Desperate and litigious housewives

Last night's episode of "Desperate Housewives" provided a nice little moment of what political scientist Mike McCann might call a "pop tort."

On the show, Bree Van De Kamp, the uptight Christian conservative Republican housewife, is addressing Christmas cards with her gay son and insists on sending a card to her new mother-in-law, whom she's never met. Bree's new husband Orson has told her that his mother lives in a nursing home and suffers from dementia.
Orson protests that his mother doesn't need a card, but Bree tells him something to the effect that "it's important to let the staff of the nursing home know that your mother has people who love her--who also might drop in at any moment and slap them with a lawsuit."

Apparently Wysteria Lane is not in Texas, where Republicans have all but eliminated nursing home litigation...