A Spork in the Drawer

In The Tank

And so it continues. The Pittsburgh City Paper's Chris Potter:

While Barack Obama visited Oakland's Soldiers & Sailors Hall on March 28, Clinton was bewitching Pittsburgh Tribune-Review publisher Richard Mellon Scaife. Yes, that's right: The architect and arch-fiend behind what Clinton herself called a "vast right-wing conspiracy" is apparently quite taken with his onetime adversary. And the proof is a March 30 column Scaife wrote for his paper.

Titled "Hillary, Reassessed," the column notes that "Clinton has been criticized regularly, often harshly, by the Trib. We disagreed with many of her policies and her actions." That actually whitewashes the antagonism: Scaife doesn't mention the Trib's role in spreading scurrilous rumors about the death of President Bill Clinton's aide Vince Foster, for example.

But Scaife and Clinton have a lot in common by now. For one thing, Scaife's marriage is a public joke too, thanks to an ugly divorce profiled in a recent jaw-dropping Vanity Fair story.* Among the story's more delicious highlights: Scaife's estranged wife "once kicked Dick in the crotch ... and his testicles swelled to such a size that he had to be taken to the emergency room." [Link added - ed.]

From Dicky's love letter:

Does all this mean I'm ready to come out and recommend that our Democrat readers choose Sen. Clinton in Pennsylvania's April 22 primary?

No -- not yet, anyway. In fairness, we at the Trib want to hear Sen. Barack Obama's answers to some of the same questions and to others before we make that decision.

But it does mean that I have a very different impression of Hillary Clinton today than before last Tuesday's meeting -- and it's a very favorable one indeed.

A couple of points:

"'Democrat' readers" - 'nuff said.

Richard Mellon Scaife has all but endorsed Hillary. Think about that. This would be the same Richard Mellon Scaife who spent millions to destroy her husband (and her) and is such a classy, classy guy:

A few minutes later [Scaife] appeared at the top of the Club steps. At the bottom of the stairs, the following exchange occurred:

"Mr. Scaife, could you explain why you give so much money to the New Right?"

"You fucking Communist cunt, get out of here."

This is Hillary's new BFF.

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Enough

It's time for Hillary to go. Marc Ambinder:

The Clinton campaign is distributing an article in the American Spectator (!) about Obama foreign policy adviser Merrill McPeak and his penchant for.. well, the article accuses him of being an anti-Semite and a drunk. Principally, the author takes McPeak to task for supporting a Middle East map that would require Israel to withdraw to its pre-1967 border. It also makes the case that McPeak supports the Walt-Mearsheimer view of the influence of the Israeli lobby on foreign policy.

The author's sudden conclusion: "Obama has a Jewish problem and McPeak's bigoted views are emblematic of what they are. Obama can issue all the boilerplate statements supporting Israel's right to defend itself he wants. But until he accepts responsibility for allowing people like McPeak so close to his quest for the presidency, Obama's sincerity and judgment will remain open questions."

This would be the same American Spectator that inflicted "Troopergate" and Paula Jones on an unwilling public and, it should be noted, played a large roll in bringing about only the second impeachment of a president in our Republic's history.

That president was Bill Clinton, in case you've forgotten.

And now the Clintons are using that rag for their own sleazy, grasping ends. It's time for both of them to go.

James Fallows:

That the Clinton family would dignify the American Spectator, of all publications, is astonishing to anyone who was alive in the 1990s.

That they would bless this attempt to paint Merrill McPeak as an anti-Semite is grotesque.

[...]

I can easily believe that the Spectator would publish such an article. That the Clinton team would circulate it I'm still trying to deal with.

And to add insult to injury I give you this photograph:



Sidney L. Davis/Tribune-Review

That's Hillary with Pittsburgh Tribune Review owner and publisher Richard Mellon Scaife. For those of you who don't remember Scaife bankrolled the so-called Arkansas Project which sought to destroy utterly a sitting president.

That president was Bill Clinton, in case you've forgotten.

I expressed tepid support for Barack Obama a while back but have tried to stay out of the nasty Democratic civil war which threatens to rip the party apart. I didn't want to contribute to that. But now that the Clintons have turned not only to their worst enemies to save Hillary but have turned to the most extreme, most hateful, most insane elements in our polity I can't stay aloof even if it means turning this blog into a Clinton-bashing site. Them's the breaks.

It's time for Hillary to go.

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Dicky!

