THANK YOU! Like I said, I’m a devoted liberal, but I’d rather interact with someone like you than with the fringes of my own cohort. You and I can have a conversation about our different viewpoints and maybe even find some common ground. But the folks far to the left of me will try to eject me from the party just for…

The one thing left-wing and right-wing media agree on wholeheartedly is that the country is more polarized than ever and that there’s no middle ground anymore, no such thing as a centrist. But that’s not true. There are reasonable, centrist-leaning conservatives still, lots of them. But the dichotomy in our media…

My initial comment was uneducated, and fortunately some folks with legal knowledge corrected my misconceptions. Based on the article above, I was proceeding on the assumption that this filing was somehow outside the norm and that the NFL’s lawyers had unnecessarily gone out of their way to paint the accuser as a…

You know how film studios sometimes make crappy films just to hold on to the film rights to a property? Like the various Fantastic Four movies over the years? That’s what the NFL is now. It’s basically just a billionaires’ enrichment scheme, but they have to keep staging games to maintain the illusion that it’s more…

Listen, every conservative in this country saw millions of Muslims dancing in the streets of New Jersey after 9/11, and if you ask to see video proof, that just means you’re a secret Muslim, too. I don’t see why this is so hard to understand.

Given the way Hollywood is going, it might be best if Tom hangs on to all the penises ... wait a sec ...

I enjoy a good discussion. I’ve spent a fair amount of time being mad online and it’s not much fun anymore.

He decided that Van Gogh was a crappy artist anyway.

It’s good of you and TCourt to go to so much effort to correct my misconceptions. The legal system really is a whole ‘nother universe.

It’s dawning on me based on your responses, and others, that this article perhaps misrepresents the importance of the document we’re discussing. Sounds like it might not have even been worthy of an article.

I like the “neutral conduit” mentality you describe, and if I need a lawyer, that’s what I would expect. We don’t have to be friends and you don’t have to believe that I’m in the right, so long as you use your full skill to advocate for me in accordance with the law. I was originally under the impression that the…

I suppose in a sick way this document is actually useful to the accuser’s lawyers, since they have some idea of how the NFL might defend itself. On the other hand, it sounds like nothing in here is going to surprise them and one hopes they prepared their client that this was coming.

I realize that to some degree, the esoterica of the legal profession is integral to giving everyone a fair shot. But given the poor legal fluency of our populace (including me), it would be wise to rejigger documents like this so that they don’t appear so inflammatory to the uninitiated. I expect that many lawyers see…

The was the year the Patriots embraced villainy whole-heartedly, rampaging through the regular season and playoffs unbeaten while setting mind-boggling records. Then in the Super Bowl, the underdog Giants, led by Eli “Gomer Pyle” Manning, pulled off one of the greatest upsets in sports history. It really was the…

Then what you describe is a flaw in our legal system. There should be a mechanism to reserve the right to mount any conceivable defense without having to accuse the other party of every imaginable transgression under the sun.

That’s all well and good, but if my job as a lawyer was to draft these kinds of documents in these kinds of cases, standard or not, I would not be able to live with myself.

Must be.

Money’s nice. I like money. But I also like not feeling like I’m a disgusting tumor on society, and being able to sleep at night.

I realize that few people start out their lives aiming to become a villain, it happens by degrees. You go to law school thinking you’ll be the next Atticus Finch defending the defenseless. You face the reality that you have to work for a big law firm to pay your bills. You wind up representing people who can pay…

That was a good team, and I rooted for them to do well, but I don’t know that the sporting world at large took much notice of them, which was unfair.