Nicole Buffett is a "struggling" artist in San Francisco, if by "struggling" you mean, "makes $40,000 a year off the sale of her paintings alone, partly because she's Warren Buffet's granddaughter" which actually sounds like a pretty good living for anyone who makes a go of it in the creative arts. She "can't afford" cable television or health insurance, which places her among the 47 million Americans who can't afford the latter (one-sixth of the country, give or take). But, you know, given her upbringing, we're supposed to feel badly for her.

Although, actually, her upbringing wasn't that of the privileged little rich girl — Buffet is notoriously stingy and she describes her family as a "meritocracy" in which she had no idea her grandfather was crazy rich until she was 17. She does concede that he spent more than $100,000 on her art school education, as he did for all his grandchildren, but wouldn't pay any non-school expenses for her or anyone else.

For this, she paid him back by appearing in a documentary by another American heir about the gap between rich and poor in which she complained that Mr. Buffett didn't include her in his philanthropic decisions and said she was scared of the repercussions of discussing her grandfather's personal finances with the world. It was a decision she didn't discuss with her grandfather, even as she appeared to be laying claim to her piece of the Buffet pie. She was right to have been scared, because, when he saw it, he cut her off.

...Buffett was galled. He had for some time felt ambivalent about Nicole and her sister's claim to his fortune — though Peter had legally adopted them, he divorced their mother in 1993 and remarried three years later. To make matters worse, while plugging the film on Oprah, Nicole confessed, "It would be nice to be involved with creating things for others with that money and to be involved in it. I feel completely excluded from it."

The perceived sense of entitlement and Nicole's self-appointed role as family spokesperson prompted Buffett to tell [her father] Peter that he'd renounce her. A month later, the mega-billionaire mailed Nicole a letter in which he cautioned her about the pitfalls of the Buffett name: "People will react to you based on that 'fact' rather than who you are or what you have accomplished." He punctuated the letter by declaring, "I have not emotionally or legally adopted you as a grandchild, nor have the rest of my family adopted you as a niece or a cousin." Nicole was devastated. "He signed the letter 'Warren,'" she says. "I have a card from him just a year earlier that's signed 'Grandpa.'"

Sounds like he was pretty pissed at having his granddaughter — one to whom he hadn't been technically related in more than a decade — call him stingy and suggest she should be involved in his finances.

Anyway, fine, her grandfather was mean to her and when he dies she won't get a penny. When I cut my $400 check every month for the next 15 years to pay back the student loans in pursuit of the education I wanted, and my $183 check for my self-bought health insurance every month for the next year, I'll think of her sadly bemoaning how her apology-less selling out of her still-living grandfather to make a political point means she won't inherit a bazillion dollars and feel really bad.

The Billionaire's Black Sheep [Marie Claire]

STEVE: Shalom and here we go. It won't be the first time I've talked about something I didn't actually see.

MEGAN: Well, you saw it but in true Jezebel fashion, you saw it intoxicated. This is the first one I actually watched stone-cold sober because I couldn't stop typing long enough to drink the bottle of wine I opened.

STEVE: My insights are admittedly influenced by the haze of a nice, Australian Cabernet-Shiraz blend. Yes, "that one."

MEGAN: So you do remember some things! But, basically, Obama won and nobody asked anything that wasn't pre-screened because they didn't want to get yelled at by Tom Brokaw like he kept yelling at Obama and McCain.

STEVE: Yes, I remember mostly the focus group that Katie Couric did after, and the undecidededs didn't like "that one" very well. Maybe, as Maureen posited this morning, it was a cross between "the one" and "that woman," but it seemed dismissive and odd.

MEGAN: I mean, it's actually something you say to, like, your kids, isn't it? I thought it was very infantilizing.

STEVE: I wouldn't know about kids, but my friend Suzanne is here and says she'd never really talk to her kids like that. I would, however, sometimes talk to a boyfriend like that. And that's not a good sign.

MEGAN: Wait! Wasn't it you that sent me that magazine cover of them kissing?

STEVE: YES I DID and you didn't pick it up. I thought it was going to be a big deal. But maybe the progressives won't get mad at The Progressive?

MEGAN: It was just a little too... something.

STEVE: I'm not even sure what that was supposed to mean. But I can say, without a doubt, that I wouldn't kiss any man who pointed at me and called me "that one" in public.

MEGAN: You know, I did kiss a dude who later called me "that one" in public in what he thought was a jocular way. I accused him of using his brother's terminal illness as a way to get pussy, so I guess I didn't appreciate it.

STEVE: Speaking of our rights to kiss anyone we want, I thought it was a little odd, and disappointing, that not a word was said about the Supreme Court last night, two days into the new term and with at least two judges barely holding on.

MEGAN: Well, but Sarah Palin covered that, right? [I crack myself up some times]

STEVE: Every swing state voter I know - and I recently met a mom in Ohio who WANTS to vote GOP, but is really being persuaded by the high court argument.

MEGAN: Because of Roe? That's interesting. On the other hand, if the Democratic Party can win the Presidency on the economy and the Republican can't gin people up on social issues like abortion and gay marriage because independent voters have realized that it's craven and whatever, that's not a bad thing, right?

