When I saw the headline, I was hoping someone else had noticed that the short-lived series ABC sent to die on Sunday nights this summer had been noticed by someone else...

I discovered "Defying Gravity" purely by accident, and was intrigued enough to go back and watch the earlier episodes on Hulu. Now, like others of the few who've even heard of it, I'm completely addicted, and sadly expect that it will never have a chance of renewal.

It's sad to see that a disciple of Burton would so faithfully absorb his mentor's core essence... an oeuvre that consists entirely of visually stunning, narratively vapid work.

I had high hopes that this might be the time the shtick got an upgrade, that the gorgeous design sensibility would finally be married to compelling storytelling; it's an immense disappointment (but, alas, not much of a surprise) that the Burton influence turns out to provide us simply with more of the same.

The whole idea that a husband (or a wife, or significant other of any kind) can be "stolen" is nothing but incredibly demeaning to all involved.

The basic premise behind the idea of "husband stealing" is that all men are helpless against attempts to lead them around by their dicks, and that therefore all a woman has to do to "lead them astray" is present herself as available for sex with them. After all, what man can resist that? This makes it the solemn responsibility of all women to present themselves as sexless in the company of married men; it also by definition means that if a man engages in adultery it's because some depraved woman ensnared him into the act.

So instead of dealing with the immensely complex issues that adultery raises, we're left with the mindless simplicity of caricatures: the helpless, innocent dupe of a wife; the weak, guilty dupe of a husband; and the despicable, homewrecking "other woman".

It's long past time to retire these tropes.

@ Clockwork Smurf:

"To call the entire program a torture program is erroneous, because many of the issues, though draconian, and perhaps even illegal on other grounds, aren't torture."

To which I can only ask, is it erroneous to call the Third Reich's Final Solution a program of mass murder because many Jews, Russians, gypsies and homosexuals were merely imprisoned, starved, and used as slave labor, but not to the point of death?

Clearly, a program which employs some techniques that fall indisputably under the legal definition of torture, and many others that even a Clockwork Smurf would call torture if they were employed on him or his loved ones, can and should be called a torture program. Any other terminology is simple semantic quibbling.

First of all, every single credible expert on the subject has stated that nothing would undermine the Iranian opposition more than for the U.S. to publicly come out in support of it.

Every Iranian, and not many Americans, know that the last democratically elected government of Iran was overthrown by the U.S. to put the well-hated Shah in power. Any sense that the U.S. is again supporting the overthrow of their current government will simply cast the opposition as patsies of the U.S. and undermine any chance they might have in the current turmoil.

As a consequence, I have grave doubts about the credibility of the anonymous sources behind these claims. Whatever else one might think of Biden and Clinton, they're not stupid, and they must see as clearly as anyone else conversant with the situation that it would be a disaster for Obama to publicly support the opposition in Iran.

Keillor was just the host of a fairly annoying radio show to me for years, until I made the mistake of reading his apology for the torturers in Salon. That didn't make me see him as evil, it just revealed to me for the first time how limited his intellectual capacity is.

And this comparison of two cities just confirms his simplistic superficiality. I've spent a fair amount of time in DC, mostly for work, and although I've enjoyed myself there, I've never found its human face.... that's just my experience.

I also lived in New York City for many years, and I'd like to point out that those who say the personality of the city was changed forever by the events of 9/11 are simply revealing how little they ever understood its character. The way people came together after that terrorist attack was not an anomaly, but simply the most recent and public manifestation of what New Yorkers always do when faced with adversity: pull together, help their neighbors, work to make things better.

Keillor trades in cliches, not in reality.

What little respect I had for Mr. Keillor and his cloying, faux-provincial shtick has disappeared with this stomach-turning essay.

Those who perpetrate crimes against humanity exist solely because of those who see what they do and do nothing about it. Garrison (and fellow-traveler Peggy Noonan) belong to the unique class of those who actually have a bully pulpit from which to denounce these horrors, and instead choose not just to ignore them, but to encourage others to do so as well.

Shame on you.

I was listening to Bloomberg Radio this weekend, and actually heard former New York Senator Al D'Amato say (probably slightly paraphrasing here): "Torture is, and should be illegal in this country, except in cases where there is reasonable cause to believe a ticking bomb scenario exists".

As per Glenn's article, he does not believe government officials should be held accountable for breaking the law, only for demonstrating that they had a "reasonable basis" for doing so.

On the other hand, I at least found it refreshing that he didn't resort to the usual smarmy euphemisms like "harsh techniques", and was willing to bluntly call torture by its true name... (small comfort).