I finally got around to reading Vanity Fair's piece on our favorite batshit crazy billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. The bits I like most:

THE HOOKER

In December of 2005, the private detective proved Ritchie’s (the soon to be ex-Mrs. Scaife - ed.) fears to have been well founded: he took pictures showing the reclusive 75-year-old billionaire with a woman named Tammy Vasco, a tall, blonde 43-year-old whose criminal history includes two arrests for prostitution. The pair was photographed at Doug’s Motel, a roadside establishment near Pittsburgh, where rooms rent for $49 a night, or $31 for three hours.

He spends all of that money in an attempt to destroy a president yet meets an (ex?) hooker in a motel that charges by the hour. Gotta keep those priorities straight, I guess.

THE ANGORA SWEATER

Ritchie says Dick started pursuing her immediately. Dick himself says that he didn’t see Ritchie again for another six months. Then one day she came to his office, soliciting for a charity; he couldn’t take his eyes off her white angora sweater. That afternoon, he adds with a wink, “we did what comes naturally.”

“Never owned an angora sweater,” Ritchie protests, aghast and lilting. “I’m allergic to things like that!”

Was it Ritchie or Ed Wood?

CORRUPTION OF A MINOR

David (Dicky's son from his first marriage - ed.) says that Ritchie soon won him over: “My grades were so bad at school at that point, I just thought, Well, instead of getting yelled at,” siding with Dick against Franny could be “a new chapter to our friendship. All of a sudden, he and I were drinking buddies.” When Dick and Ritchie visited him at Deerfield Academy, David claims, Ritchie brought pot for them to smoke together, and his father bought him alcohol.

“To take marijuana to a child? To a prep school?,” Ritchie marvels, when asked about the story. “Never,” she declares, her petite hands holding one another in her lap. “And how dare anyone even make a comment like that?”

Dick, who regretfully confirms the details of his son’s story, says that he did not inhale.

"I didn't inhale."

HIS NAME IS "DICK"

For the exchange of vows, on the old Penguin Court property (Dick had had the gloomy mansion torn down after his mother died, in 1965), Ritchie wore a short white dress. For the reception, at Ligonier’s Rolling Rock Club, the new wife surprised her husband, a fireworks aficionado, by hiring Zambelli, which is responsible for the July Fourth shows on the Mall in Washington, to create a blazing sign on the lawn that proclaimed, in sparkling letters, ritchie loves dick. Even today, a certain set of Pittsburgh women, including wives of some of the country’s most brass-knuckled industrialists, speak of Ritchie’s flaming double entendre as among the most shocking moments of their lives.

It was not a double entendre, Ritchie says, with tears in her eyes: “My mind doesn’t work that way. Please. His name is Dick. His name is Dick, and I thought of the human being. And how evil of them, because I was saying I loved my husband.”

Sometimes you just gotta have Dick.

BEAUREGARD

After Dick had Ritchie arrested and thrown in jail (and stories about it appeared in his newspaper), Ritchie and the Scaife’s three dogs—including Dick’s favorite, a yellow Lab named Beauregard (Dick says Beauregard was a gift from Ritchie; Ritchie says the couple owned the dog together)—moved in with Pietragallo and his wife, Helena, who is one of her oldest friends. Then, in March 2006, Dick arranged for a sign to be made and placed on his front lawn: wife and dog missing—reward for dog.

Woof.

DICKY = BILL CLINTON

For his part, Dick does not believe that any of his efforts to humiliate Ritchie were excessive. Erecting those signs in his front yard, he says, was just plain “fun.” Do the end of the marriage, its escalating vindictiveness, and the ongoing consequences of such anger make him in any way sad? His eyes go blank, and he says, “No, I don’t think about that. I just don’t want her near me. That’s all I think about.”

Asked whether his infidelity is hypocritical, in light of his political commitments, he refers not to a moral principle but to his own personal history. “My first marriage ended with an affair,” he says, amused. And monogamy is not, he continues, an essential part of a good marriage. “I don’t want people throwing rocks at me in the street. But I believe in open marriage.” Philandering, Scaife says with a laugh, “is something that Bill Clinton and I have in common.”

That's our Dicky!

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Another Bad Week For Dicky

Dirty laundry:

A judge refused yesterday to order the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to return court documents related to the divorce case of billionaire publisher Richard M. Scaife and his wife.

Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Alan Hertzberg agreed with the Post-Gazette's contention that the newspaper had First Amendment rights to retain and publish information about the divorce case, even though it had been sealed by court order.

[...]

Mr. Scaife's lawyers filed court papers Friday demanding that the Post-Gazette and reporter Dennis Roddy return any case documents obtained by the prothonotary's error. The newspaper, maintaining the information was of public interest, responded over the weekend by posting key portions of the documents on its own Web site.

