A federal judge sentenced Bernard Madoff, the convicted mastermind of the largest and most sweeping Ponzi scheme ever, to the maximum sentence of 150 years in federal court Monday.
Judge Denny Chin of U.S. District Court in New York announced the sentence just moments after Madoff apologized to his victims.
“I live in a tormented state for all the pain and suffering I created,” Madoff said. “I left a legacy of shame. It is something I will live with for the rest of my life.”
Madoff orchestrated the scam by masquerading his investment firm as a legitimate business. But the business became a front for a Ponzi scheme, in which the scammer uses fresh money from unsuspecting investors to make payments to more mature investors, creating the false appearance of legitimate returns.
Madoff sent statements to victims claiming that their investments had grown several times over, but in actuality he had stolen, not invested, their money. Investigators believe that he had been running his scam since at least the 1980s until he finally ran out of money in December 2008.
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Ed Comment: My only complaint with this video is that the people profiled are described White, Working Class… While they were definitely white, I don’t believe that many of them were working. I wonder How many of them well reflect on their behavior when they get jobs under an Obama Administration? Also Viewers please note the use of Provocative language in this video. -Shiinai.
The most persistent falsehood about Senator Barack Obama’s background first hit in 2004 just two weeks after the Democratic convention speech that helped set him on the path to his presidential candidacy: “Obama is a Muslim who has concealed his religion.â€
That statement, contained in a press release, spun a complex tale about the ancestry of Mr. Obama, who is Christian.
The press release was picked up by a conservative Web site, FreeRepublic.com, and spread steadily as others elaborated on its claims over the years in e-mail messages, Web sites and books. It continues to drive other false rumors about Mr. Obama’s background.
Just last Friday, a woman told Senator John McCain at a town-hall-style meeting, “I have read about him,†and “he’s an Arab.†Mr. McCain corrected her.
Until this month, the man who is widely credited with starting the cyberwhisper campaign that still dogs Mr. Obama was a secondary character in news reports, with deep explorations of his background largely confined to liberal blogs.
But an appearance in a documentary-style program on the Fox News Channel watched by three million people last week thrust the man, Andy Martin, and his past into the foreground. The program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.
An examination of legal documents and election filings, along with interviews with his acquaintances, revealed Mr. Martin, 62, to be a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims. He has left a trail of animosity — some of it provoked by anti-Jewish comments — among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over more than 30 years.
He is a law school graduate, but his admission to the Illinois bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of “moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.â€
Imagine an election where one of the participants calls foul. Investigations are launched or at least called for. Prosecutors raise the specter of charges, the U.S. attorney and FBI get involved. No voter fraud is ever actually found. But by the time that conclusion is reached, the myth has been solidified both to soothe the loser’s supporters and condemn the winner.
Sound familiar? Sound like the recent ACORN scandal?
Well, actually I’m talking about the 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. That Nixon was cheated out of a win is the stuff of legend on the Right. The allegations say that Kennedy loyalists fixed the vote counts in Illinois and Texas–swinging 51 electoral votes and a majority in the Electoral College to Kennedy. In more hyperbolic versions there is alleged involvement by the mob, the Teamsters Union or legendary Chicago mayor Richard Daley.
The story goes on that Nixon, “for the good of the country,” conceded honorably and exited the scene. No matter that Nixon was later chased out of the White House for cheating in an election. The myth endures.
This whole story–maybe to be replayed with Obama playing Kennedy and McCain playing Nixon–is a canard. It is a fable. A lie made up by the conservative movement to hold together their fraying coalition.
In 2008 the stakes are bigger than they’ve ever been before for conservatives and the canard is that much more important to them.
In the case of Obama the conservative movement is lining up a serious of story elements. They are:
• Obama was a community organizer.
• ACORN, a group that does community organizing, has committed voter fraud.
• Obama is from Chicago.
• You know what happens in elections in Chicago. Remember the 1960 election.
The story is half true and half lies. As we all know, Barack Obama is from Chicago and was a community organizer. Those are the only true parts of the conservative story. But the other two facts are myths: the 1960 election wasn’t stolen (says the conclusion of recounts and investigations in 1960 and numerous academic studies since). And, ACORN has not committed voter fraud. Not one bit.
The facts about ACORN are worth getting out. ACORN is an organization that, among other things, registers low-income people to vote. One of the ways they do this is to hire door-to-door canvassers from the neighborhoods they are working in. This sort of work is tightly regulated. So, when one of the thousands of people they give jobs to doesn’t do their work right and brings back bogus or phony voter registration cards, the law REQUIRES that ACORN turn the forms in to the voter registration office. The law, rightly, doesn’t want anybody throwing out voter registration forms for any reason.
But ACORN goes a step farther. They have people assigned to do quality control on all the cards–calling people on the forms after they fill them out. When they find bad information on the cards they attach a cover sheet to the card but, as mentioned above, they turn in the cards as required by law. The effect is that a few bad canvassers or a poorly run office will mean that bad cards are submitted as part of the normal process. But ACORN has done everything possible to make sure voting officials know to check the forms.