STEVE: I really think the court issue is ALMOST as persuasive as the "Jesus the stock market crashed 500 points again" issue. You know, Bill Maher said on Friday, and I agree, that it almost always requires a national catastrophe to get progressives elected. BUT DO AMERICANS NOT GET THAT THE SUPREME COURT COULD BE A NATIONAL CATASTROPHE TOO?

MEGAN: Well, 54 percent of the country thinks abortion should stay legal and the more they put the crazies on TV, the more people go, um, those people are cray-cray. Like, they should give that crazy anti-gay guy from Kansas more press.

STEVE: I bet Fred Phelps votes based on the Supreme Court!

MEGAN: Totally! But everyone hates him. Harley riders hate him. He's the antithesis of everything the anti-gay movement is trying to pretend to be, which is faux-tolerant. You know, like Sarah Palin. It's okay if you, like, have to be gay, but the government shouldn't do anything special for your heathen, social-norm defying self. That would be giving you "special" rights. Because the right to, say, marry or to have equal protection under the law is "special."

STEVE: Sarah says she "tolerates" the gays. Does that make us feel better?

MEGAN: Like, she doesn't want to gas them or anything! It doesn't make me feel better. What is there about gay people to "tolerate"? It's not like gayness is something that might rub off or something.

STEVE: OK and so if they spent 60 minutes on the economy last night, we should spend a few minutes on it here. Angela Merkel is on the front of the NYT business section today, looking very stressed.

MEGAN: Well, I think I know why.

STEVE: And as someone who was raised by a single mother and appreciates the (much better) grasp that women have on pocket book issues than men, I get worried when they look panicked. I mean, a friend emailed last night to tell me that he and his boyfriend decided not to buy expensive, designer jeans after the 500 drop yesterday. And when the gay men stop pumping money into the economy for lavish, unessential items like Italian jeans, we have problems.

MEGAN: Well, that alone explains the 500 point drop in the Dow yesterday. I have no doubt that Angela Merkel doesn't want to be presiding over an economic crisis brought on by the financial crisis and credit crunch by her personal masseur.

STEVE: I mean, when $2 trillion of retirement money is gone . . . and gay men can't buy jeans . . . is our salvation really going to be found in cutting a $3 million overhead projector for a planetarium? And, like, if they did buy the projector for the planetarium, and Sarah could see Jupiter from her seat, could we make her an astronaut and send her to the moon or something?

MEGAN: Okay, first off, I really like planetariums. I'm just sayin'. Fuck McCain for hating on planetariums. Second off, he's also going to personally renegotiate everyone's mortgages. Except mine. And yours if you had one. I mean, not really "everyone" as much as people whose houses lost value because they bought stuff for absurdist prices. And took out absurdly high mortgages. And only if they're old, to make up for the massive cuts in Medicare spending he's planning.

STEVE: And McCain's mortgage plan is totally borrowed from Hillary, which was borrowed from her history lessons on the Great Depression.

MEGAN: Also, did you get the sense that they made that up on the bus on the way there? Sort of like how McCain's all, I know how to kill bin Laden! I do! Just watch! I will go into some place I won't name and kill bin Laden quietly, because generally invading a sovereign nation goes over way better if you just hope they don't notice.

STEVE: But if you pronounce Pakistan as Pah-kee-stahn, the whole things has an air of credibility.

MEGAN: Just like "new-cue-lerr" makes it sound less scary?

STEVE: You betcha!

MEGAN: Such as!

STEVE: So Olbermann says Palin is the one palling around with terrorists — the Alaska Independence Party.

MEGAN: Well, you know, just because they advocated potentially violent secession, we sponsored by Iran and hate Our Freedoms doesn't makes them terrorists... Oh, wait, let's just call Olbermann and pinko Commie in the tank for Obama.

STEVE: The AIP founder, Olbermann says, said that, "The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government, and I won't be buried under their damn flag"

MEGAN: Why doesn't he just go to Canada? It's, like, right the fuck there.

STEVE: Don't ruin Canada for the rest of us! I hear Montreal is quite a party.
But where is this tank everyone keeps talking about? It must be pretty crowded in there by now.

MEGAN: And kind of sexy. I mean, Olbermann's in it with Rachel Maddow and Bill Keller of the NY Times, who I saw on Saturday and is kind of silver foxy.

STEVE: Is Rachel Maddow DRIVING the tank? Margaret Cho says you gotta have a lesbian to read the map.

MEGAN: Well, I'll bet Rachel is driving and Suze Orman is navigating through the minefields.

STEVE: Are we going to end up with Suze or Warren Buffet as treasury secretary anyway? Can't Warren Buffet just bail us out of this . . . maybe with a little help from Bill Gates?

MEGAN: I know, Warren Buffet as Treasury Secretary? I was like, dude, McCain, seriously, you had a whole series of commercials about how stupid celebrity is and now you're nominating the only financier people will recognize by name as Treasury Secretary? I mean, you know he wanted to be honest and say "Phil Gramm," because McCain, too, thinks we're a nation of whiners and this is just a mental depression.

STEVE: I mean, I bank at Wachovia, or Citibank, or Wells Fargo OR WHATEVER IT IS THIS MORNING and I'd feel much more secure banking at Warren Buffet's house.

MEGAN: I'd feel more secure banking from under my mattress at this stage.
If anyone is going to fuck over my money, it really should be me.