In the merry-go-round of GOP presidential politics, is it about to be Newt Gingrich‘s time to take a turn as a frontrunner? Recent polls suggest that he’s on the way up, currently in a respectable third place behind an embattled Herman Cain and a tepidly-supported Mitt Romney. Perhaps more importantly, Gingrich is escalating his use of over-the-top rhetoric that will get him more attention, as he did this weekend when he likened President Obama to convicted Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff.

The Ruth Madoff explanation tour continued today with a nearly 20 minutes on the set of the Today show this morning alongside son Andrew Madoff and his fiance. Matt Lauer served as interviewer and challenged Madoff over her recent claim in her recent 60 Minutes interview that she and her husband had attempted suicide by talking a number of pills. A NY Mag report suggested that Bernie Madoff refuted that claim, though Laure revealed that he later personally told him that it was true.

Martin London, who discovered the body of his late son-in-law Mark Madoff following Mark’s suicide, visited Joy Behar‘s HLN show Thursday to share a letter he had written — but hadn’t sent — to Mark’s father, Bernie Madoff.

Despite Ruth Madoff‘s claim on 60 Minutes that she and her criminal husband, Bernie Madoff attempted suicide together, New York magazine editor Steve Fishman earlier this year interviewed the convicted mobster and he denied such a plan.

This Sunday, 60 Minutes will air an interview with Ruth Madoff in which she reveals that she and her husband, disgraced financier Bernie Madoff, tried to commit suicide with an overdose of Ambien on Christmas Eve in 2008. “I don’t know whose idea it was,” the gravelly voiced Madoff matriarch says, “but we decided to kill ourselves.”

What’s it like to be one of the country’s most hated men? It probably doesn’t feel that great. So, it’s unsurprising that Bernie Madoff is apparently using the media to rehab his reputation. Unfortunately for him, he’s not getting any help from Fox Business Network’s Charlie Gasparino who, in a new profile, doesn’t depict Madoff as the victim he seems to want to be. Instead he depicts him as, well, a guy who’s using the media to rehab his reputation.

The New York Post‘s Jeremy Olshan put it best: “you’d think they’d know better than to trust their valuables to Bernie Madoff.” But as the Post reports this morning, a tech entrepreneur who bought up Madoff’s clothes at auction has fashioned them into pricey iPad covers–and people are buying (even though, just like Madoff, these covers are a fancy veneer only, and you could lose everything). “They are strictly for fashion purposes,” he said. “If you drop it, it’s going to crack.”

On Friday, Irving Picard, the trustee representing the victims of Bernie Madoff‘s Ponzi scheme, claimed in legal papers that New York Mets owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz and partners at Sterling Equities, had to know that Madoff was engaged in a Ponzi scheme and should have to compensate the victims. In papers just released, Mediaite has learned that Wilpon is fighting back, calling the lawsuit a “work of fiction” filled with “false allegations.”

Bernie Madoff, the con artist who pleaded guilty two years ago to a series of financial crimes, spoke with The New York Times and was angry with a lot of his critics. Most notably, he attacked the news media for their “disgraceful” coverage of his son’s suicide.

The AP is reporting that Mark Madoff, son of infamous Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff, was found hanged in his apartment at 7:30 this morning. Police officials are investigating but have called the matter an “apparent suicide,” according to the AP. The younger Madoff was also under investigation for ties into his father’s illegal dealings.

Bernie Madoff’s in prison, but new details about his massive Ponzi scheme keep on emerging. The latest revelation, via ABC News: JP Morgan Chase, which did significant business with Madoff, suspected something was amiss with his operation’s abnormally high return on investment before he was arrested…but kept on doing business with him anyway.

If you needed further evidence that the American right has gone off the rails, Right Wing News (last seen publishing their Conservative New Media Spank Bank) has just put out their list of the 25 Worst Figures in American History (as selected by 43 conservative blogs). Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh could only make it to #9 on the list, while Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama earned the top two spots, respectively. Worst of all, though, is that Snooki doesn’t seem to have gotten a single vote. (h/t Doug Mataconis)

This morning on the business show The Cost of Freedom, guest Jonathan Hoenig argued that the Social Security program was “a Ponzi scheme.” He didn’t get too much support from the other guests, and as soon as he said it, Fox News ran a disclaimer that the opinions expressed on Fox News are not those of the network.

