One can agree wholeheartedly with the following, powerful sentiment,

"A good and just society would feed and house all its people. A society that is rich and powerful and has not found a way to use its great wealth and power to feed and house all its people fails this fundamental test in a spectacular and historic way. I fear that such a civilization will be mocked and scorned by future generations."

and yet still object to the sentence that follows it as simply the leftist way of looking at things stated as dogmatic fact:

"Since our government is the principal organ by which we exercise our vision of a good and just society, this failure is primarily a failure of our government."

I'm not saying it's false in some cosmic way -- personally, I have some sympathy for the collectivist point of view --, but Cary states it as if it's beyond dispute, ignoring the rich and varied literature which intelligently rejects the idea that "government is the principal organ by which we exercise our vision of a good and just society," not to mention the large portion of the population who still believe churches or other private civic groupings ought to be the principal organs by which we exercise our visions, and that government is at best a big, clumsy, unloving, unlovely fool in such matters.

Salon is best, in my opinion, when it remembers to edit out the reflexive Leftism.

Tell Me You Love Me may not be for everybody, but at least it's a serious, thoughtful, aesthetic, realistic show aimed at adults, not a zany, wish-fulfillment soap opera about rich people or a supernatural comic book aimed at 15-year-olds.

There's not a single new Fall drama that looks anywhere near as intriguing as this summer's Mad Men or Damages, or Lost, Friday Night Lights, Dexter, or Brotherhood, for that matter.

What is it about commercial television that leads to 95% of it being so dumb?

is good art, not great, as Heather says. I agree that it lacks the full range of emotional shading of truly great shows such as The Sopranos or Six Feet Under.

But in a sea of crap, isn't a B+ show worth a positively slanted review rather than a negatively slanted one?

HBO really hit it out of the park in recent years with The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, and Six Feet Under...and Friday Night Lights, alone among network shows, achieves that same level most of the time.

But I don't think a show needs quite rise to that level to be worth watching. Put Brotherhood in that next tier of dramas with The Shield, Mad Men, and Lost. If you enjoy TV, B+ is usually good enough.

does not glorify or celebrate Texas culture, whatever that is. It depicts it, at least in one little rural, hardscrabble corner of it. Texas, by the way, is an awfully big place with a lot of different types of people living in it. Wanting it to secede based on a broad-brushed perception of its politics makes about as much sense as the desire of some righties to see California, another huge, various place, secede.

FNL is the single best network show, in my opinion; smart, soulful, authentic. A minor miracle for network television. If you're missing it, you're missing something special.

This desire to politicize and partisanize (word?) every aspect of life -- art, geography, even ordinary people struggling to get by -- is a disease, and it exists on both sides of the political spectrum. FNL is about humanity -- remember that? -- not politics.

I couldn't get past the generic 1) fairy-tale narrator, 2) Danny Elfman knockoff music, 3)storybook gloss and art decoration, each of which everybody has seen a million times before. The leads are pleasant, but kind of samey and milquetoast. Anna Friel speaking an American accent gives off that flat, disengaged effect so many British actors speaking American do.

It's not an original, organic piece of work, in my opinion, just a standard genre piece, albeit a well-written one, out of the Hollywood factory. If this is the best new show, then the new shows this year are a complete waste of time.

I don't see anything embarrassing in Bennett's words there, with the possible exception of "dignity" being one of those old-fashioned backhanded compliments for black people (sort of like "articulate")...but surely Bennett can be forgiven that much.

A black man winning the lily-white Iowa primary is HUGE news. Juan Williams on Fox used the word "astounded" repeatedly, and his eyes personally registered the fact. Politically incorrect though it may be, there are reasons Obama plays so well to white crowds, when previous leaders didn't. You mean we can't talk about those? Or just old conservative white men can't talk about those?

This kind of partisanship before the fact -- guilty until proven innocent -- is exactly the sort of old politics Obama is trying to overturn, and exactly the reason he succeeds where Jesse Jackson and others haven't. We really don't need to hate each other so much.