I have read many stories about two hetero pals of the same sex who were almost joined at the hip, yet the friendship had nothing to do with sex or romance; I am also aware of some (non-celebrity) relationships like this among people I know.

So do we know that Sontag & Leibovitz were a couple? (Undoubtedly Leibovitz does know the answer.)

Or is having apartments within view of each other's, or having one member of the pair having taken "intimate" photos of the other, supposedly proof that they were a couple (even when one is a famous photographer and the other is a famous authority on photography, among many other things) ?

Most likely Newsweek simply chose to omit a "fact" not in evidence, one of the hallmarks of good journalism: a concept evidently alien to this Broadside writer.

I hold no brief for Pirro, and I certainly agree that she wasn't targeted because of her gender.

But why is asking someone about potential wiretapping, in itself, incriminating?

Giving someone money to go through with it may be illegal -- it certainly should be -- but asking about it is far short of paying for a hired bug.

I suspect that very few people with reason to suspect their spouse of cheating have not wondered about tapping the spouse's phone conversations, And many of these poeple probably asked someone about it. This is a crime?

After all, legally, spouses are often considered to be not just any two people, but special cases, and are covered by special laws.

Naked men are giving lap dances. We don't want to over interpret this, but there seems to be a trend afoot.

Assuming a lap dance is a lap dance, even when the genders are swiched, wouldn't a lap dance be kind of uncomfortable for most women? After, all, men tend to weigh a good bit more than women do, on average.

. . . but while Broadsheet says

After that, McGee's professional evaluations went downhill, including a reprimand for wearing flip-flops (McGee says the footwear in question was a pair of Via Spiga sandals) and McGee was suspended without pay.

The New York Times says that she was suspended with pay.

Not the most important fact, but still a fact, in black & white in the Times, and facts are the kind of thing that Broadsheet would greatly benefit by reporting accurately.

Broadsheet is conceived as a kind of blog, or polyblog, and as such has plenty of room for opinion -- as everyone knows, or should know. But opinion is a separate thing from mis-reporting facts.

or rather, a grammatical version of that last sentence I wrote.

Not just because one boza principal reacted like a mega-moron in firing a teacher for walking from one gallery to another through a museum space containing a few not-even-very-explicit nudes.

But what is most damining is that the school district community did not rise up in protest against this vast display of principalitiudinous incompetence and this vast miscarriage of justice.

Of course it's just possible that this did happen but was not reported nationally. Let's hope so.

. . . seems to be far more important in the minds of those Texas loyalists who have posted here -- than trying to fix what is seriously wrong with that place.

This speaks volumes. There is no state I've lived in where improving the state of the state was ever subordinate in my mind or the mind of anyone I know, to "defending" it, especially when the issues were indefensible.

Why don't y'all park your loyalties at the door and do something to improve the state of the state of Texas?

No one is attacking anyone personally just because they live in Texas, and the fact that a few Texan loyalists would feel that way is yet another example of what's wrong with that place.

And kindly don't pretend that your former gov and twice not-elected U.S. prez has nothing to do with Texas. Was it not Texas (however its political system works) who put him in gubernatorial office in the first place? And isn't Texas's economy significantly linked with the fortunes of the petroleum industry -- which is precisely antithetical to what the rest of the country needs?

Oh, sure, there are many positive things about Texas. Every cloud has a silver lining.

But that's irrelevant to solving the problems with the state. The fact that other states have some problems closely related to Texas's doesn't reduce the impact of Texas's problems.

Texas doesn't even permit the sale of vibrators. A woman there was arrested for bringing in photos to be developed that showed he breast-feeding her infant (her children were forcibly removed into foster care and she was charged with felony "sexual performance of a child". Texas has long has more people on death row than any other state (391 awaiting execution as of Sept. 14, 2006 -- more than all executions in Texas combined since 1983). The Texas state capitol plaza contains a six-foot-high monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments. Road rage in Texas is reputedly more likely to result in murder than in any other state; I do not know if the facts support this claim. Whether or not they do, it is a known hazard that in Texas one can get shot for driving in a way another driver takes exception to. For decades and still, Texas's blinkered textbook standards had a profound influence on what textbooks were made available by publishers, who were warned that if they published textbooks (anywhere!) out of line with Texas standards, they would be boycotted by the state. And most recently a 5th-grade teacher with 28 years of receiving good performance reviews on her job was fired after bringing her students -- all of whose parents had signed parental consent forms for the trip -- by the principal who had approved the trip in the first place, supposedly because there were some nude sculptures in an area of the museum through which students passed on their way from one gallery to another.