"Rep. Ryan Tastes The Grapes Of Wrath" - $350 wine while cutting seniors' safety net

[lutefisk]

People who vote for people like Ryan are truly idiots.

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/07/rep-paul-ryans-pricey-pinot-noir.php

[mojowork_n]

1. On Thom Hartman's radio program yesterday,

They gave the price as $750/bottle. (Or that's what I remember hearing.)

Either way, the woman who was in the restaurant will be on his show this afternoon.

....It made me think -- the domain name "wealth porn" is not currently being used --
where could I go with a similar tale? About a Republican ideologue, a friend of a
friend, who's been pretty profligate with *his* ill-gained executive pay-offs.
(A string of ex-Iron Curtain mail order / internet future ex-wives-to-be.)

....Or the story I heard from someone down at the Milwaukee Yacht Club / Marina,
very near to where I live.

One of the big, big boats down there -- the one
that has a huge discothèque right in the middle
of it -- fills up with $40,000 worth of fuel (I
suppose, diesel, which is a little higher than
gas right now), every time it crosses Lake Michigan
and comes back.

If you've ever been to Navy Pier in Chicago, you've
seen that category of boat up close.

I couldn't fully believe the numbers, though,
until I did a little online research. A really big,
big yacht in the Carribean -- photo, below, with
link -- has a 300,000 liter fuel tank. (At $3.75
a gallon, that would equal close to $300,000.
So maybe a lesser craft, here on the Great
Lakes, could get by with a fuel reserve less
than 15 % that size.)

Seems plausible.



http://www.ybw.com/forums/showthread.php?t=168038

When you've got half the population shutting their eyes, ready to vote for a straight
RepubliCon ticket in hopes of fostering "job creation," by giving the oligarchs
everything they're asking for (the "Americans for Prosperity" / "Freedomworks" crowd),

http://www.counterpunch.org/elich07112011.html

...would it give some people pause to have a better idea of just how most of
those "job creation" funds actually get spent?

If I had to open my wallet and peel off a stack of 400 Benjamins, every time I
pulled up to the pump, I'd be against repealing the Bush tax cuts, too.

But then I guess it's necessary, sometimes, to actually go out in person to visit
some of those Cayman Islands and Bermuda off-shore tax shelters.

What do I know from high finance? ...But I was kind of thinking, what if there was
some kind of "Tales of the Rich and Shameless" sort of -Wiki site, where people
could post stuff. Maybe it would catch on, and even develop a following?

The raw numbers are pretty staggering:

http://www.lcurve.org/images/LCurveFlier2003.pdf

($40,000, by the way, is the mean annual income for an American family, according
to the link above, the pdf.)

[mysuzuki2]

4. I drank a bottle of wine tonight

it cost $1.29. Hic.

[Yon_Yonson]

5. Sounds like Ripple ....

I don't even know if you can still buy that gut rot

[mysuzuki2]

6. nah, they don't make Ripple anymore.

it was one of thes 6 oz bottles of Chardoney and was on sale as a close out. It wasn't good wine by any means but it was drinkable. It probably tasted as good to me as the $350.00 stuff would.

[Yon_Yonson]

2. Paul Ryans dinner partners have been identified

TPMMuckraker

Paul Ryan's $700-Wine-Sipping Buddies: Hedge Fund Manager And University Of Chicago Economist

Susan Crabtree | July 9, 2011, 5:24PM

It didn't take long for TPM readers to identify the two likeminded conservatives with whom Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) shared two pricey $350 bottles of Pinot Noir Wednesday night.

The two names repeatedly flooded into TPM's e-mail since our story on Ryan's big spending night first ran Friday, and we spent the next 24 hours trying to reach the pair to confirm their identities and get their side of the story.



The three men were spotted ordering the $700 worth of wine at Bistro Bis on Capitol Hill by an associate professor of business at Rutgers University named Susan Feinberg. After dining in the same restaurant with her husband, Feinberg confronted Ryan and his pals about the high-end wine. The exchange became contentious. Ryan professed not to know the price of the wine, and one of his buddies responded to Feinberg's chastisement by loudly saying, "Fuck her," Feinberg told TPM.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/07/mystery_solved_ryans_dinner_dates_ided.php

[mojowork_n]

3. Two bottles @ 350 ea.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/07/mystery_solved_ryans_dinner_dates_ided.php?ref=tn

The three men were spotted ordering the $700 worth of wine at Bistro Bis on Capitol Hill by an associate professor of business at Rutgers University named Susan Feinberg. After dining in the same restaurant with her husband, Feinberg confronted Ryan and his pals about the high-end wine. The exchange became contentious. Ryan professed not to know the price of the wine, and one of his buddies responded to Feinberg's chastisement by loudly saying, "Fuck her," Feinberg told TPM.

When TPM asked Ryan who he was dining with Wednesday night, he declined to identify them, saying only that they were economists, not lobbyists. But TPM has confirmed that the two other men with Ryan were Cliff Asness and John Cochrane. Both men have doctorate degrees in economics and are well-known in the conservative media world as die-hard proponents of the free market's ability to right itself without government bailouts when the crisis hit in late 2008.

Asness, who ordered the wine and who, according to Feinberg was the one who said "Fuck her," is better known as a high-profile hedge fund manager. Asness founded and runs AQR Capital, which manages an estimated $26 billion in a variety of traditional products and hedge funds, and his life story has been the subject of numerous books and articles about the rise and fall of Wall Street. He's also grabbed headlines for being one of the most voluble opponents of President Obama's economic policies...

<snip>

...In May 2009, Asness served as a guest host on CNBC's Squawk Box and defended the $450 million in bonuses AIG executives received, arguing that President Obama and the Congress are responsible for the economic crisis and should pay the execs the bonuses themselves.

Before launching AQR Capital in 1997, Asness worked for Goldman Sachs, the most profitable securities firm in Wall Street history, as the director of quantitative research for its Asset Management Division.

By the end of 2008, the firm was at the epicenter of the global financial crisis and received a $12.9 billion government bailout ($10 billion of which it paid back the next year). Amid the crisis, Goldman Sachs was under fire for doling out billions in bonuses.

"Cliff and his team at Goldman were responsible for building quantitative models to add value in global equity, fixed income and currency markets for Goldman clients and partner," states the bio on his firm's website.

Asness graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and went on to earn his Ph.D from the University of Chicago.

As TPM reported Friday, Ryan says he decided to pay for one of the bottles of wine after being confronted by Feinberg out of an abundance of caution. Ryan's office provided TPM with a copy of his credit card receipt. Congressional ethics rules bar congressman from receiving gifts from lobbyists and gifts of over $100 from anyone.