I have a simple question: if Tom Brady knowingly tried to gain an unfair advantage does he deserve to be punished? At all? Or put another way, if the punishment had been a lesser suspension (1 game, maybe) or a fine would that have been fair?

I didn’t know that DeVry had a law program.

Wrong. The Supreme Court disagrees with you. None of the rights in the Bill of Rights are absolute, and the court has many, many decisions which place reasonable limitations on these rights.

Your point of view misunderstands how the Bill of Rights works. None of the rights on the list are absolute, it has taken years of precedent set by the Supreme Court and a continuing public conversation to determine the extent to which we can extrapolate what is laid out in the Constitution.

Again, you’re either misunderstanding where and how lobbyists work or willfully ignoring the facts. The NRA lobbies the federal government in order to prevent federal/centralized gun control legislation. For example, the Brady Bill was a federal law mandating a criminal background check for gun purchases. The NRA…

Thanks for the civics lesson, this is great! To think I didn’t have to pay for my political science degree, that’s just depressing as hell :(.

This is where the battle is taking place (and being grievously lost) - between our government and the NRA lobby. By a gaping-wide and not-too-surprising margin they are the most powerful lobby in these United States.

Lifelong Yankee fan here. Loved Phil Rizzuto and Bill White, they were my favorite broadcasting team for the Yanks. Paul O’Neill is good as well, you can pair him up with anyone and you’re bound to be entertained.

It gets tricky when we try and define what exactly is a good result in professional sports.

You know what? Yes. I don’t mean to oversimplify it, but if a player is making more money for the team then he should be compensated for that. Anything else is unfair.

Having said that, a kind-of-funny relevant fact: the number 1 all time fielding percentage at SS? Troy Tulowitzky

I’ll respectfully decline any help in understanding this, though I appreciate your positive attitude! Thanks bro.

Performance alone doesn’t translate into popularity. A-Rod at his peak of performance was divisive in NYC, despite a succession of MVP-type years and his willingness to move to third base for Jeter despite still being one of the best shortstops in the league. To become a transcendent star on the Yankees you need to…

I grew up in Vermont. When I was in college at UVM, Bernie was our lone House congressional representative, and was considered a kind of political curiosity nationally. Though not really a Vermonter, he precisely reflects the politics of a state which has an almost reflexively independent political streak. In fact,…

Of course it is. $300,000 diamonds don’t ‘disappear’. Even if someone found it on the street, they took something that didn’t belong to them. As far as I know ‘finders keepers’ is not applicable in international law.

It actually used to be the ‘motto’ of my building company. I had it printed on the back of all of my employee t-shirts, to my delight and to my business’s detriment.

I think your expectations are too high. Not for Trump (though you make him out to be more self aware than I ever would: ‘Donald Trump knows it’?!), but for the rest of the political media. They have always covered campaigns this way, always - as you yourself imply with references to Pats Robertson & Buchanan, etc.

I don’t think so. The lack of text messages/emails referring to this practice doesn’t mean it was done silently, rather that the communication referring to it was done in person. It isn’t a stretch to believe that the only times Brady reached out to the Pats staffers about deflating the balls was after he’d been…

‘To be honest, I don’t much care about which part of the British Isles rightly may claim John Lennon’s ancestry. He mostly was a self-promoting misogynist checkbook activist who imagined no possessions from one of the most exclusive addresses in the history of planet earth, so whichever country wants him can have him.…

I’ve been reading more about this - turns out it was arbitrated, just not by Ted Wells. He was hired to conduct the investigation into whether the balls had been deflated illegally, and to present his report at the arbitration hearing.