Richard Mellon Scaife, that horrible little man with an immense fortune who has been propping up institutes loudly supporting right-wing family values, creationism, and gutter-scraping attacks on Democrats, is getting a divorce. Not just any divorce — a train wreck of a divorce, prompted by Scaife’s gallivanting about with a prostitute, and with scads of amusingly petty behavior. And the money involved is impressive.
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."
Take him for everything he’s got, lady, and then throw the money away on diamond dog collars, a team of tanned, buff pool boys, and whatever silly overpriced frippery tickles your over-privileged patrician fancy. It’s got to be better than using it to fund the Heritage Foundation.
Isn’t it so typical, though, that a rich old bluenose who thinks he knows best how other people should live their lives doesn’t even try to meet his own standards, and is flaming out spectacularly in such a tawdry scandal?
Yes. So why does anybody listen to any of the nut-job organizations that this complete waste of oxygen props-up?
It is obvious that his bad judgment carries over to every one of his write-offs.
Mmmm… Schadenfreude pie!
Well, 1.3 billion is so big that even if he never gained another penny, he could afford to pay $750,000 for 1733 months, or 144.4 years before running out of money.
In this case, the lady had to put up with Scaife for 16 years, so she’s probably earned the money several times over.
This is like, what, the ninety-six thousand, three hundred and seventy-eighth time that something like this has happened to a prominent religious righter this year alone? It’s almost getting boring; then you remember the things they’ve done and it becomes fun again.
I’m looking forward to Huckabee’s, Romney’s and Thompson’s scandals.
You lie in the bed you make…
Maybe he qnd his ex-wife should get together with Richard Roberts at Oral Roberts University.
The Scaifes have money.
Richard and his wife could use some bucks by now for their legal troubles. And they have 1000’s of young students mostly just past the age of consent.
Of course the kids are hard core Xians. But it is starting to look like sincere, committed Xian is code speak for party animals with unusually broad tastes.
Starting to see how fundie Xianity persists.
Richard’s new status. Plebeian
If I weren’t happily married, I’d break out my Sunday suit and pay a call on Miz Ritchie.
Somewhere, the Clintons are smiling.
I just wanted to thank you, Pharyngula, for providing me an excellent link to submit to Fark. It goes live at 11:36am EST.
Unless you have Total Fark, clicking on the above link will not work until after the aforementioned 11:36 :)
The story linked above just demonstrates that marriage break-ups among white trash participants, whether rich or poor, involve the same elements: alcohol, SUVs, hair-pulling, cheap motels, drive-by hollering, and dawgs.
Another member of the Distinguished Order of Unapologetically Conservative Hypocritical Evangelicals.
These family-values shouters (or “blue-nosey horny toads,” as Jello Biafra calls them) are so far out there they make me feel like a prude.
It’s a really strange feeling: I’m seriously unused to feeling like a prude.
How many wetsuits was he wearing?
I wish I could be the editor of a major newspaper every once in a while. I’d put pictures of Nelson right above reports like these.
Of course this sort of politics is one of the oldest 3-card-monte games going. Rev up the poor folks with “morality,” know most of the rich folks will vote their pocketbooks, and crowd out the people in the middle who are employed by the rich folks. Let the former Mrs. Scaife receive a fortune from the divorce; it is unlikely to equal the boost to Mr. Scaife’s fortune resulting from the laws passed during the Reagan and Bush administrations that his propaganda machine helped put in place.
It’s always about the money.
P.S. Note to Mr. Scaife’s lawyers – considering who your client is, appealing to the judge’s sense of outrage regarding obscenely large incomes is unlikely to be an effective tactic in this particular case.
In the interest of respecting the privacy of the Scaifes, we ask that you refrain from commenting on their private tragedy.
Don’t be so quick to assume those items will necessarily be her choices. It’s worth at least checking whether she might donate some to atheist, secularist or scientific organisations.
Now you’ve made my day! She should write Hillary a big check to really piss off Richard.
Janine: if you are so foolhardy as to actually be serious, kindly fuck off. You reek of Rep Defender.
First, a public figure has to learn to cope with their ‘private’ tragedies being made the subject of commentary. On top of that, as you may have figured out by our collective capering at the rich asshat’s misery, most of us would probably be happy to see Mr Scaife and his ilk penniless and miserable, ideally in the midst of the realization that the world would be a better place without them. (or at least I would be, I really shouldn’t speak for the others)
Hey, Mechalith #21: sar·casm /ˈsɑrkæzəm/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation[sahr-kaz-uhm] Pronunciation Key – Show IPA Pronunciation
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
2. a sharply ironical taunt; sneering or cutting remark: a review full of sarcasms.
