Quinn, wife of former Washington Post editor (and abundant life-liver) Ben Bradlee, divides the world into two groups: those who have attended one of her garden parties, who are good and honest people (like Ken Starr), and those who have not, who are outsiders, not to be trusted (like Hillary Clinton).

At some point, perhaps recently or perhaps in the distant past, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. turned down a party invitation from Sally Quinn. Or so we are forced to assume, from this vague account:

What nobody will say publicly, for fear of being called a racist, is that he is notorious, especially among many of his colleagues (black and white) at Harvard, for being short-tempered and arrogant. I have had personal dealings with him in which his behavior was not honorable.

Yes. We all know how terrified people are of calling black academics "short-tempered" and "arrogant," adjectives we feel like we've heard applied to every single nationally prominent black intellectual in the nation besides Skip Gates.

But Sally Quinn, she knows the important thing is that discrimination goes both ways. Gates may have been wrongfully arrested, but Quinn was once yelled at by a black cop. Quinn, though, was scared of the yelling black man, with the gun, and so she did not Talk Back to him. She is, indeed, wiser and more honorable than Professor Gates.

My friend had a similar incident that night and was not so prudent. She was arrested, handcuffed and hauled off to jail. Were we singled out because we were white? Who knows. But if we had been black and the police white, would it have been a story about racial profiling? Probably. As I sat there seething with my child in his car seat in back, the first thing I thought of was: this is how most black people must feel every day when confronting the police.

Don't laugh at that last bit: Quinn, like black people across the nation, lives in a racially segregated ghetto ruled and policed by the ethnic majority. It is called Georgetown.

Here is a sentence both staggering and hilarious in its unselfawareness: "I mentioned on National Public Radio this week that in response to the Gates & Crowley incident, many of my white friends and colleagues have been discussing reverse discrimination."

Fill in the blanks yourself: "I mentioned on National Public Radio this week that in response to [a recent racially charged incident], many of my white friends and colleagues have been discussing [one of the occasional or perhaps even imagined inconveniences suffered by the ruling classes elevated to the status of a national issue of great concern]." (Those blanks are perhaps too specific for the passage to function as a proper Mad Lib, but we wouldn't want Quinn's essential and important point to be lost.)

(Confidential to WPNI: hope we don't put you out of business with all this stealing of your precious fucking article!)

Funny. The New York Times wouldn't know; they're yet again reporting on how The Rich are being hit by the recession. And we're thus forced to again report on the Times reporting on something that's been covered incessantly! This time, Hamptons Edition! Highlights:

• Personification of The Hamptons as mystical Lost-island like entity. Also, appearances: they count for something! "..the important thing is that everything seem low-key. The Hamptons wants you to perceive it as conforming to the spirit of these hard times and not to caricature it as the flashy, traffic-choked, over-the-top playground it has increasingly become."

  
  

• Restaurants are throwing down on cheap booze to sweeten the deal. "Dinner for two at Della Femina will set you back $150 - but the restaurant is throwing in a free glass of wine."

  
  

• The most fun they might have all summer is in coming up with awesome euphemisms: "Boutiques are calling themselves "beach shacks" but still selling $200 slacks."

  
  

• Patterns of patently ridiculous spending might actually be slowing: ""I didn't order the $2,500 Italian backgammon board this year, which I sold three of the summer before last," she said."

  
  

• And then this piece of absolute strangeness, which could document the moment Times writer Allen Salkin totally lost his shit:

  The operator of what is shaping up to be one of the season's hot new clubs envisions a sound system that pumps out the ambient vibe of breaking waves and squawking gulls.

  Caw! Caw! Polly want a dollar!

  Sure, there's more, but you know the routine: people who used to not have to save are trying to save, and watching them do it is totally newsworthy, because they concessions they make are amazing.

