saying/shouting, "You could have killed me. Stop, Please stop. This is my life." something like that. We saw his bike in the road, left behind, as the SUV drove on, with the cyclist on his hood.

When the cops arrived and told Dooda that the "NYP" plate meant that the driver who nearly killed him was a journalist, Dooda told Gawker he joked: "I wonder if he's from Fox News, because he was such an asshole."

He was!

Gawker tracked down the driver, Don Broderick, who says he is a news writer for Fox News (he was formerly a reporter for the New York Post). When we first called him to confirm that he was the man to whom the vehicle that dragged Dooda for blocks was registered, Broderick said, "I don't know what you're talking about," and asked if he could call us back. A couple hours later, he called to acknowledge that he was indeed the driver, but said that he was the victim of a "vigilante" bicyclist who had attacked him: "Whatever this guy is claiming, there's no truth involved—he punched me. And I left, because he was attacking me."

Dooda says he never laid hands on Broderick, whom, he says, stared with "cold psychotic intent" while Dooda was on his hood, and answered his pleas to stop with shrugs of the shoulders and the occasional "get the fuck out of here."

"He wasn't like hanging out the window screaming 'you fucking pussy!'" Dooda says. "He spoke with his car."

Both men agree that the altercation started because Dooda was riding his bike in the left-hand lane at roughly 25 m.p.h., which caused a line of ten or so cars to back up behind him. Broderick's was the last car to get around him, which is when Dooda says Broderick tried to send him a message by abruptly cutting back over into the left lane in front of him, coming close to his tire. "He initiated the whole encounter by almost running into me," he says. "I'm sure he felt like I was antagonizing motorists because I was in the left lane riding a bicycle. But did I attack him? If he considers me pointing out that he is an aggressive and dangerous driver to be an attack, yes. Otherwise, no."

No matter who started it, actually hitting someone with your car, and then hitting them again, and then dragging them on your hood for 200 feet, and then driving away can't be legal! Dooda, who was only slightly injured with some scrapes and bruises, filed a police report with the Central Park Precinct, and says a detective has been in touch. Broderick says he hasn't been contacted by the police, and an NYPD spokesperson couldn't immediately confirm that an investigation is underway.

New York Press license plates are issued to members of the working media who can demonstrate that they are employed by a news organization—in Broderick's case, Fox. They let reporters park in special reserved spots in New York City and avoid tickets for illegal parking if they're actually covering a news story. They also let road-ragers get tagged as media employees, which sparks the interest of bloggers.

A Fox News spokeswoman didn't immediately return calls for comment.

[Illustration by Steven Dressler; if you have actual photos of the incident, please send them our way.]

The Gubmint

Maybe an energy policy that for years consisted entirely of "keep gas prices as low as possible" directly encouraged overproduction of the huge cars that no one wants anymore because oil will no longer be so ridiculously cheap ever again.

And maybe the young liberal technocrats in charge of things now don't care about the industrial midwest and don't understand the importance of preserving American manufacturing jobs, which is why they'll give the banks a blank check and let them fight even the most basic of new regulatory legislation while demanding crippling concessions from the automakers in exchange for a fraction of the cash.

Also now they will seize all the automakers because they are Kenyan Communists.

The Foreigners

"George Washington would roll over in his grave and call it treason for letting foreigners come in here and take away what we had built," a longtime autoworker says in The New Yorker's April story on the death of Detroit. And it's true! The Japanese waltzed in here offering better, more fuel-efficient cars during the oil crisis in the '70s, manufactured in non-union plants down in the lawless South, and next thing you know no one wants a Firebird anymore.

And these foreigners also won the affection of all these southern Republican lawmakers, who refused to help Detroit because Nissan owned their districts. It's un-American.

The Hippies

Wah wah we want an electric car the hippies all said. And so California made Detroit build an electric car. But it was expensive, and real Americans, who only buy cars based on how loud, big, and cheap they are (gas is still so cheap whee!), didn't want anything to do with the EV1.

Now G.M. is sinking billions into the Chevy Volt, an all-electric car that will cost twice as much as a Prius, and still be a Chevy, so no one will want it.

The Elitists

The only people left in America with any money are various liberal New York Times-reading coastal elitists. And guess what? They don't buy American! If they don't take trains, they buy Toyotas and Hondas. Because American cars aren't hip enough for them.

The Jews?

In addiction to controlling the New World Order, the Jews caused the first oil crisis with that whole Yom Kippur War thing.

The Arabs?

They still have allllll the oil (besides all the oil we haven't yet drilled for, in Alaska, because of hippies), and they won't just give it to us for free! What jerks!

The Unions

Ok, so, G.M. spends more than $1,000 per car manufactured on the entirely useless and stupid act of "providing health care to current and retired workers." And the stubborn unions that crippled the industry refuse to negotiate in good faith, demanding crazy things like "equitable sacrifices from bondholders" in exchange for the various concessions they've made, like accepting half their pension funds in Ford stock and introducing a two-tiered wage plan for new hires!

