Richard Mellon Scaife, Influential U.S. Conservative, Dies at 82

[blue neen]

78. Sorry.

I believe the harm Scaife did far outweighs the good.

"He donated widely not just to Republican political candidates -- Barry Goldwater's presidential run in 1964 was among the first -- but to the think tanks, research institutes and university departments whose work has been closely tied to the ascendancy of right-wing ideology since the Reagan presidency."

"The public foundations and private trusts controlled by Mr. Scaife have been major backers of the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Hoover Institute in California and the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies, among many institutions linked to the right. "He is nothing less than the financial archangel for the movement's intellectual underpinnings," the Wall Street Journal once said of Mr. Scaife."

"Most of those contributions came outside of the spotlight, but Mr. Scaife's visibility grew during the Clinton presidency. He was identified as the key funder of efforts in the non-mainstream media to discredit Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton -- she called his the money behind "a vast right-wing conspiracy" -- by investigating their pre-White House financial dealings."

"In a detailed examination more than a decade ago, The Washington Post estimated Mr. Scaife's trusts and foundations had by then given $340 million to conservative causes."

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/news/obituaries/2014/07/04/Tribune-Review-publisher-Scaife-dies/stories/201407040150#ixzz36YzFCz2R

The ultra-conservative movement that started with Reagan has been so damaging that we may never be able to repair that damage, if at all. Scaife contributed $340 million (that we know of) to the masters of greed, hatred, bigotry, and racism. And that doesn't even begin to account for the brainwashing of western PA by his newspapers (and I use the term "newspaper" loosely).