  Meanwhile, in some other country, two reporters at the Times are reporting the high rate of foreclosures amongst minorities:

  On 145th Street in southeast Queens, just south of Linden Boulevard, attached brick homes with tidy, fenced-in gardens stretch into the distance. Children play tag under blooming oaks. But 8 of these roughly 50 homes face foreclosure; 4 are vacant; 2 have plywood boards nailed over punched-out windows. "My district feels like ground zero," said City Councilman James Sanders Jr., an African-American who represents hundreds of blocks in Queens like this one. "In military terms, we are being pillaged."

  I'm swearing, right now, to never read another one of these goddamn stories again until it contains one or more of the following items or variations of them: the snacking on of beach towels, riots at Nick and Toni's, Billy Joel-related brutality, The Surf Lodge being overrun by actual surfers, the Hampton Jitney being hijacked by various New School/NYU protesters, the Guest of a Guest-ers drop-kicking their way into Pink Elephant, Grey Gardens-esque summer shares for Upper East Side families to hide their batshit cousins, improved stronger-faster-scarier Montauk Monsters, etc. Times, 'ball's in your court. Please run with it.

  Minorities Affected Most as New York Foreclosures Rise [New York Times]

  The Hamptons In Flip Flops [New York Times]

Basically every paragraph of this "story" in support of a slideshow has at least one sentence that makes you want to punch the world in the mouth.

Whether it's expanding the family business or striking out independently, launching a career in the arts or plunging into philanthropy, the 38 heirs and heiresses to fabled names and consequential fortunes in this portfolio seem determined to make a contribution to society at large while carving out identities of their own.

And

Dasha Zhukova, who founded the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, in Moscow, and is editor in chief of Pop magazine. Why would the daughter of an oligarch who is dating an even bigger oligarch give up a life of leisure to work so hard? "I still have a life of leisure," she says. "I don't see it as sacrificing."

She is at least realistic enough to correct VF on the misconception that being editor in chief of POP magazine constitutes "hard word!"

Oh, and hey:

"I always thought, Will I go into the business or will I not go into the business?" says Jared Kushner, son of New Jersey real-estate magnate Charles Kushner, who spent nearly a year in prison on charges including tax evasion. "But when my father got arrested, I really didn't have a choice. I was the oldest son, and it was something that had to be done." Although he was in the process of getting graduate degrees in business and law, he found time to buy The New York Observer on the side, and as publisher has seen monthly traffic on the paper's Web site increase from 400,000 to 1.4 million.

Hah, and then he fired the cleaning lady. Giving back!

Though maybe we shouldn't make fun. Look how depressed Tatiana Santo Domingo, Bianca Brandolini d'Adda, Margherita Maccapani Missoni, and Alexia Niedzielski look! Being heiresses looks miserable.

Hah, no, we're not. No, instead NYM is just exposing this kid—who goes by "Maximilian" of course—to the ridicule and vitriol of people like us, who decorated their own dorm room with empty whiskey bottles and cigarette ash.

This kid, though! He is going places! Really terrible places!

Maxamilian, voted "preppiest in class" at Choate, "has a sincere love for Stubbs & Wootton slipper shoes and melon-colored pants."

Look at everything about this paragraph!

When other 15-year-olds were going to lacrosse camp, Sinsteden worked for David Easton, a neoclassical decorator in the Albert Hadley/Bunny Williams school. After his first year of college, he interned for Moss and still works for her one day a week. "I finish her sentences," he says. "And she reads my mind."

No, New York. That is not what "other 15-year-olds" were doing. Other 15-year-olds were playing Xbox and texting lewd photos of themselves to one another and getting high and maybe working at the ice cream stand at the park. Also, Maxy, anyone can read your mind. Your mind is a 30-year-old novelty book. Look, we're reading your mind right now: "I'm a tool."

Still, we cannot fault his one gesture toward the sacred duty of a guy not to be THAT fucking guy:

It's not unusual to find twenty friends crammed into Sinsteden's room, enjoying the contents of his well-stocked bar.

Ah, college. Anyone with liquor or drugs is tolerable for a night!