At least one of us is having a hard time with it this morning ;-)
FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! Mechalith, and I repeat again fuck you.
Anyone who is familiar with the tactics used by all of the media owned by Scaife would realize that the statement said by me was a joke.
And frankly, I am getting tired of stupid people taking my jokes seriously. What am I going to have to do, put a warning at the beginning of my post; “Warning! Oncoming Joke!”
I am never to be confused with any sort of theist and I am never to be confused with any right winger.
AlanWCan: I considered the possibility that it was sarcasm (one of my favorite types of humor, works poorly in text with no context) which is why I started out with “IF you are, etc.” The ‘we’ in her post also lends itself to an interpretation that she was posting as representation for a group or concern, in this case Mr Schaife’s.
Janine: er… calm down? I’m sorry to have upset you, but since I don’t know you and have seen enough posts like yours that were serious I simply took it at face value. Also, you’ll note that I never said you were a right-winger OR a theist. I did imply you were with Rep Defender, but as I’ve seen them make posts like that in the past I think it was a fairly logical conclusion. If this is a regular problem for you, some re-evaluation of your communication or comedic skills may be in order.
Oh c’mon, Janine- You gave ME a good chuckle, anyway. Mechalith obviously has not spent enough time on this site to recognize your by-line. Otherwise, he would certainly not have been so irony-challenged. Probably blushing by now…I would be. Even without the spanking.
See? This is why I posted these proposed rules for commenting:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/10/everything_is_explained.php#comment-609267
So now we have the sarcasm truth table.
If A then ‘Fuck Off’.
If B then ‘chuckles’.
Sorry, “If” does not get you off the hook. I saw that there. Yet you still felt the need to flip me off and lecture me. I am been here long enough to not be confused with the likes of FTK, Legion, Bill C, John Smith or Caledonia. The problem is not with me. It is with you.
Also, it is possible to respond to my post without resorting to swearing at me and lecturing me. You could simply ask if I am serious. I am sure most of the regulars here could answer for me.
AlanWCan, Mike K and Brownian; thank you. I am pleased you found it funny with having to have it explained.
i cannot for the life of me see any logic in that. if this sum is so exasperating when given to the ex-wife, surely it can be no less scandalous if retained by the ex-husband?
You may well have been here long enough for most of the regulars to not mistake you Janine, but I don’t usually post in the comments threads or read them (something I’m trying to get better about). Absent any reason to think otherwise, I treated you like I would treat someone who had made your comments in earnest. I didn’t ask if anyone recognized you because I thought it was unlikely to be the case and because I didn’t think you would get this mad about a misunderstanding. It was/is possible to be more polite, but frankly if you had been the type of individual you appeared (to me) to be, that’s about as nice as I get. To put it more concisely, your ‘sarcasm truth table’ is pretty much accurate.
–
Nomen: I suspect it’s primarily scandalous to them based on the idea that it’s his money and there’s no way in hell that she needs that much money to live on. Honestly, much as I’d like to revel in schadenfreude and simply cheer the alimony payments on, I don’t think it’s right that our legal system is set up this way in regard to marriages, and I can’t bring myself to be a hypocrite about it. I’m all for alimony payments or something similar if one spouse has no current income/residence and needs the funds to keep themselves afloat until they do. Avoiding homelessness and bankruptcy shouldn’t be a reason to maintain a relationship. That said, I also don’t think it should be possible/encouraged for one partner to completely rake the other over the coals just because they didn’t think to cover their ass legally in the event their marriage went south.
…that said, the asshat doesn’t need it either, so I’m not about to get all incensed on his behalf.
To clarify my previous post; what I was trying to get across is that I think it’s reasonable to expect him to pay alimony, however I think the size of the payments is insane, no matter HOW much money the guy has. Arguments re: the ‘quality of life they have become accustomed to’ would be referred to the “suck it up and deal with it” department.
well, if the payments were in the dozens of millions per month, then i might agree that even a man worth $1.3 billion might be getting “raked over the coals”, and that the sum was unfair. but an amount that mr. Scaife could keep up paying for over a hundred years, even if he lost all sources of income completely, cannot possibly be said to be paupering him.
your complaint may be valid, Mechalith, but this particular case is not a good example of it by any measure.