The sad fact is that in at least one state–Nevada–the voting officials disregarded ACORN’s cover sheets flagging the voter registration forms. That should have never happened. The resulting blowup was a scandal in search of a scandal.
I attended Governor Sarah Palin’s press conference this week. I witnessed the “Palin Truth Squad” first hand. It was as “truthy” to politics as the Jeffrey Dahmer Cooking School would be to the culinary arts. It made me nauseous. With a precarious political atmosphere in Alaska, we are still making our way through indictments, trials, and federal penitentiary sentences; the past two years of bipartisan work and healing thrown under the bus in attempt to win the White House.
National political assassins have invaded Alaska. They were visible and in full force at the McCain-Palin press conference yesterday. Alaskans don’t roll that way. People get cranky, even nasty at times, over politics and what they think is best for the state. Alaska Lawmakers are sitting in federal prison for selling their votes and it wasn’t this nasty. The McCain-Palin ticket has become a poster child for partisan politics on steroids. On November 5th, the day after this election, the shrapnel of this campaign will be strewn across Alaska. It’s going to take Dr. Phil and a few Barry White albums to get the healing started.
Right off the bat, a full-on assault of character was laid out-Walt Monegan the target. Megan Stapleton, lead off hitter for the Palin Truth Squad was polished, assertive, dramatic, professional, fantastic….and LYING! For all of her assertions of Walt’s “loose cannon” behavior, you would have thought he was tasing Alaska children. A stack of emails from or regarding Monegan, chosen by Palin’s state paid attorney, were released to prove his incompetence. I asked why, if he was such a terrible employee, was he offered another position in government? How could they risk something so important as the oversight of alcohol in rural Alaska? After all, alcohol is a huge contributor to our domestic violence and rape statistics. Megan’s answer felt like an out of control carnival ride for all the disingenuous spin! Her co-”truther” is Edward O’Callaghan. He looks and acts like the evil and unstoppable Agent Smith from “The Matrix”. Six weeks ago, he left his job as Co-Chief of the Terrorism and National Security Unit of the U.S. Attorney’s office in New York. Does the McCain camp consider a bipartisan group of Alaska Lawmakers to be terrorists?
A new study out of Yale University confirms what argumentative liberals have long-known: Offering reality-based rebuttals to conservative lies only makes conservatives cling to those lies even harder. In essence, schooling conservatives makes them more stupid. From the Washington Post article on the study, which came out yesterday:
Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration’s prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation — the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration’s claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.
A similar “backfire effect” also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.
In a paper approaching publication, Nyhan, a PhD student at Duke University, and Reifler, at Georgia State University, suggest that Republicans might be especially prone to the backfire effect because conservatives may have more rigid views than liberals: Upon hearing a refutation, conservatives might “argue back” against the refutation in their minds, thereby strengthening their belief in the misinformation. Nyhan and Reifler did not see the same “backfire effect” when liberals were given misinformation and a refutation about the Bush administration’s stance on stem cell research.
MIAMI (AFP) – A top advisor to John McCain Tuesday said his boss was partly responsible for the “miracle” of the BlackBerry, stirring a flurry reminiscent of Al Gore’s claims to have helped develop the Internet.
“You’re looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create,” said Doug Holtz-Eakin, an economic aide to Republican White House hopeful McCain, as he held up his BlackBerry wireless e-mail device.
Democrat Barack Obama’s campaign immediately pounced — seeking to replicate the political storm gleefully whipped up by Republicans who mangled Gore’s notorious comment ahead of the 2000 election.
“If John McCain hadn’t said that ‘the fundamentals of our economy are strong’ on the day of one of our nation’s worst financial crises, the claim that he invented the BlackBerry would have been the most preposterous thing he said all week,” said Obama spokesman Bill Burton.
Cindy McCain’s addiction to prescription painkillers emerged into public view 14 years ago with a well-orchestrated PR campaign designed to preserve her husband’s political future.
Aside from a lengthy contemporary investigation from Phoenix’s alternative weekly and occasional mentions since then, the addiction back-story — including ample questions about what John McCain knew, when he knew it and questions over whether he was complicit in the cover-up — has gone largely untold. Until now.
Tom Gosinski, a former employee of the medical-aid charity Cindy McCain used as personal supplier of Percocet and Vicodin, is speaking out publicly for the first time.
On Wednesday, Gosinski sat down with RAW STORY and other outlets to tell his story and distribute copies of his personal journal from his time with the American Voluntary Medical Team in the last half of 1992, where he voiced ever more acute concerns and frustrations over McCain’s drug use and its impact on her mood and job performance.
“My journal wasn’t to trash Cindy or anything,” he says. “My journal was kept because I came in contact with so many people. It was a way of keeping an ongoing biography of all the people I met, so I could refer back to it.”
He says he can’t buy the official McCain camp line that Cindy’s drug abuse was kept from her husband, he saw and heard too much for any of their stories to make sense — like the time Cindy was allegedly taken to the hospital after an overdose and John rushed in to berate the doctors and nurses there before moving Cindy to their secluded Sedona ranch. Then there were the Hensley family interventions and the fact that Cindy’s drug abuse came to be something of an open secret among employees of the charity.
