The $350 bottle of wine and a guy named Asness

That would be Cliff Asness, a high-profile hedge fund manager and notorious Obama hater who had the temerity of ordering two bottles of pricey Pinot Noir during a dinner on Capitol Hill with a couple of old pals - one of them being Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican architect of the GOP's budget-cutting plan. TPM picks it up from there:

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.

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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.

Just to give you an idea, Asness (could you have come up with a more appropriate name?) defended the $450 million in bonuses that AIG executives received, arguing on CNBC that Obama and Congress are responsible for the economic crisis and should pay the bonuses themselves. All right, so Asness seems like a total jerk - and yet even jerks have a right to spend their money however they so choose. This is the schoolyard that Washington has become: A bully being taken on by a buttinsky. By the way, Ryan apparently got freaked out after the confrontation with Feinberg and decided to pay for one of the bottles himself. Madness.