Make sure to check out the slideshow! It features this immortal phrase: "The tie-backs are repurposed ascots."

Smith is a spendy, spendy dude, so it was stupid of them to hire him in the first place and even stupider to then claim he'd be redecorating with Pottery Barn purchases in order to stave off the OUTRAGE, because why did you hire Mr. Domino's Favorite Hollywood Decorator if you are then going to ask him to sacrifice his expensive taste in the name of propriety?

So, presidents get $100,000 to redecorate, when they move into the White House, and that isn't really so much in the grand scheme of things, but the Obamas will not use any of that money on their fancy Hollywood decorator, they promise. Which is fine, because Obama has never lied about being a rich person. (It is part of his pitch, actually, for sacrifice and paying taxes and things: he and Jay Leno can certainly afford it!) There is one more benefit: now no one will have to know how much they're spending! As New York reports:

The White House declined to disclose the budget, saying that all expenses would remain private as a result of the Obamas' decision to absorb the cost.

Hah, they're gonna get more shit for this.

That is the story of Tom Daschle, the former Senator and Obama's pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services. He is the guy who will fix health care, once his embarrassing tax issues are dealt with. All because a rich friend of his gave him millions of dollars to sit on the board of his media company that, oddly, had no business with the government. And also his friend let him use his Cadillac and driver for free, whenever he was out of town, and Daschle didn't pay taxes on that, because who knew?

And so Daschle's accountant finally told him that he owed $150 grand in taxes, on that car, but he can afford it because his rich friend's investment firm gave Daschle $2 million to raise money and sit on the board, with other former lawmakers and random notable political types.

Oh, and Daschle also worked for a Washington law firm that had as clients lots of groups doing government business, but Daschle didn't lobby, he just, you know, advised. And then a student loan company sent him to the Bahamas! That is what they're doing with our money! Christ! If it weren't for the fact that Tom Daschle is going to fix health care, we'd be really upset with him.

And so a couple Republican Senators attempting to tarnish Obama's "ethical and open" image, and his lobbyist ban, will stall Daschle's nomination for a little while, because he is a former Senator, and former Senators are rich people, and rich people don't pay taxes.

While the rest of America milled around jumbotrons set up around the National Mall, contributors who raised $300,000 or more for Obama's inauguration got VIP tickets to private meetings with America's Hope Tsar and his smiley sidekick Joe the Biden. And there was basically no security at those special meetings, the Washington Post reveals.

Three contributors who raised $300,000 or more for the inauguration said they were never asked to show identification to retrieve dozens of tickets, including VIP passes that allowed them and their guests to meet privately with Obama. One of the three said ticket checks were so lax that no one noticed when, after a breakfast for contributors, a friend whose name hadn't been submitted for a background check tagged along into a VIP room to take pictures with Vice President-elect Joseph Biden.

There are two levels to this story: one, that no one considers rich liberals to be a threat. And two, that the rich liberals were concerned not so much with the safety of our president than they were with the terrible idea of being infiltrated by commoners.

But after passing through a magnetometer outside the hotel, members of the group said they were directed to a public sidewalk and told to find their way across Ninth Street to buses waiting in a convention center parking lot. Along the way, they said they mingled with throngs of spectators streaming toward the Mall. The VIPs were not screened again or asked for identification, they said.

Suzi LeVine, a former Expedia executive, said volunteers lined her path to the buses. Even so, she said, "I was definitely thinking, 'Is there a way that people could be infiltrating this group?' "

We see a wonderful political thriller or possibly 24 plot involving a shadowy George Soros-like figure.

The problem with lists of billionaires' paper losses, like the one Henry Blodget's Business Sheet has assembled, is that they're frustratingly free of context. Did a particular CEO do anything to make his company's shares worthless, or was he just buffeted willy-nilly by the crashing stock market? Is Rupert Murdoch $3.5 billion poorer because he's a bad manager, or just unlucky? Instead, we're left knowing that they own many millions of shares in their companies and those shares are, ohmigod, totally worth less now than they were last January! That's about as much fun as reading companies' annual proxy statements.

