Free Republic

As the No. 2 executive at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, Peter Madoff worked side by side with his older brother Bernard for nearly 40 years. Outside the office they skied together, including on one 2004 trip with a broker working at the firm's office who recruited investors for Bernard Madoff's advisory business. With Peter long viewed as an heir apparent, the brothers tried to avoid flying together. Now, they are keeping their distance. Bernard Madoff has told prosecutors he acted alone in bilking investors out of $50 billion over several decades. Peter Madoff has stopped coming into the...

The Securities and Exchange Commission's New York watchdog, under fire for failing to uncover Bernard Madoff's alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme - despite a dead-on tip by a whistleblower - yesterday tearfully defended herself, arguing that she and the agency did the best job possible. "Why are you taking a mid-level staff person and making me responsible for the failure of the American economy?" an upset Meaghan Cheung, with eyes tearing up, told The Post. "I worked very hard for 10 years to make a career, and a reputation, and that has been destroyed in a month," said Cheung, who...

In a speech Monday at Fordham University School of Law in Manhattan, Dan Rather claimed there was a "new journalism order": politicians applying pressure to news conglomerates, "dumbed-down, tarted-up" news coverage, 24-hour cable competition and a "chase for rating and demographics" — all of which creates an "atmosphere of fear" in newsrooms greater than anything he has seen in his four-decade career. What kind of fear? Certainly not the fear of broadcasting "inaccurate" stories, such as Rather's own bogus report on the president's National Guard service. Not the fear of journalistic bias as in the mainstream media's attempt to blame...