Heather: Good column...as always.

You neglected to mention on additional insipid detail about Cougar Town.....it's got a laugh track.

Did you ever notice how a laugh track lowers the tone and the IQ of any TV comedy?

An actor recites a bad line, and......bingo....some moron in the booth presses a button and canned laughter is added to the soundtrack.

Did you ever notice how they add the exact same canned laughter over and over to these bad sitcoms?

Stop and think about it.......

The jokers who create these so-called TV comedies think all they have to do is play the laugh track after a bad or sophomoric line, and you are so fucking stupid, you will actually think it's funny because the laugh track induced a Pavlovian response in you.

Depressing, isn't it?

Consider what the shove actually says. What the shove says is, I love you and I want to feel the violence of my love for you by having some contact. The shove says, I want some pain inflicted, will you please engage in some mutual infliction of pain? I need some pain. The shoving says, here, look at what I am willing to do: I am offering myself to you, to be beaten. Will you please attack me so I feel whole again? Here, look, I will shove you again. That is my request. The shove says, "I want you. I want you to beat me."

The shove can be ignored as certainly as a telemarketer's phone call can be ignored. The shove is meaningless without the belief system attached to the shove. Yet we refuse to take the extra step to say that nonviolence is possible after a shove.

You really are a bloody idiot, Cary.

And you obviously have no idea of how to behave in a situation involving violence.

You do everything you can to avoid a fight. But once someone shoves you, all bets are off. And if someone takes a swing at you, if you have any martial training, you take that individual down as quickly and effectively as possible.

You did everything right. You did not start the fight, you did everything you could to prevent it. You only took defensive action after he attacked you. You did everything you were supposed to, and validated your martial arts training.

So why are you behaving like a weenie with an overscrupulous conscience?

Man up, dude, you did good. You kicked the bully's ass.

As for those friends of yours who are "turning away" from you, I have no idea what their problem is. Most people would feel good knowing they had a friend who could defend them if they were attacked.

Back to the torture apologist Mr. Keillor: if you or your family was held in confinement and subjected to extreme heat and cold and loud music alternated with periods of sensory deprivation, deprived of sleep, threatened with death and mutilation, subjected to mock executions, threatened with rape, and water boarded-wouldn't you want some accountability for your torturers?

I dunno, mate. Sounds kinda like my college years and those wonderful fraternity initiations.

Thanks for providing that stroll down memory lane......

Excellent comments. They bear repeating:

Real reform is not possible

Nothing went wrong -- Obama set out to do the impossible and found that it was impossible. He was sufficiently arrogant to believe that the Clintons were incompetent and that if they had "talked" more and reached out across the aisle, etc. they would have succeeded. It's true that Obama has no spine and has morphed into a moderate Republican. Its also true that during his campaign, he displayed a shocking absence of knowledge regarding health reform. But, Democrats comparing Obama (who knew nothing) to Clinton who was well versed and understood the issues chose Obama and his empty rhetoric.

Nevertheless, the best, most knowledgable politician in the world couldn't succeed in effecting real health care reform for the following reasons:

1. Big pharma has gads of money to defeat reform;

2. Insurance companies have gads of money focused on defeating reform;

3. The money motivates politicians to defeat reform;

4. The American people are stupid -- they believe lies about death panels, the menace of big government, etc. They also fail to recognize that they currently pay for health care for uninsured through increased health premiums.

5. Americans are greedy and irrational -- they want the best of everything for themselves, but want to pay for nothing.

Big pharma, insurance companies, and politicians use the irrationality, fear, and stupidity of the U.S. electorate to defeat any proposal that is not in the interest of Big pharma and insurance companies. Until some part of this equation changes, no meaningful health reform can occur. That's just reality, and it has nothing to do with Obama.

Obama's fault was to not recognize this reality up front.

You're right that part of the blame for the failure of health care reform has to be laid at Obama's door.

But my point was that we have people in the conservative and Republican camps who set out to sabotage health care reform because they didn't want Obama and the Democrats to get credit for it.

These are the people who have distorted the issues and created fear among older Americans and among people who don't take the time to understand all the complexities and nuances of the current system.

I thought Obama did a reasonably good job of presenting health care reform to the American people. But it's a lot easier to sow seeds of disinformation and fear about health care than it is to fix the inequities of the current system.

No, GW doesn't stand for "George W." It's been my online pseudonym since before W was a gleam in the eye of GOP kingmakers.