And yes, workers won the right to get paid even when they weren't working, so that the robots wouldn't steal their jobs, and they could retire after thirty years and hold on to very nice health plans and pensions. All in all it was a lot like France or something.

It could be argued that these out-of-control labor costs pale in seriousness to the various ridiculous missteps and idiotic business decisions management made over the last 30 years but only if you are a communist.

Once again those foreign-owned plants did it right. Their non-unionized workers contribute to the cost of their own health care, encouraging many of them to not get sick so much, and instead of fancy guaranteed pensions they all have 401(k)s, which encourages them to work even harder, because now those 401(k)s are worth zero dollars.

Gremlins

This seems like the most likely explanation.

As if you didn't have enough trouble getting stoned and magically appearing in front of the Waffles and Dinges mobile apparatus, avoiding the Mitzvah Tank, finding your Mudd Coffee Truck, beating off crowds at any number of Mr. Softee Mobile, getting on Cash Cab - hell, getting an actual cab - or not getting hit by cars jaywalking in any part of the city, now you have to concern yourself with not being humiliated in perpetuity by the Google Street View Sandcruiser, back in town for a second tour of duty in all five boroughs.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.We've all seen the serendipitous results. Schadenfreude by the rest of the country (and naturally, all of New York) is in full effect. We can't wait for Google to lovingly re-document your teary breakup in front of the Astor Place cube, your rainy curbside soaking outside the 2nd Avenue F-Train stop, Michael Musto biking up Avenue A, some skaters falling on their face in Union Square, Park Slope baby stroller traffic jams, the sheer joy that will be Every. Square. Block of Williamsburg and Murray Hill, and all the wonderfully drunk, insane shit we love about this city. NYU kids puking, that bum jacking off in Madison Square Park. All of it.

The New York Times even got in on the fun: they wanted to ride shotgun in the Google Street View whip to get the full experience of magically awakening and provoking some of the weirdest split-second snapshots of humanity. And Google shot them down. Twice.

Google officials are eager to preserve the car's mystery status. They would not divulge the car's route, but they did say that the car was in New York City for about a month, photographing streets in all five boroughs.

A Google spokeswoman, Elaine Filadelfo, would not say whether there was one car in New York or several. She denied a request for a ride in the car, saying the company did not want to risk exposing the "proprietary technology" used by the cameras...A reporter for The New York Times spotted the car last Tuesday at a stoplight on West 15th Street near the West Side Highway and asked to ride along. The driver declined.

If by "proprietary technology" they mean "black magic," sure. There's nothing not to like about this story, as the Times even used Vanishing New York blogger Jeremiah Moss's man-on-the-street pictures (seen here) from his blog. And sourced them properly, too! Also, "spying" on the Google Street View car: meta. It's like finding a white stag!

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Unfortunately, those who don't feel like being in the spotlight can't really do much to fight back against Google. Sure, there's a place you can file a complaint, and faces from Street View are now "blurred out." But what's the fun in that? New Yorkers should simply embrace the fact that these humiliation-spell-casting camera monsters are roaming the streets, and be resilient: put your best clothing on for them, and try to smile as that rickshaw biker near Central Park runs smack into you while staring at one.

Photo from Swerz photostream.
Put on Your Best Clothes Before Going Out: Google's Camera Car May Cross Your Path [New York Times]

Henderson, whose face throughout much of the segment bore the look of a shell-shocked Pilgrim who'd traveled through time to find himself in the middle of a Cirque Du Soleil performance, refused to bite the hook of Beck's crazy-baiting, even going so far as to explain how Beck was so painfully, thoroughly wrong about many of the things he said, including his condemnation of the auto unions.

To his credit, Beck did cop to his penchant for acting "squirrelly" on the air. So I guess we'll describe him as a "squirrelly maniacal dildo" from here on out.

Thanks to Gawker intern Sarah Moroz for catching this clip for us!

Morgenstern runs Valor Equity Partners, which led a $40 million investment in Tesla in February 2008 and controls a seat on the board. The badly mismanaged electric-car startup quickly blew through Valor's money; by October, it was down to $9 million in cash. Despite raising more money from investors, Tesla is running on fumes, and collecting deposits for its Model S electric sedan, a car which exists only as a barely drivable quasi-prototype. Tesla requires hundreds of millions of dollars more than it has to make the Model S a reality — which is why Morgenstern's talk of new money is so interesting.

Morgenstern is briefly visible in the video, apparently recorded by an unknown Tesla fan who hopped in with Morgenstern when offered a test drive, and his face matches another published photo. A Mexican restaurant in Highland Park, a suburb north of Chicago, briefly appears in the shot. According to public records, Morgenstern's family foundation is based in Highland Park. The car is one of Tesla's Founders Series, the first built, and Morgenstern has been reported as one of the buyers in that series. He did not return a message left for him at Valor.

