Was Madoff ‘extraordinarily evil’?
“Psychopath,” “monster.” May “his jail cell become his coffin.” Such were the sendoffs offered Bernie Madoff by his victims. The Federal District Judge who sentenced the master swindler to 150 years behind bars called his crimes “extraordinarily evil.”
Whether his crimes were that bad, given the unspeakable things that happen in this world, can be debated. One thing is certain: They are not uncommon. Today elderly people across this land will be defrauded of everything they have.
What distinguished Madoff was the vast sums he stole and the alleged sophistication of people he stole from. Stripped of these details, Madoff’s scheme was largely a classic affinity con.
I wrote about Madoff and affinity cons several months ago.
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Here’s a link
Janet, thanks for your interest, and Joseph, thanks for your help.
Here is a link to the NPR show.
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Hear me today on NPR
![s49783[1]](http://www.fromaharrop.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/s4978311.gif "s49783[1]")
Friends,
I’m on the weekly news roundtable on NPR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook. Information on stations carrying the show and times can be found here.
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Sanford and ‘the whole sparking thing”
Really, the story about the South Carolina governor being in Argentina with his lady love sounded a lot saner than the earlier one about his hiking alone on the Appalachian Trail to clear his mind.
Why did his staff try to pass off the first one?
Mark Sanford gets the “manly award” for fessing up before the national media. He said that he didn’t ask his staff to cover up for him.
Quite a show.
With Nevada Sen. Ensign’s recent confession of marital infidelity, albeit in a more conventional form, two more seats sit empty in the Republicans’ arena of potential candidates for 2012.
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Tags: Conservatives, Republicans, South Carolina
What Chicago could teach the Ayatollah
The mystery in Iran isn’t that the leadership rigged the election. It’s that it did so in such a primitive way. The reasoning was that if Ahmadinejad was seen to have commanded such an overwhelming lead, the opposition would have deemed it fruitless to question a mere 100,000 questionable votes here or 50,000 there.
As Ayatollah Khameini said at the Friday Prayer:
Sometimes the difference is is 100,000, 500,000 or even 1 million. In that case one could say that there might have been vote-rigging. But how can they rig 11 million votes?
Clearly, the Ayatollah doesn’t know the first thing about stealing an election. The results have to be plausible. And for the “losing” opposition, there’s nothing more infuriating than having one’s intelligence insulted.
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Tags: Iran
Ensign’s affair and 2012
That Nevada Sen. John Ensign admitted to an extramarital affair with a married campaign staffer need not end his apparent hopes for a 2012 Republican presidential nomination.
Ensign apologized to his followers. (Apologies were also presumably extended to the woman’s husband, who had worked for him.) Ensign’s wife, Darlene, has publicly forgiven him. Duly reported: The liaison involved consensual sex between two adults.
And so the guidelines for handling a politician’s indiscretion have been followed.
One only wishes that Ensign and Darlene hadn’t been active in the Promise Keepers, an evangelical group that supports strong marriages. Some decency, please.
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Tags: 2012, Republicans, Sex, Washington
Thoughts on Letterman’s ‘humor’
Our friend Vivek references a Salon.com piece on the lack of “outrage” from feminists on Letterman’s description of Sarah Palin’s make-up as the “slutty flight attendant look.”
Writer Amanda Fortini also brings up his joke: “Sarah Palin went to a Yankees game yesterday… during the seventh inning stretch, her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.”
What do I think? I think those remarks are unfunny. But I do differentiate between offensive comments by comedians and those coming from the “serious” punditry or the politicians themselves.
Having been roundly (and in this opinion, unfairly) denounced for comments about Palin and her daughter, I am especially cognizant about drawing lines. (The offending column is here.)
As for leaving the children of politicians out it, here’s the deal: The politicians keeps their children out of the spotlight, and we pundits follow suit.
As it happened, Palin paraded her pregnant, unmarried teenage daughter, and her boyfriend, before the Republican National Convention, along with a bs story about their plans to get married.
Not to defend Letterman’s bad-taste joke, but Palin exposed her daughter to ridicule.
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James von Brunn is a head case. Period.