I agree Nomen, if I were going to try to argue a case for my point of view, this guy would actually make an excellent counterpoint. The only reason I even mentioned my reservations is that I felt it would be somewhat dishonest not to, and partially to play devils advocate.
Mechalith, if that is your attempt at an apology, I think you know what my response it. All I will add to that is this, if my dry humor makes you think I am being “earnest”, the problem is all yours.
You can’t expect that everyone here is familiar with such a detail of life in the USA. On this blog, you are talking to the whole English-speaking world, and that doesn’t even just include native speakers.
You made an insider joke.
You can’t expect that everyone here is familiar with such a detail of life in the USA. On this blog, you are talking to the whole English-speaking world, and that doesn’t even just include native speakers.
You made an insider joke.
An insider joke is something that is shared among friends. I am guilty of assuming that people know that Scaife owns the second largest family of right wing media to Rupert Murdoch. (That renowned American!)
Everyone remember those “Axis of Evil” playing cards? Well, maybe we should make some with right-wing Xians caught in flagrante delicto.
Kimpatsu, that is the best idea I’ve heard in some time!
If anyone with better PhotoShop skills than I have will make some, I’ll buy a deck for our regular Games Night.
“and whatever silly overpriced frippery tickles your over-privileged patrician fancy”
That has to be one of the very best satirical phrases with historical innuendo I have ever read. And it was written by a BIOLOGIST?…
Uggh. I’m going to have to start reading up on invertebrates.
Janine: I recognized your post for what it was right away. It fit beautifully into the thread.
GDad: Schadenfreude pie – what an interesting and imaginative idea. Thanks much for the recipe link. I’ll be making one some day (perhaps soon…and perhaps, one can hope, in November 2008).
I think a little more background information on good ol’ R. M. Scaife is in order here. You see, he’s one of the heirs of the Carnegie-Mellon foundation. That’s right, banking AND steel money. He was one of the directors of Republic Steel. Rep. steel owned LTV steel. When LTV Steel didn’t make 25% per annum on his multi-million dollar investment (they made 22% that year according to the Mpls. Star-Trib) he pulled the plug on them. That put 3 entire towns in northeastern Minnesota out of work overnight. Over 8,000 people fucked over at once. Nice guy, eh?
One of the towns was my hometown, Babbitt.
I got nothing nice to say or write about RMS. I think you can all guess why. Anyway, my very bitter 45c worth.
“I am guilty of assuming that people know that Scaife owns the second largest family of right wing media to Rupert Murdoch.”
I for one had never heard of him. Thanks, Jeffox, for the extra information.
Jeffox, that is a clear example of my believe that the actions of people, largely unknown to the general public, having more effects on their lives, then the actions of a much more public elected body.
I knew he came from a steel background. But I did not know about what you stated. While it can be argued that sooner or later, the amount of steel that has to be processed will go down, I am of the opinion that this action is much worse then the anti-Clinton campaign that he financed during the nineties. Near where I live, in recent decades, all of the steel plants in Gary, Indiana have closed down. Republic was one of those. Northeastern Indiana and Southeast Chicago have not recovered from that.
Are we terrible people for taking so much rich, delicious pleasure out of Scaife’s misfortunes? Considering his influence on American democracy, this couldn’t have happened to a better misanthrope…
Still, this is much more than gloating about a hypocrite being taken down a peg or two; there are some real poltical implications here. The biggest and most important question is this: what are Ritchie Scaife’s politics, and does she share his enthusiasm for bankrolling a far-right agenda? If she doesn’t have any designs on becomming a neocon sugarmamma, then a major funding source has dried up for outfits like the Heritage Foundaton, the Hoover Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, GOPAC, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, etc. Pinch me, I must be dreaming.
Janine:
It could always be worse: they could fail to perceive the joke and then fail to take you seriously. Or intelligent people could be taking your jokes seriously. Either way, what horror!
Janine wrote, “Jeffox, that is a clear example of my believe that the actions of people, largely unknown to the general public, having more effects on their lives, then the actions of a much more public elected body. ”
I agree 100%. I call them “social lurkers”. Invariably wealthy and able to hide that fact, they control aspects of all of our lives to their (and their’s only) benefit. It’s where fascism comes from, if you study history.
It sounds like you and I share similar thoughts because of similar backgrounds. Nice to meet you in here, Janine.
afterthought: He’s given money to CMU, and some of what CMU does is worth while …