What this list needs is a dose of schadenfreude. Here's an edited version, including only those people we really are happer to see poorer:

• Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, -$3.3 million: Totally deserved, for installing Randy Falco, a useless broadcast-network flunky, as CEO of AOL, thereby destroying whatever remaining value the Internet portal had.
• Roger Ailes, head of Fox's local TV stations and Fox News Channel, -$3.5 million: This News Corp. executive deserves a net worth chop — not for the maddeningly popular Fox News, but for the laughably unwatched CNBC wannabe he championed, Fox Business Network.
• James Dolan, Cablevision scion, -$13.1 million: Bought Newsday, and then gave an interview to a company-owned cable network rather than to the newspaper, which, frankly, could use some help filling column-inches.
• Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., New York Times publisher, -$76.7 million: Almost let the Times run out of cash so his cousins could keep getting paid millions of dollars in dividends by the family-owned paper. Also, rumored to be in annoying relationship with Caroline Kennedy.
• Sam Zell, CEO, Tribune Co., -$315 million (maybe): Zell might lose his investment in the bankrupt Tribune — but he's not out nearly as much as his employees, whose stock-ownership plan was used to buy the newspaper-and-TV conglomerate.

Here's the whole list. Bravo if you can make it to the end — at which point you will learn that you never really cared about EchoStar CEO Charlie Ergen, the richest media mogul you've never heard of and for good reason. Also, you'll wonder why media CEOs aren't more photogenic.

(Photos via the Business Sheet; clockwise from upper left: Bewkes, Sulzberger, Zell, Dolan, Ailes)

See, Michelle Obama took her little girls to visit Washington DC's bestest private schools, because soon they will begin their life of cloistered privilege in one of the nation's poorest, most segregated major cities. The Obamas chose Sidwell over Maret, which is a very important and meaningful sentence if you are part of "Washington Society."

So at a recent Maret-Sidwell basketball game, tensions ran high! “The Sidwell kids started yelling ‘O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!’ at us,” a Maret parent told the City Paper. Man, that was uncalled for!

“On the Maret side, that was insulting and incendiary,” says the Maret parent, who requested anonymity. “How crass!”

Maret’s side eventually responded by yelling “Oatmeal sucks!” — a play on Sidwell’s nickname, the Quakers.

Oh god, guys, lame.

Meanwhile, no one is even bothering to chant anything at Obama third-choice school Georgetown Day's basketball team. (Does GDS have a basketball team? Maybe someone will chant something belittling at their quiz bowl team!)

Pride at Sidwell [Ben Smith/Politico]

Kuczynski, 40, is married to Charles Stevenson, a rich investor 20 years her senior. I.V.F. failed the couple and natural pregnancies ended in miscarriages. They switched their attention, then, to surrogacy. Specifically, to gestational surrogacy, in which "the surrogate mother is carrying a child genetically unrelated to her." Alex encountered, during this process, the class system! "We encountered the wink-nod rule: Surrogates would never say they were motivated to carry a child for another couple just for money; they were all motivated by altruism. This gentle hypocrisy allows surrogacy to take place. Without it, both sides would have to acknowledge the deep cultural revulsion against attaching a dollar figure to the creation of a human life."

But:

We had the money to pay. My husband is a very successful investor; I have made a healthy income for a writer. We were lucky in that we could afford to do what most infertile couples cannot. The questions for us were philosophical. I suppose I could have decided that it was my destiny to remain childless, that it was somehow meant to be. But I hate the phrase “meant to be,” loaded with its small, smug assumptions, its apathy and fake stoicism. I believe that where things can be fixed, they should be fixed. In our case, reproductive technology could make it relatively easy for us to have our biological child.

