He said "overtly partisan" which is entirely correct. The Democrats passed this law completely without opposition support. That's pretty much a text book definition of "overtly partisan."

The current proposal on the table, by the way, is to delay implementation by a year. Something that the POTUS has already done selectively (and illegally) for special interest groups that support him. Why should big businesses get a break on the ACA but not everyone else?

LOL. And therein lies the truth of the ACA: it's not fair that people who are "somebodies" should have to live with the consequences of their decisions, but it's perfectly OK for all the rest of us "nobodies."

I find your selective outrage amusing. Where was your high minded defense of democratic first principles when this train wreck was forced through Congress? The simple fact is the Democrats didn't have enough votes to cleanly pass the bill they wanted and so through a lot of undemocratic shenanigans they managed to cram an unpopular bill through Congress with no opposition party support.

Now you'd like to be all outraged that the opposition didn't just pack up and go home and, worse, they're playing the same dirty tricks against your side.

Turn about is fair play.

Glad I wasn't the only alpha tester who felt that way.

I was part of the alpha test group and I raised most of the issues listed here during the alpha. Clearly I was out-voted. I'm still waiting for all those other alpha testers who outnumbered me to show up and defend this god-awful redesign.

Original comments are here.

tl;dr:

"There are at least four glaring problems with how you've redesigned the comments:

1) You're wasting at least 33% of the usable screen space for comments. ...
2) You've dropped the visual cues as to how far down in the thread you are. ...
3) You moved 'load more/all comments' to the end of the comments! WTF! ...
4) You've removed the ability to filter on moderation rating in the story. ...

Also be careful with moderation changes and
You broke my ability to track my own comments and responses to them.

Overall this is much much worse."

There are at least four glaring problems with how you've redesigned the comments:

1) You're wasting at least 33% of the usable screen space for comments. I understand you need to put in some ads but after that you should be using the entire screen to display comments. The new format is hard to read and actively penalizes longer and better formatted comments. Like other posters have said: I come here for the discussions, not the stories, and this is a major turn off.

2) You've dropped the visual cues as to how far down in the thread you are. This is particularly bad in long threads because as it is designed today when I spot a flame war I can pretty easily visually skim past it to the next relevant comment. I can't do that in the new format.

3) You moved 'load more/all comments' to the end of the comments! WTF! I don't want to read down to the end of the screen, load more comments, and then have to go back to the top and try to figure out what's new. Now, you're saying to yourselves: yeah that's not how it works. Now we just add more comments onto the bottom which brings me to problem four:

4) You've removed the ability to filter on moderation rating in the story. It looks like now you're just barfing out the first X comments, regardless of moderation, and the loading X more when I hit the button. I understand how this makes #3 simpler but it's a pain the ass if on one story I want to follow the high level threads and the next I want to read at -1 so I can moderate.

Additionally: I'm really concerned that every comment has a moderate link. Be really careful here. /.'s moderation has warts but it's far and away better than any other moderation system out there. Break this and you break /.

Also on the user page you took away the ability for me see how my comments got moderated (vanity) and also to track replies to comments that I've made (breaking current functionality).

Comparing current to Beta it also looks like you increased the size of the ads. I don't like it but I can live with it.

Overall, this is much much worse.

"Resistance is futile"

I thought that was the Vogons.

Well that explains why Ep. V went downhill after the Battle of Hoth. Come to think of it, it completely explains the land side of the Battle of Endor.

I have children in public elementary, middle, and high schools in Texas. TFA is creating strawman: no public school in TX is teaching anything but straight up science. In fact, my high school child's genetics/dna material is more rigorous than what I saw in college.

All this BS about teaching ID in Texas might be fun to get in a lather over but it just isn't true.

I was responding to the summary quotation that releasing classified information is treason. For a release of classified information to be treason, and not just illegal, you'd have to prove it was giving aid and comfort to our enemies. There's plenty of wiggle room in both directions when it comes to defining: aid, comfort, and enemy.

Her statement, assuming she quoted accurately and in context, is wrong and it furthers an illegitimate end, in my opinion, by reinforcing the belief that the federal government can pretty much do as it pleases and we shouldn't be asking any inconvenient questions about it.

No, Marissa, it is not treason:

"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."

That's treason. Releasing classified information isn't treason per se unless it meets one of the Constitutional criteria laid out above.

There was at one time a rationale for the law. Legend has it that when auto manufacturers first started selling cars they relied really heavily on dealers to take the risk of introducting this new-fangled device and building a durable market for it. After the market had been established and the risk eliminated the dealers felt, not unreasonably, that it was a bit unfair to allow the manufacturer to barge in and simply drive all the dealers out of business.

Personally, I think if the dealers were dumb enough not to have protected themselves contractually from this completely foreseeable risk they they deserved to be run out of business. Most (all?) State legislators didn't share that viewpoint though (and I'm sure the big campaign donations didn't hurt) and we ended up with the system we've got today.

I think it's reasonable to say that this model of government enforced monopoly has outlived its usefulness, however, inertia in the system means we're likely to have to live with it for a while longer.

Yes, strictly speaking, you're correct. You don't _need_ to form a corporation. However, it's often convenient and more effective.

Should labor unions be prevented from participating in elections?

What about newspapers, television, or radio stations?

How about your local Rotary club?

Remember, had it gone the other way, the levers of power won't always be in the hands of people you like or trust. My personal opinion is that we'd be better served by a well documented and transparent free-for-all than the hodge-podge of hacks we deal with today.

Simply because I generate the data, largely incidental to my use of a private service, doesn't mean the government is entitled to it. "It exists, therefore the government may have it," isn't a position supported by the US Constitution.