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Oh, Happy Day: The Scaife Divorce

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MADem Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Oct-26-07 06:12 AM
Original message
Oh, Happy Day: The Scaife Divorce
This may have been posted before, but in the abundance of news this past week it just might have been missed. It really is a CRACKING GOOD READ!

....But only Pittsburgh is the scene of the fabulously tawdry and surpassingly vicious spectacle that is the divorce of Richard Mellon Scaife. .... He's best known for funding efforts to smear then-President Bill Clinton, but more quietly he's given in excess of $300 million to right-leaning activists, watchdogs and think tanks. Atop his list of favorite donees: the family-values-focused Heritage Foundation, which has published papers with titles such as "Restoring a Culture of Marriage." ... his own marriage is apparently past restoring. With the legal fight still in the weigh-in phase, the story of Scaife v. Scaife already includes a dog-snatching, an assault, a night in jail and that divorce court perennial, allegations of adultery.

Oh, and there's the money. Three words, people.

No. Pre. Nup.



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.....

It gets better.

But to fully appreciate this mesmerizing debacle, one must study it up close, for its many strategic blunders and its moments of epic brutality -- like a visit to Gettysburg, minus the gravitas.....



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/21/AR2007102101643.html
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MaineYooper Donating Member (555 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Oct-26-07 07:27 AM
Response to Original message
1. schadenfreude
The Germans have the perfect word for this: schadenfreude, roughly meaning happiness at the bad fortune of others.

I know that we should be above it, but people like Scaife make it impossible to avoid at least a little gloating.
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MADem Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Oct-26-07 08:52 AM
Response to Reply #1
3. I think we should be all over it like a cheap suit, myself!! Why?
Because even though he is rich as Roosevelt, if he's fighting and paying lawyers, and she's trying for half, that's money that might not go to the HERITAGE SOCIETY. I'd love to see those bastards have to make it on their own--they'd fold like a cheap suitcase!!!
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Cha Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Oct-26-07 08:00 PM
Response to Reply #1
8. That was gonna be my
my three words.. Schad En Freude

But, it's not just the bad fortune of others ..it's the bad fortune of your sworn enemy and a traitor to the United States Of America. So, I think it's more like ol' scaife(rhymes with asshole extraordinaire) lost this battle with his wifey poo and was exposed as the freakshow hypocrite that he is.. tsk tsk, another goPervert that gets busted..go join the rotting pile up, richard mellon scaife.
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Jade Fox Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-27-07 11:21 AM
Response to Reply #1
14. Me, I'm changing my middle name to Schadenfreude....
With the destruction to our country people like Scaife have funded, you're damned right I enjoy their bad fortune.
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Rageneau Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Oct-26-07 07:51 AM
Response to Original message
2. Karma
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Baby Snooks Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Oct-26-07 09:54 AM
Response to Original message
4. The Poster Boy for Conservative Christian Republican Family Values
Richard Scaife is the perfect example of the hypocrisy of the conservative Christian Republicans. Truly their poster boy.
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Joanne98 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Oct-26-07 11:01 AM
Response to Original message
5. Now, if we can only get Margaret to donate Ritchie's money to liberal causes!
That would be purrfect!!!!!!
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MADem Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Oct-26-07 11:11 AM
Response to Reply #5
6. It would be SWEET revenge, that! nt
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Demeter Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Oct-26-07 11:34 AM
Response to Reply #5
7. Even If She Just Keeps It Out of Politics, We Win
Payback is such a bitch.
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FREEWILL56 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-27-07 11:13 PM
Response to Reply #7
16. That would be literally and figuritively.
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Democrats_win Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Oct-26-07 08:34 PM
Response to Original message
9. The implosion of the family values hypocrites continues like the fourth of July.
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FREEWILL56 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-27-07 01:17 AM
Response to Original message
10. It was previously placed in the Pa section if you want to check it out.
Edited on Sat Oct-27-07 01:21 AM by FREEWILL56
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=175x13192
It really didn't get very much attention and I really get a kick out of her name.
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Aviation Pro Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-27-07 07:24 AM
Response to Original message
11. Three words sw--ee--t.
This is the reason we need inheritance taxes, to prevent rich scions, who have no reason or motivation to contribute anything to society, from becoming a force unto themselves.

Scaife is just another in a long list of trust baby, silver spoon fuckheads. The most famous? Motherfucker George Bush.
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Myrina Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-27-07 08:14 AM
Response to Original message
12. "As Richard Scaife's exasperated lawyers put it ... "
... they're exasperated at the thought of him having to pay out that much money to HER, but they're not exasperated at the thought that one individual can be that stinkin' filthy rich in the first place? As if that money just magically appeared and he didn't make it off of someone/something along the way?

:shrug:

Something's wrong with that picture.
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Warren Stupidity Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-27-07 08:27 AM
Response to Reply #12
13. In Scaife's case the money just magically appeared.
He is a trust fund baby inheriting the Mellon billions. Lawyers state the obvious as if it is unusual. Did they expect that the estranged wife of a billionaire was going to move into a double-wide?
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in_cog_ni_to Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-27-07 10:32 PM
Response to Original message
15. I hope she take every freakin' penny that SOB has! Leave him with NOTHING!!!!!
Please!
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grasswire Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-27-07 11:20 PM
Response to Original message
17. there are a couple of suspicious deaths, too, right?
Reporter Steve Kangas, who mysteriously died in the restroom outside Scaife's office? And didn't Scaife have his daughter's fiance killed or something like that?
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Joe Bacon Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Oct-28-07 02:37 AM
Response to Original message
18. Let's hear it for NO PRE-NUP!!!!
I hope she takes a Hoover vacuum cleaner to Dicky's bank accounts!
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