Leona Helmsley’s dog Trouble must be aghast. He is now only marginally a multimillionaire after Manhattan Surrogate Judge Renee Roth reduced his inheritance from the “Queen of Mean” to $2 million. The other $10 million will go to charity and, most notably, the two grandchildren that she wanted to disinherit.
Helmsley shocked many when she disinherited some grandchildren while leaving millions to her
now 9-year-old Maltese who lives in Florida with Carl Lekic, the general manager of the Helmsley Sandcastle Hotel.
Trouble’s as expensive as a french poodle with an annual cost at $190,000, including Lekic’s $60,000 guardian fee, $100,000 for security, $8,000 for grooming, $3,000 for miscellaneous expenses, $1,200 for food and 2,500 to $18,000 for medical care.
Ok, I will not ask about how much it takes for Lekic to watch over Trouble, even though $60,000 seems a bit high for periodic games of catch. However, $18,000 for medical care and $8000 for grooming. I can get buy with less than $200 a year, including tips. Now, I admit that they do not do the whole body and I may not be quite a looker for the Maltese set, but $8000?
Nevertheless, it was her money to spend, which brings us to the two grandchildren. I am not sure how Judge Roth has the authority to start bestowing money on charities and individuals, particularly two disinherited kids. As far as I can recall, Roth was not named in the will. I always find probate court a bit free with dead people’s money. If these individuals were truly disinherited, it seems a bit odd for a judge to determine that it was a mistake.
After all, Trouble can fetch (between grooming sessions, of course).
For the full story, click here.
Russ,
So tell me what exactly does your over long post have to do with Leona Helmsley’s will? Do you get paid by the word to act as a troll, or is it that you are so self-involved that you write non sequitur posts depending on the thoughts hitting your brain? Kirchick merely makes assertions without taking the time to back them up with at least what might be “his” version of facts. The facts are there for anyone to see. Accessible to all but the most computer challenged. I suspect though that you’re not receptive though to the truth. You prefer instead the Administrations version of reality. The truth that more than 4,000 of our troops are dead, along with more than 25,000 injured and that we have murdered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi’s in the cause of ego and oil, is an uncomfortable one for someone who roots for politicians with the same blind loyalty of a hometown football fan.
Oh, so Bush didn’t lie? He was just dead flat wrong instead. So the 4000+ dead American soldiers, some number of contract employees and untold numbers of Iraqis died because of his poor judgement, poor planning, poor management, bent on petty revenge and complicit in the greed of his campaign contributors. It wasn’t malicious, it was just incompetence. That’s sooo much better.
Russ:
“Liberal “TNR Editor: ‘Bush Never Lied to Us About Iraq’ By Warner Todd Huston | June 16, 2008 – 13:39 ET”
“The question, famed of old, by which logicians were supposed to be driven into a corner, obliged either to have recourse to a pitiful sophism, or to confess their ignorance and consequently the emptiness of their whole art, is the question: What is truth? The nominal definition of truth, that it is the agreement of knowledge with its object, is assumed as granted; the question asked is as to what is the general and sure criterion of the truth of any and every knowledge.”
— Immanuel Kant, ‘Critique of Pure Reason, Kemp-Smith ed., pg 97
N.B. Right Wing parrots need not concern themselves with the foregoing.
You go Russ!
Yee ha!
What is the point in drafting any estate planning whatsoever if some judge will just rewrite everything and give away the money like a Democrat? 🙂
russ:
Well let’s see where to begin? Kirchick has called himself a “liberal,” a “conservative,” a “libertarian” and a “recovering leftist.” He is now a neo-con, and to top it off he has a full two years of experience graduating from Yale in 2006. Certainly a stable source for experienced and nuanced analysis. Some of his recent works include “Clarence Thomas is Not The Hypocrite,” which defends Thomas’ renunciation of affirmative action after he befitted from it; “The Anti-NeoCon Fervor'” defending neo-cons; and last but not least, “Tolerant-except on dates,” about his experiences dating men who don’t share his conservative belief system. Next time, russ, I would cite a better credentialed fool.
Liberal TNR Editor:
Bush Never Lied to Us About Iraq
By Warner Todd Huston | June 16, 2008 – 13:39 ET
In an editorial in the L.A. Times on the 16th, Kirchick said that “Bush never lied to us about Iraq” and then went on to substantiate his claim in a style that runs contrary to the Media and nutroots meme that “Bush lied and people died.”
The left narrative, one the media is happy to parrot, has been that Bush lied us into war. Kirchick points out that “the notion that the Bush administration deceived the American people has become the accepted narrative of how we went to war.”
But Kirchick then steps out into some of the most intellectually honest analysis I’ve seen from the left since before the 2000 election when BDS first began to infect the media.
Yet in spite of all the accusations of White House “manipulation” –that it pressured intelligence analysts into connecting Hussein and Al Qaeda and concocted evidence about weapons of mass destruction –administration critics continually demonstrate an inability to distinguish making claims based on flawed intelligence from knowingly propagating falsehoods.
Kirchick goes on to chronicle some of the agencies and investigative bodies that have found absolutely no evidence that the Bush Administration manipulated Congress as it made the case for the war.
Kirchick also comes as close to calling John D. Rockefeller (D, W. Va.) a liar as you can without using those specific words when he notes that Rockefeller’s “highly partisan” Senate Intelligence Committee report does not support the wild eyed claims made in its summation.
Yet Rockefeller’s highly partisan report does not substantiate its most explosive claims. Rockefeller, for instance, charges that “top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and Al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11.” Yet what did his report actually find? That Iraq-Al Qaeda links were “substantiated by intelligence information.” The same goes for claims about Hussein’s possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons program.
Kirchick also trenchantly notes that the latest partisan attack that is being presented as a “report” conveniently forgets to mention the words of the many dozens of highly placed Democrats who’s words were nearly identical to Bush’s in the run up to war.
In 2003, top Senate Democrats — not just Rockefeller but also Carl Levin, Clinton, Kerry and others — sounded just as alarmist. Conveniently, this month’s report, titled “Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information,” includes only statements by the executive branch. Had it scrutinized public statements of Democrats on the Intelligence, Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees — who have access to the same intelligence information as the president and his chief advisors — many senators would be unable to distinguish their own words from what they today characterize as warmongering.
In the end, Kirchick finds no shred of proof that Bush “lied” about anything. In fact, he scolds every Democrat and partisan leftist for saying that he did and that the claim that Bush lied us into war is an “unsubstantiated allegation” that is “cowardly and dishonest.”
So, kudos to James Kirchick for an honest look at the record. Certainly we can agree to disagree right now, at this point, if the war was a good idea or not. But, it is beyond question that there were no lies disseminated by the Bush Administration and neither did the president “manipulate” any evidence to “mislead” the nation into war.
Go read Kirchick’s piece and marvel that it came from a lefty. He really nailed it. “Bush never lied to us about Iraq” is worth your time.
If wills and contracts can be disregarded on a whim, what is the point in even having them?
I sure agree with Joe on this. How can it be? I think it’s unfair I didn’t get any of the money.
That kind of thing always makes me so angry. Not her leaving the money to her dog. She had the right to do whatever she wanted with he money. It just infuriates me when what a will or contract means is based on what some judge thinks is “right” and “fair”. That shouldn’t enter into the equation at all. The only thing that judge should be considering is the law. If wills and contracts can be disregarded on a whim, what is the point in even having them?