Whenever some lunatic commits a hate crime, there’s a parsing of his insane notebook scribblings and straight-faced analysis of how he came to his “philosophy.” Paul Krugman pursues this unfortunate sport by attaching James von Brunn’s killing of a guard at the Holocaust Museum to a political viewpoint, in this case, “a right-wing extremism” that is “being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.”
In doing so, Krugman draws a very squiggly line from the Oklahoma City bomber to the murderer of Dr. Tiller to the rantings of Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck to the provocations of Rush Limbaugh to the melodrama of actor Jon Voight to the unremarkable thank-you for Voight’s speech by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
My main question isn’t what right-winger drove von Brunn over the edge to violence. It’s who let him out on the streets after, in 1981, he entered the Federal Reserve System headquarters in Washington with a revolver, hunting knife and sawed-off shotgun. Von Brunn’s plan, he told police, was to take the Fed board hostage “to focus news media attention on their responsibility for high interest rates and the nation’s economic difficulties,” according to The New York Times.
That alone should qualify one for permanent residence in a high-security mental facility. Attaching a political motive to the craziness only dignifies it.
The O’Reillys and Becks are your basic publicity hounds. They are not the conservative movement’s heralds but among their worst problems. Limbaugh says some silly and irresponsible things, but you can’t hang the “hatemonger” sign around his neck. Krugman does — then tries to hang Limbaugh around the GOP’s neck by noting a poll in which 10 percent of Republicans identify the radio entertainer as “the main person who speaks for the Republican Party today.” I thought the percentage would be a lot higher.
As for actor Voight, his supposedly inflammatory speech involved calling Obama a “false prophet.” And he told attendees at a Republican fundraiser that “we and we alone are the right frame of mind to free this nation from this Obama oppression.” Colorful but nothing here suggests any place for accomplishing this other than the ballot box.
And I speak as one who is generally happy with President Obama.
In any case, these semi-persecutory statements have easily been matched on the liberal side. Recall actor Alec Baldwin’s 2006 blog post holding that Dick Cheney “terrorizes our enemies abroad and innocent citizens here at home indiscriminately.” And that was very tame next to Baldwin’s televised opinion during the Clinton impeachment proceedings that in another country, “we would stone [Judiciary Committee Chair] Henry Hyde to death, and we would go to their homes and kill their wives and their children. We would kill their families, for what they’re doing to this country.” Baldwin later apologized.
I’m sure that Krugman’s sentiments have been warmly applauded on the cyber left. But just as rightwingers’ intemperate attacks hurt the conservative agenda, low blows delivered by prominent liberals don’t help their cause. Most Americans like a fair fight.
As for James von Brunn, he is, at bottom, a head case. Whatever fig leaf of philosophy he might use to cover his personal disintegration is beside the point.
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‘Le Grand Paris’ sans skyscrapers
La Tour Maine-Montparnasse
President Sarkozy, like the wanna-be French pharoahs who preceded him, has plans to expand Paris (and ease its housing shortage). However, there is a 121-foot building height restriction. If you’ve ever seen the Tour Maine-Montparnasse, a lone Parisian skyscraper, you know why.
Indulge me by checking out this brief movie I took from my room at the Hotel Edouard VI, right across from the Tour. Had I know last June that I’d be doing this post, I would have done a better job. Use your imagination. The Galleries Lafayette is right at the skyscraper’s base.
What you do see here is the noisy and charming low-height environs. (Remember that, little Poss?)
There’s talk of building skyscrapers outside the old city. If they must…
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Culture war goes on
No one nails the culture wars like Thomas Frank. He explains in today’s WSJ why the pro-life fringe was taken aback by the disgust sent their way following the murder of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita. An excerpt:
A larger reason for the shock and surprise — and this is true for the right generally — is this: The culture wars are not meant to be taken seriously. Yes, right-wing invective dabbles in nightmare visions of treason and conspiracy and rampant paganism and a homegrown holocaust right here on Main Street, U.S.A. Yes, it ritually denounces liberals as members of a class fundamentally alien to the American way of life. But these are the ingredients of entertainment, not politics.
The right will regroup, he predicts, flattering themselves as martyrs braving unjust accusations fueled by liberal conspiracies.
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Tags: culture war
