Item #1: In Patrick Healy‘s 5.2 N.Y. Times piece about “Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them,” Christopher Durang calls his satirical play “a catharsis, a comic catharsis, for the last eight years. What’s particularly strange…is the play running when all of a sudden all these torture memos are released and discussed. It feels like I wrote some of these scenes yesterday.”

Item #2: A 4.30 CNN story reported that “the more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey. More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’ justified. The religious group most likely to say torture is never justified was Protestant denominations — such as Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians — categorized as ‘mainline’ Protestants, in contrast to evangelicals.”