Obituary: Richard Mellon Scaife

Richard Mellon Scaife, the "Mr. Moneybags" of the far right until the even more batshit crazy Koch brothers got involved in buying off politicians and shoving their anti-American ideas down the throats of the American people, has died at the age of 82.

He had been suffering from cancer and wrote about his battle recently.

Scaife was the person most responsible for financing the bogus Clinton scandals of the 1990s, including the notorious "Arkansas Project."

Interesting the New York Times even writes about Scaife because this paper swallowed that bullshit hook, line, and sinker and peddled it even before Scaife got involved thanks to their star reporter Jeff Gerth's shoddy Whitewater reports. Gerth instigated the entire bullshit and should have been fired for it.

He never ran for public office or gave speeches to promote his political views. Indeed, he was notoriously withdrawn, rarely giving interviews or addressing controversies that regularly engulfed him. He had a longstanding drinking problem, engaged in bitter feuds with relatives, friends and employees, and found his troubled life examined in the press and online, despite phalanxes of lawyers, spokesmen and retainers paid to insulate him from endless public fascination with his wealth and power.

And then there was this:

In 2008, Mrs. Clinton, then a Democratic senator from New York running for president, met Mr. Scaife and editors and reporters of The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for an interview. The newspaper endorsed her, and Mr. Scaife, in a commentary, said: “I have a very different impression of Hillary Clinton today. And it’s a very favorable one indeed.”

I've Seen Everything

now.

Sure AIDS is a good cause to contribute money, but Scaife, having received notoriety as the person most responsible for funding a would-be coup against former President Clinton, is damaged goods.

I'd say Clinton should not accept any money from such a source as a matter of principle. To me, what Scaife did was unforgivable:

Ruddy, who accompanied Scaife to the Clinton lunch, says the peacemaking meeting came about after former New York City mayor Ed Koch offered to put the two together. (Koch declined to comment.) Clinton, pouring on the charm, greeted Scaife like an old friend. "President Clinton believes in redemption and moving forward," says spokeswoman Jennifer Hanley. Ruddy says they talked about Clinton's charitable work and avoided opening old wounds. After receiving the full Bill treatment, Scaife left with a new outlook on the man he had once set out to crush. Scaife isn't ready to sign on to Hillary's campaign—he's still a Republican. But his lawyer, Yale Gutnick, says Bill Clinton and Richard Mellon Scaife are now members of a "mutual admiration society." Cue the apocalypse.

As the World Turns.

I ain't any right-winger, but there is something terribly wrong with our country if middle school students are having sex.

They are below the legal age of consent, for God's sake.
_____

The Daddy Warbucks of the radical right has gotten his comeuppance:

Unfathomable but true, when Scaife (rhymes with safe) married his second wife, Margaret "Ritchie" Scaife, in 1991, he neglected to wall off a fortune that Forbes recently valued at $1.3 billion. This, to understate matters, is likely going to cost him, big time. As part of a temporary settlement, 60-year-old Ritchie Scaife is currently cashing an alimony check that at first glance will look like a typo: $725,000 a month. Or about $24,000 a day, seven days a week. As Richard Scaife's exasperated lawyers put it in a filing, "The temporary order produces an amount so large that just the income from it, invested at 5 percent, is greater each year than the salary of the President of the United States."

The numbers are just one of many we-kid-you-not dimensions to this tale. In late 2005, Ritchie Scaife peered through a window at one of her husband's many homes and saw him with one Tammy Sue Vasco, a woman whose colorful criminal history includes an arrest for prostitution. And this tryst was no one-afternoon stand. Ritchie Scaife describes Vasco in court filings as her husband's "mistress."

_____

As the World Turns.

Granted, Dickie Scaife is no Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, but his divorce case should be very interesting to watch.
_____

Now that Larry Craig has reached iconic status, something he never came within a million miles of before the men's room incident, should he be cut some slack for his unspeakable crime?
_____

Son of a bitch, I just ate:

Heather Walsh-Haney bursts through the door and hurries past the long table where the skeleton of a man who was once a professor lies, past the rows of human skulls, the candles and the old leather-bound books until she stops and takes a breath.

