Free Republic

Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire publisher and banking heir who financed conservative causes that included attempts to discredit Bill Clinton while he was president, has died. He was 82. Scaife's death on Friday followed his disclosure less than two months ago that he had terminal cancer, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, one of his newspapers. He was heir to the banking, oil and aluminum fortunes of the Mellon family and used his estimated $1.4 billion wealth to underwrite conservative crusades and groups that included the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute.

Richard Mellon Scaife, the Pittsburgh philanthropist and reclusive heir to the Mellon banking fortune, whose support for right-wing causes laid the foundations for America’s modern conservative movement and fueled the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton, died on Friday. He was 82. Mr. Scaife’s death was reported by the The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a newspaper he owned. He had announced recently that he had cancer. Decades before David and Charles Koch bankrolled right-wing causes, Mr. Scaife and Joseph Coors, the beer magnate, were the leading financiers of the conservative crusade of the 1970s and ’80s, seeking to reverse the liberal traditions...

A few months ago, after John McCain locked up the GOP presidential nomination, Chris Ruddy says he received a series of insistent phone calls from an unexpected source: Sarah Palin. "We got calls from her people up in Alaska asking if we wanted to interview her," says Ruddy, editor in chief and owner of the conservative Web site Newsmax.com, based in West Palm Beach. "Back then she wasn't on the radar for the vice presidency, and I just blew her off." But the calls continued. Palin's people wouldn't go away. "Finally we sent a writer, not even one of our...

Richard Mellon Scaife, the reclusive right-wing billionaire who financed a “family values” crusade that almost bought down President Bill Clinton, has offered surprising praise for the politician he once despised - and admitted they both share an interest in philandering. The heir to the Mellon banking fortune was once scorned by Democrats as the shadowy figure behind what Hillary Clinton dubbed “the vast right-wing conspiracy”. Mr Scaife backed the so-called Arkansas Project that produced a series of stories in the American Spectator magazine into Mr Clinton’s sex life, including the notorious “Troopergate” piece that spurred Paula Jones’ sexual harrassment suit...

One current permathread on Big Orange is that Krugman and Obama are feuding or having a vendetta. Which, when you take a step back, is bizarre. That movement conservatives and Villagers like stone Bush enabler William Kristol, like David Brooks, Broderella, and Andrew Sullivan are all good with Obama isn’t even mentioned in passing by Obama’s fan base. And yet those same enthusiasts spend inordinate amounts of time vilifying Paul Krugman, a true progressive who was there for us from the earliest dark days of the Bush regime. Curious. What’s really happening? Krugman doesn’t have a problem with Obama; Krugman...

Hillary Clinton has been in politics long enough to know the value of the word "change." In 1992, her husband's political guru, James Carville, hung a white sign in the Clinton campaign war room that read CHANGE VS. MORE OF THE SAME. Bill Clinton won the presidency that year with 370 electoral votes. Over the course of the summer, she watched her rivals for the Democratic nomination try again and again to define themselves as change and Clinton as the status quo. ("We're more interested in looking forward, not backward," Barack Obama told reporters. "And the American people feel the...

By John Berlau © 2004 Insight/News World Communications Inc. Though President Bush constantly is criticized and attacked by Democratic partisans for pursuing policies that benefit "the wealthy," why are so many of what would be considered America's superrich his political opponents? In addition to the Hollywood mega-elite, which since the death of Sam Goldwyn have opposed the GOP mainly for cultural reasons, billionaire businessmen have stepped forward calling for the defeat of Bush or his policies. Most prominent has been speculator George Soros, who has pledged to raise $75 million to defeat Bush, given millions to Democratic Bush-bashing groups such...

Back in the late 1990s when Hillary Rodham Clinton claimed the existence of a "vast, right-wing conspiracy," she was scoffed at by the Republicans, the press and anyone sore at the Clintons for whatever infraction, real or imagined, they might have committed. The country got a good laugh, and the expression has become almost as much a part of our political lexicon as "What did you know and when did you know it," "I am not a crook" and "Read my lips: No new taxes." However, while Hillary's naysayers were chortling and guffawing, those "thinkers" at the Cato Institute may...