Rachel Maddow opened her economy update segment last night with some good news: The job growth “bikini graph” has turned into a “Loch Ness monster graph” with incoming April job numbers! What she means is that the number of available jobs is, finally, growing. Despite that, however, Maddow was concerned for the US economy, because its behavior has been so volatile and its players so unregulated that it’s starting to become an undesirable market for foreign investors to work in.

Can an intern get Andrea Mitchell a cup of coffee? The exhausted-looking host had trouble telling apart one of the most notorious fraudsters in history from one of her own MSNBC colleagues yesterday when she repeatedly asked Rep. Barney Frank about all the porn the SEC employees were watching instead of following the “Maddow” (?) case.

According to this month’s CBS/Vanity Fair poll 22% of those asked would be willing to forgive Tiger Woods his bad behavior (no word on whether Elin was one of the polled). This may seem like a low number, but Tiger should perhaps breathe a sigh of relief: he polls well compared to, say, John Edwards who only got five percent of the forgiveness vote.

Yesterday it was the New York Times vs. Wall Street Journal, and today it gets muddier. The Daily News enlisted Joanna Molloy to write a 575-word column slamming the Post for running Ashley Dupre’s new Sunday column. There’s nothing like a tabloid slamming another tabloid over a prostitute!

Time‘s Person of the Year can “Sometimes be surprising, sometimes be controversial, but always interesting,” as Meredith Vieira put it on this morning’s Today Show, where Time managing editor Richard Stengel announced the nominees. The same can be said of the list of finalists. A few were no-brainers (Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke), at least one was puzzling (The Chinese Worker? Really?). And some omissions (i.e. Twitter) may have been the biggest surprises of all:

It’s the weekend, which means it’s time to separate the chumps from the champs in Mediaite’s “Winners and Losers” — our scorecard of who rocked and who flopped in the week’s headlines. The contenders include: President Bush, adding “motivational speaker” to his resume, Sarah Palin posting an online resume, and Jay Leno, who might be wise to start updating his resume.

Happy Anniversary Great Recession. A year ago today Lehman Bros. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and sent the economy into a tailspin the country is still struggling to cope with. Here’s a look back at the top five media moments from the last twelve months.

This morning’s New York Post report that Bernie Madoff was dying of pancreatic cancer spread like wildfire through the news, based only on quotes from anonymous inmates. As it turns out, the Post‘s “jailbirds” were far from reliable sources. The Federal Bureau of Prisons responds with an unequivocal rejection.

Bernie Madoff gave his first prison interview (sorry Barbara, Diane, Matt) to the lawyer representing the victims suing his wife, sons, and brother, but it was something of a dud. San Francisco lawyer Joseph Cotchett told ABC News that Bernie was surprised he was able to get away with it for so long. “There were [...]

MSNBC, 10:14amET: Yesterday we wrote about the Bizarro MSNBC segment about Bernie Madoff that included Eliot Spitzer and a prison coach who served time for, among other things, “machine guns.” (That’s him in the screengrab.) So anyway, Ponzi scheme in prison using fish…discuss.

Well this is not television you’ll see everyday.

One of Dylan Ratigan‘s regular guests on Morning Meeting, former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, and a “prison coach,” Larry Levine of “Wall St. Prison Consultants,” contributed to a segment this morning on Bernie Madoff‘s future life in prison. And of course, the convicted felon ended up cracking a Spitzer joke.

Bernie Madoff is now in jail for the rest of his life — what better time to start speculating about who gets the first jail house interview!

Broadcasting & Cable‘s Marisa Guthrie got a jump on the sit-down exclusive sweepstakes, and not surprisingly, all the networks are interested in making it happen. So who gets the big get? It’s time for another edition of Mediaite Oddsmakers.