As he pulls away from the restaurant, Morgenstern takes a call and mentions that he's driving around Highwood, a nearby suburban district. During the ride, Morgenstern took a call and discussed Tesla's finances, including rumors previously reported in Valleywag that Tesla was about to take money from a strategic investor. Morgenstern expressed confidence that the deal would be announced Monday or Tuesday. Other sources Valleywag spoke to are less sanguine. Tesla CEO Elon Musk is loathe to surrender control of the company to someone — and yet a new investor would be understandably reluctant to invest if Musk's replacement as CEO weren't a condition of the deal.

So here's the question: Is the video a genuine scoop — or a hoax staged by Tesla?

It does seem curious that Morgenstern's phone just happened to ring seconds after he starts cruising down the street. But if it's a hoax, it's a very foolish one. For one thing, investors don't like their deals getting leaked before the ink is dry. A leak like this, if intentional, may well scuttle the deal, or weaken Tesla's negotiating stance.

And then there's this: Morgenstern uttered something particularly damning on the phone. He said the investment will "make people believers that the sedan will be produced."

Not, mind you, actually allow Tesla to produce its new Model S. It will merely make people believe that it will. That could be read as encouraging optimism among potential buyers. Or it could be read as an intent to deceive people into handing over deposit money for a car that Tesla currently cannot build. Would he really have said that if he knew he was being taped?

It's not that Musk's dreams — introducing a mass-market electric car, colonizing space — are ignoble. Far from it. It's just that he lacks the means and the mindset to realize them.

Every dreamer must turn huckster at some point, lest his fantasies remain just that. But Musk is taking the practice to an extreme.

He is touring the United States, showing off a barely driveable show-car version of his Model S electric sedan, hoping to drum up deposits — sorry, "reservation fees" — on which his cash-strapped company will live until, in theory, it lands $350 million in government loans to build the car — maybe in 2011 but more likely in 2012, years after Musk first predicted his company would sell a mass-market sedan. If it happens at all. Musk has been treating the loans as a sure thing for months, but the company's application has yet to be approved.

If he cannot stop human motorists from polluting the planet, he will try to help them escape it through his other company, Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX. But SpaceX, too, seems to be running aground. The latest launch of his Falcon 1 rocket was cancelled, and the vehicle is rotting in the moist salt air of Omelek Island in Kwajalein while his technicians scramble to fix a vibration problem.

Aside from Falcon 1, Musk has no tested vehicles. The Falcon 9, the rocketship which Musk hopes will replace the Space Shuttle in carrying crew to the International Space Station, has not yet had its maiden flgiht. According to an archived SpaceX launch schedule, that was supposed to happen last year. An updated schedule shows that SpaceX's paying clients from Malaysia to Sweden have had their launches delayed, in some cases by years.

Musk's personal life is another source of unmanaged distraction. He is in the midst of a divorce from his wife, Justine Musk; the couple has five children. He is engaged to a British actress, the recently blonde Talulah Riley, whom he is supposed to marry this year. (That launch's schedule, too, has seemed to shift.)

Musk's underlings report a fickle, reality-resistant boss, flitting from idea to idea but never quite landing. And yet we're supposed to believe that Musk will get us to Mars by 2020 on the dot?

There's the real danger: Not that Musk's dreams are wrong, but that his personal failings mean it's more than likely he'll never realize them. Then the danger is that Musk's frothingly dizzy fanboys and orgasmically giggling fangirls will turn not just against Musk but against the dreams of electric cars and spaceflight. That's why, if you hope to zip around this rock without polluting it, or escape its gravity altogether, Elon Musk should not be your hero. The dream is not the dreamer.

(Photo via SpaceX)

Mostly Letterman wanted to know why Detroit's big car companies didn't come up with mass-market electric cars, and whether Tesla's Roadster really would save the planet. (He made a good point about carbon emissions from coal-fired electrical plants.)

But Letterman, when he let Musk get a word in edgewise, let him off easy. He didn't quiz Musk, for example, on whether the Model S show car Musk drove on set was the real thing. According to Dan Neil at the Los Angeles Times, it's not. The slapped-together prototype, a rebuilt Mercedes with a Tesla-designed powertrain, is "just barely ambulatory — more like a glorified golf cart than a harbinger of tomorrow tech," Neil wrote. And Tesla executives confessed to Neil that the car was far from being finished in its design, let alone production.

Here's another thing Letterman should have asked about: How is Musk going to build the Model S? Even if Tesla gets the $350 million in government loans it's hoping for — far from a sure thing — it will fall hundreds of millions of dollars short of the real cost of bringing the Model S to market. An insider tells us Tesla is about to close a new round of financing from a so-called "strategic" investor — that is, some industry powerhouse, rather than a traditional financier. Tesla almost ran out of money last fall, and has run on fumes since then, despite raising a $40 million round of convertible debt from existing investors.

Any new money will mean handing a large stake to the new investor. Daimler, which already has a deal to buy parts from Tesla for its own electric car, is a strong possibility. But will they leave a hothead like Musk, with his habit of stretching the truth, in charge? That's what Letterman should have asked — not if electric cars will come to market, but if Musk will be the man to do it.

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