How many folks from the early aughts DU era are having mellon/scaife flashbacks today?

[Blue_Adept]

It was nice not hearing about them for a few years, but unless you break billionaires, they'll always be back in some new form.

The "new" guy is 83. There's a slate of mellon's behind him that will be wielding this same power soon too.

[UpInArms]

1. Checking in

PTSD

ETA

https://www.spartacus-educational.com/JFKkangas.htm

Kangas ran the Liberalism Resurgent website. This included several articles on the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. One of his online essays, The Origins of the Overclass, attempted to show "why the richest 1 percent have exploded ahead since 1975, with the help of the New Right, Corporate America and, surprisingly, the CIA." In the essay he argues that Richard Mellon Scaife ran "Forum World Features, a foreign news service used as a front to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world."

Scaife was very unhappy with the attack made on him and employed private detective, Rex Armistead, to carry out an investigation into Kangas.

It is believed that Kangas was working on a book about CIA covert activities when on 8th February, 1999, he was found dead in the bathroom of the offices of Richard Mellon Scaife, the owner of the Pittsburgh Tribune. He had been shot in the head. Officially he had committed suicide but some people believe he was murdered. In an article in Salon Magazine, (19th March, 1999) Andrew Leonard asked: "Why did the police report say the gun wound was to the left of his head, while the autopsy reported a wound on the roof of his mouth? Why had the hard drive on his computer been erased shortly after his death? Why had Scaife assigned his No. 1 private detective, Rex Armistead, to look into Kangas' past?"

[Deep State Witch]

2. I'm From Pittsburgh

And went to Chatham College, now University. Our student center was in Andy Mellon's old mansion. So yeah, we knew all about the Mellons and Scaifes.

[Ocelot II]

3. A blast from the past, and not a good one.

In his first foray into national politics, in 1964, Mr. Scaife backed Senator Barry M. Goldwater, the Arizona Republican, who lost his presidential bid in a landslide. In 1972, Mr. Scaife gave $1 million to the re-election war chest of President Richard M. Nixon, including $45,000 to a secret fund linked to the Watergate scandal. And in the 1980s, Mr. Scaife ardently supported Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

But, disillusioned by Watergate and Nixon, he switched his focus from officeholders to ideologies, and his influence in the rise of neoconservatism stemmed primarily from his contributions to think tanks, lobbyists and publications that promoted free-market economics, lower taxes, smaller government and cuts in social welfare programs. Beneficiaries included the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and Judicial Watch.

In another approach, in the 1990s, he poured millions into what critics called a moral crusade against Mr. Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, financing investigations by publications, notably the conservative American Spectator and his own Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, that were aimed at discrediting the Clintons.

They accused the Clintons of fraud in the Whitewater case, a failed real estate venture in the 1970s and ’80s, when Mr. Clinton was governor of Arkansas, and Mr. Clinton of sexual misconduct in liaisons with Paula Jones in Little Rock and Monica Lewinsky in the White House. They also charged that Vincent W. Foster Jr., a White House counsel and former law partner of Mrs. Clinton, had been murdered in 1993 in a Whitewater cover-up. Several investigations found that Mr. Foster had committed suicide.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/05/us/richard-mellon-scaife-influential-us-conservative-dies-at-82.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wE8.wdBT.GnN7qP70J5QR&smid=url-share

[AllaN01Bear]

4. im still in shock from gore v bush.

[crud]

6. I showed up at the CA capitol that day

With a sign shaped like a headstone announcing the death of democracy. There were about 200 people there.

[Solly Mack]

5. Same song, new verse.

[A Badger]

7. The late-seventies especially, but also the early-eighties

...had such muckraking journals as In These Times, Mother Jones, The Progressive, and Nation with which to stay informed. The '76 Ford/Dole ticket- and the intra-Party battle at the Republican Convention which produced it,- to a large degree spelled the beginning of the end of the moderate and liberal wings of that Party. Those news sources kept us abreast of what Reagan was about to unleash upon us.

Scaife was almost a 'bit player' back then, compared to the likes of Paul Weyrich, Joseph Coors, Richard Viguerie, Phyllis Schlafly, Robert Welch, Jesse Helms, Edgar Uihlein...
Their ghost still live.

[some_of_us_are_sane]

8. Fascinating... I'm from Pittsburgh too

and don't remember this at all. DOESN'T SURPRISE ME IN THE LEAST.