Tom Maguire offering his thoughts on the Libby trial:

seems a bit early for speculating on *why* Fitzgerald blew his case, (only partly because it is really Thursday, and mainly because the verdict is not in yet), let me offer this as Fitzgerald’s Biggest Blunder:  Playing eight hours of Libby tapes from his grand jury testimony.

Why?  Assuming the jurors are human, after eight hours they were probably reeling, and may be quite sympathetic to the notion that Libby was reeling too.

Too bad Fitzgerald didn’t have video of Libby being waterboarded - that would have iced it.

Once upon a time, in the beginning, I was a big fan of The Sopranos. Then, in the second season, the strain of maintaining those high standards got to David Chase and he got lazy and began leaning more heavily on violence. I barely made it through to the end of the second season. Once Dr. Melfi got raped in the third season, that was it. I stopped watching. The great drama of Tony and his crew and the fabulous acting were not enough to outweigh the orgies of blood and cruelty for its own sake.
All that was by way of introduction to these interesting comments from Howard Gordon, and executive producer of 24, which has come under a lot of criticism recently for portraying way too much torture on the show:

The decision to cut back on torture is driven by creativity, not criticism, according to Gordon. In its sixth season, 24 has become so torture-heavy that it borders on cliche, he says.

“What was once an extraordinary or exceptional moment is starting to feel a little trite. The idea of physical coercion or torture is no longer a novelty or surprise.

“It’s not something that we, as writers, want to use as a crutch. We’d like to find other ways for Jack to get information out of suspects,” says Gordon.

Calling MacGyver.***

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*** This is not an endorsement of torture. It is a shout-out to young men who were raised in more innocent, and perhaps more thought-provoking, times.