In yesterday's court hearing, H. Yale Gutnick, Mr. Scaife's lawyer, contended that the Post-Gazette's access of documents it knew to be sealed was illegal, similar to a burglar entering the judge's home if he left the door open.

"It has thumbed its nose at this court with a smirk on its face," Mr. Gutnick said, suggesting the Post-Gazette was merely acting out of competitive spite against Mr. Scaife.

The documents in question can be found at the link (pdf's).

Dicky and Ritchie in happier days.

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A Bad Week For Dicky

It always gives me pleasure to report on the misfortunes of Dicky Scaife (a case of Schadenfreude, as a German might say). And this week has been bad for the publicity-shy rightwing gazillionaire. D-I-V-O-R-C-E:

The divorce case titled Scaife v. Scaife has wound its way through the courts under a blanket of secrecy as both sides struggle over a storied Pittsburgh fortune surpassing $1.4 billion and a temporary monthly alimony payment bigger than the life savings of most people.

Margaret Ritchie Battle Scaife, 60, and her husband, Mellon banking and oil heir Richard Mellon Scaife, 75, have been unable to agree on support payments, whether one of his newspapers is a hobby or a business investment, and even the date of their separation. She says they split in December 2005, after she caught him in an affair. He says they separated 10 months earlier.

[...]

Copies of the Scaife case file obtained by the Post-Gazette illuminate a dispute that could set a new record for a divorce settlement. The couple did not have a prenuptial agreement. The case file, though ostensibly sealed by the court, was readily available online from the Web site housing Allegheny County court records over a period of several days at the end of last month.

[...]

The case could also affect the fortunes of Mr. Scaife's publishing enterprise, notably the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, which, records filed with the divorce papers show, he has subsidized with more than $140 million -- Mrs. Scaife's lawyers contend the figure is $244 million -- from one of his trust funds over the past 15 years, and which has lost between $20 million and $30 million yearly since it was started in 1992.

There's a dog. There's always a dog:

Five months after her first arrest, Mrs. Scaife was again charged, this time after a street fight outside her husband's home when she confronted and physically battled three of Mr. Scaife's employees.

At issue was a yellow Labrador retriever named Beauregard. She insisted the dog belonged to her. Mr. Scaife has argued that she gave the dog to him as a gift.

When the confrontation was over, Mrs. Scaife was charged with assault. The charges were later dismissed by District Justice Cathleen Bubash, but the three employees, using the same law firm as Mr. Scaife, filed suit for damages against Mrs. Scaife.

But what of Bob Duggan?

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What's That I Smell?

Could it be hypocrisy?

Liberty is not possible if government is not accountable to the governed for what it does in their name. But the House of Delegates of the American Bar Association is not so certain of that.

At the ABA's convention in San Francisco, delegates are scheduled to vote on urging the government to curtail public access to records of the criminal courts.

[...]

But unlike the ABA we balance the public's interest toward openness. For there is too much already done behind closed doors.

Yesterday:

Congress passed a bill cementing the president's authority to protect a nation at war. It allows warrantless surveillance for obtaining foreign intelligence from electronic communications routed through the U.S.

[...]

There are safeguards for Americans. The target of the intercept must presumably be on foreign soil. If a party is a person in the U.S., a warrant must be obtained.

[...]

The nation is sharply divided on the president's war against Islamofascism. But it is vital that any president be free to gather the intel necessary to defend us.

Putting aside the passel of lies contained in the second editorial, it's funny how quickly Deeply Held Beliefs™ change when political considerations are at stake.

The government must always be held accountable except when accountability offends our philosophy!

Oh, and the "any president" bit? That'll change if we see President Hillary. I guarantee it.

That's our Dickie!

Mutable Philosopher

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When You've Lost Dicky...

If it wasn't clear already the Daily Scaife is clearly in the "cut-and-run" camp:

Perhaps Jack Murtha put it best: The Pennsylvania congressman, among the first to make the cogent argument that staying the course in Iraq was the exercise in futility that indeed the war has become, says President Bush is delusional.

[...]

President Bush warns that U.S. withdrawal would risk "mass killings on a horrific scale." What do we have today, sir?

And quite frankly, during last Thursday's news conference, when George Bush started blathering about "sometimes the decisions you make and the consequences don't enable you to be loved," we had to question his mental stability.

If the president won't do the right thing and end this war, the people must. The House has voted to withdraw combat troops from Iraq by April. The Senate must follow suit.

Wingnuts start calling the Trib and Scaife "liberals" in 5...4...3...

dayvoe has more.

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