''It smells a little like decomposition in here,'' says Walsh-Haney, a forensic anthropologist who hopes to open Florida's first body farm. ``Sweet and musty, don't you think?''

At 39, she already spends most of her days working among the dead, mining bones for what they reveal about life stories and crimes, mysteries and clues. Her ability to divine answers to the primal questions of ''Who was this person?'' and ''When did he or she die?'' has taken her from the broken ground of New York after 9/11 to New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina pushed bodies from their rightful burial sites. And she travels throughout Florida, investigating whether the skulls found in cauldrons have been acquired legally for use in religious ceremonies.

Hers is a relentless and complicated postmortem business. Between helping police and medical examiners throughout the state -- and teaching at Florida Gulf Coast University -- Walsh-Haney works to advance the field of forensics.

Along with the university, she hopes to establish an outdoor research facility in which donated corpses are allowed to lie out on the open ground while forensic anthropologists and criminologists study the mechanics of decomposition.

Oh, Jesus Christ.
_____

As the World Turns.

So much for family values hypocrite Dickie Scaife, the man who tried to ruin Bill Clinton over bogus adultery allegations:

The estranged wife of billionaire and newspaper owner Richard Mellon Scaife, the Pittsburgh banking heir turned media mogul, was awarded $725,000 a month in temporary support during their acrimonious divorce, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported Sunday.

They're also fighting over custody of their dog.

More:

The marriage of Richard and "Ritchie" Scaife, as she preferred to call herself, was Mr. Scaife's second. The couple had been together since the early '80s while Mr. Scaife was still married to his first wife, the former Frances Gilmore. In the course of the next 14 years, Ritchie Scaife would serve on the board of Mr. Scaife's publishing company, sometimes exercising influence in its editorial judgments, and once sat alongside him during a rare interview he granted in the midst of the Clinton investigations. All the while, she was living in a Shadyside house of her own two blocks from the Westminster Place mansion occupied by Mr. Scaife.

So the current or recent adultery wasn't his first.

Some juicy tidbits:

The Scaifes' marital troubles first gained public attention on Dec. 22, 2005, with what Mrs. Scaife's lawyers characterize in their brief as "cruel, calculated acts toward Wife by Husband as punishment for her detection" of Mr. Scaife's alleged affair.

"On December 22nd in the late afternoon, Wife, in an attempt to confirm Husband's ongoing affair, appeared at the home of her Husband, peered in his residence window to confirm" whether the other woman was with Mr. Scaife. "Wife was arrested under an absurd trespass charge, handcuffed and transported to the County Jail, where she was incarcerated overnight in a grim holding cell," Mrs. Scaife's attorneys wrote. The charges were later dismissed but, in the words of Mrs. Scaife's brief, "The marriage was over!"

Presidential Notes III.

Since it is clear to them Senator Hillary Clinton will never be elected president, some of her old enemies from the fake "Clinton scandals" era have decided to set aside their old smear campaigns.

Hell's bells, even old Richard Mellon Scaife, the legendary bizarro billionaire, isn't even going to bother her anymore. Ditto for Christopher Ruddy:

Christopher Ruddy, who once worked full-time for Mr. Scaife investigating the Clintons and now runs a conservative online publication he co-owns with Mr. Scaife, said, “Both of us have had a rethinking.”

“Clinton wasn’t such a bad president,” Mr. Ruddy said. “In fact, he was a pretty good president in a lot of ways, and Dick feels that way today.”

As for the conservative response to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, Mr. Ruddy said, “The level of intensity and anger toward Hillary is not getting to the level that it was toward Bill Clinton when he was president.” He added, “She has moderated and developed a separate image.”

It's just best to let the mainstream media help promote a Hillary for President campaign, thus drowning out more electable candidates like Edwards or Richardson, and hope Democrats will take leave of their senses and vote her as the nominee.