And, at that moment, having a biologically related child felt necessary. What began as wistful longing in my 20s had blistered into a mad desire that seemed to defy logic. The compulsion to create our own bloodline seemed medieval, and I knew we could enjoy our marriage — our lives — without a child. Yet I couldn’t argue myself out of my desire. A child with our genes would be a part of us. My husband’s face would be mirrored in our child’s face, proof that our love not only existed, but could be recreated beyond us. Die without having created a life, and die two deaths: the death of yourself, and the death of the immense opportunity that is a child.

Thankfully, they found an eminently qualified woman to carry the baby. Cathy is married to a VP of marketing for a credit union! She is intelligent, and her answers to the surrogate questionnaire "were not handwritten in the tiny alloted spaces." She wrote a really good essay. Not just any biologically competent womb can carry a Kuczynski. Despite the fact that all the involved genetic material came from Alex and her husband, surrogate mother Cathy's husband's college degree comes up as an important factor. As does the couple's "renovated mill house on a creek in a suburb of Philadelphia."

Things went sour when Cathy went to Las Vegas, and the unborn baby learned the horrors of commercial air travel and gambling, but everything turned out fine in the end, and they have a beautiful baby boy with a slightly ridiculous inherited name (Maxime), and good for them. Alex still has terrible nightmares about how she didn't deliver the baby all by herself, but hey, at least it is genetically the product of her and her husband, and not some dumb adopted baby.

The pair is renting a humble garret on the street for $12,000 a month, and have wildly disrupted the sleepy, well-insulated-from-ugly-poor-people feel of the exclusive enclave. They rumble up at all hours of the night in their enormous mink-fur powered assault vehicles, teetering up the stairs in slinky club-wear. Their security guards often shoo away the languid wealthy who sit on the building's stoop so the girls can enter their building unmolested. A rep for the twins says "If there were significant issues, you would think that the neighbors would address Ashley or Mary-Kate directly, rather than calling the media." Which would make sense if normal people lived in that part of town, but mostly they're entitled and silly, so this response is not all that surprising.

But through it all, their sad cries continue. ""It is a peaceful, quiet street," a mournful resident keened. "Plenty of other celebrities around this block are good neighbors and blend in with the neighborhood - but these two are invaders."

[P6]

Like other major donors, Mr. Johnson has traveled with Mr. McCain on the campaign trail. Mr. McCain also calls him on occasion to thank him. But Mr. Johnson plays down the access he has, saying he is no different from anyone else.

“You can call the senator, too,” Mr. Johnson said.

Yes, you can. McCain, of course, can't work a BlackBerry and the only "cell phone" he knows is a stick used to carve a cross in the dirt outside his cell so you're going to have to call him at home. You're also going to have to guess which home to try, of course, but no one said democracy's easy.

We'd expect him to informally advise Giuliani. Pickens, the old oilman, is a longtime funder of Republicans. He very very famously is responsible for those Swift Boat people who lied about John Kerry. He's spent the last 30 years ensuring that his business-friendly Republican friends remained in power, and now the old man spends millions pushing... wind power? Alternative energy? It almost sounds like environmentalism! Why waste time trying to convince Republicans to... act like liberals??

The oilman has given up oil, you see. Now he's investing millions in wind power and natural gas. Both are less environmentally terrible than petroleum, but his magic windmill plan does not seem to us to be very viable. Because there's a lot of wind in those big empty plains states, yes, but not any people. So transporting this power across the entire country adds even more to this power's price tag and enriches T. Boone and his investors yet more!

But merits of his plan aside, the question is why Democrats like Reid and Obama are giving the jackass the time of day and legitimizing him as anything other than a zillionaire who thinks the presidency and now the energy policy of this country are his to buy. Start a think tank or something dude, don't just get all "rogue vigilante billionaire crisis-solver"!

And further, why the hell aren't anyone but random columnists and Cato Institute libertarians examining his plan seriously and reporting on his conflicts of interest?

