Born Rich

Via Talking Points Memo, I found myself reading this Washington Post Style page article about the messy divorce of right-wing financier Richard Mellon Scaife, the Mellon heir who bank-rolled a continuous effort to smear the Clinton's when Bill was President. Scaife, who started dating his current wife while still married to his first wife, also has a long history of funding "family-values" organizations like the Heritage Foundation, which publishes articles about restoring the sanctity of marriage. But Republican hypocrisy about family values is as old as Newt Gingrich. And Rudi Giuliani. And John McCain. And Larry Craig. And, well you get the picture.

What caught my attention was the sums of money being talked about in this article. The soon to be ex-wife, who caught him cheating on her, is collecting "$725,000 a month. Or about $24,000 a day, seven days a week." It seems he forgot to have her sign a prenuptial agreement.

It's an astronomical amount of money - to me. But Scaife gets by on a miserly $4 million a month in trust money. What does he do? The lawyer for his soon-to-be ex-wife says:

These massive streams of income are attributable to no employment, business enterprise or other effort -- intellectual, physical, creative or ministerial -- past or present.

Ministerial?