I am not necessarily a DiCaprio or Winslet fan so I was skeptical about watching the movie.But I love Bates.So, I soldiered on.
I had been warned by many folks that the ending was “shocking.”So, I was very surprised that it wasn’t shocking at all.
As I thought about it I realized that most of those who warned me lacked a sense of “social” history. And, they were also too young to know that the events of the film were leading directly to this ending.
The ending was indeed sad, but not shocking, and all too obvious, frequent and true.
The Miranda rule strikes a delicate balance, enabling us to protect a fundamental constitutional right without forcing the courts to allow the legitimacy of every confession to be proven before it is allowed into evidence. To compromise the rule would be counterproductive and destructive to the kind of freedom we enjoy as Americans — a freedom that terrorists would like nothing better than to destroy.
In 1985 when I was working in the Mayor’s office, Chief Judge Wachtler wrote the decision outlawing Spousal Rape in New YorkState.He impressed me then, and notwithstanding his legal problems, he still does impress me.
Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.
“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”
The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.
Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months,” she said Saturday. “That is alarming.”
And I am afraid that BP, etc., don’t know what to do about it and are just making it up as they go along.
Retailers have begged Congress for years, in vain, to limit the fees they must pay to banks when customers swipe credit or debit cards. Bills never reached a vote. Amendments were left on the table. The Senate did not even grant the courtesy of a committee hearing.
That long record of futility ended in a landslide Thursday night. Sixty-four senators, including 17 Republicans, agreed to impose price controls on debit transactions over the furious objections of the beleaguered banking industry.
It is about time.These transaction fees amount to a tax imposed by the banks.Now it should be extended to credit card transactions.
Though, I have to disagree with the author that the banking industry is “beleaguered.”
It looks like some of those secrets could finally be exposed.It’s a start. And thank you to the good Socialist Senator from Vermont, the good Liberal Congressperson from Florida and the Libertarian Representative from Texas for all their hard work.This is bipartisanship one can believe in.
His testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on Thursday (Panel 2) was abhorrent and so disingenuous.Apparently Gramm-Leach-Bliley and deregulation is unmentionable and had little or nothing to do with our current and on going Financial Crisis.
Well, I am sure if I were him that is what I would like to believe (see Geithner, Summers and Rubin.)What a weasel!