Hell in a week's worth of stories entirely about how important famous elected officials are meeting with Pickens, only today's Obama stories even mention the Swift Boat Veterans.

What the hell, T. Boone Pickens. Just because you're rich doesn't mean everyone has to take you seriously.

"All along the East End of Long Island, a string of beach towns that represent a sort of New York version of the French Riviera, fund-raisers and their topiarists are suffering through a limp summer, with the rising price of oil and falling value of the Dow combining to cast a pall over the party-hopping set.

"Some fund-raisers say that it may not help either that the number of charity galas seems to keep increasing each year. 'In the past we’ve sold out pretty quickly, but this year we’re scrambling,' said Tangie Murray, director of the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation, which was founded by Mr. Simmons and his brothers to expose children to the arts and is putting on the Art for Life event. While 850 or 900 people have typically paid the $1,500 minimum to attend in recent years, Ms. Murray said that this year, 'we’re hoping we can reach 700; it’s a different economic climate.'" [NYT]

“I do have clients who worked at Bear Stearns—husband and wife both worked there,” says Lynda Ireland of Prudential Douglas Elliman. “They’d finally found a beautiful home they loved, and they bought it.” The house is in Bridgehampton, in the $2 million range. “Now they may have to sell it. They’ve told me it’s not that they’re afraid of being foreclosed upon. But they’re frightened. They have a big apartment in New York, and they feel they have to choose between New York and out here—they can’t carry both. And they have small children, so they want to be in New York for the kids. It’s very sad.”

We can relate! Since our own recent budget problems, we have been forced to choose between pawning our complete Showtime Pizza animatronic puppet collection or giving up our controlling stake in Dreamworks.

But actually the $20 million and up sector of the market is still doing just fine, thank you, thanks mostly to a man who everyone thought was Tiger Woods but who turned out to be a different guy named "Tiger" and then turned out to perhaps be a shadowy LLC that may actually belong to Tiger Woods. Also Sag Harbor is filled with 100-foot mega-yachts (everything is so mega!), movie stars and James Frey are still hanging out in Amagansett, and various hermits and bloggers have a "colony" in Montauk. Some rich people even have (ironic?) double-wide trailers!

In conclusion, the market is still crashing but we haven't hit the bottom yet but maybe there won't even be a bottom because of Barack Obama but on the other hand the wealthy may just begin burning their giant houses to the ground, which will actually be pretty awesome.

It's all these Clinton-friending liberal rich people who keep getting into messes these days, isn't it? When's the last time you heard anything about rich Republican financiers and executives flying about the nation with models, fucking teenagers, and carrying on sex orgies with movie stars? Is it the liberal connection to godless Hollywood? Former United Artists CEO and Bush Super Ranger Jerry Weintraub stays out of the headlines. Ken Lay was busted for fraud, not massages.

Hell, maybe liberals just have more fun? That's the point of liberality, isn't it? Those European values, that subjective morality, the godless thing? Clinton was impeached for having too much fun in office. Nixon never had fun ever except when he got zonked on painkillers and insulted the Jews, which is not really anyone's idea of a truly good time. Epstein never saw anything wrong with what he did. He just likes massages!

But why the need to congregate around Burkle? To hang out with him? Why did Epstein and Chris Tucker need to fly around on Jeff's private jet? Why does Clinton need to fly around the world on everyone's private jet? Liberal types do like to improve the world, and the rich ones are narcissistic enough to believe that they can do it personally. So they network and party and fuck models while flying to Africa to cure AIDS! Conservative zillionaires just rack up huge profits, contribute money to candidates who can ensure that they'll continue to rack up huge profits, and mind their own fucking (criminal) business. The liberals need to have cake with Arianna Huffington and Bono, for some reason.

So it may just be that Burkle embodies these characteristics the most. The most narcissistic, the most convinced of his own rightness, the most desperate to network with powerful people in the hopes of reshaping the world.

And then they all get tied up in sex scandals and your house is foreclosed, the end.