I would like to point out that the link to the very concise

TPM Comment Policy

has now been restored to its former position above every comment box you type a comment into.

These were announced by Josh Marshall in this April posting titled "Acceptable Commenting" after getting a lot of input from users, and in many previous posts to that one, he announced an intent to enforce some behavior rules. It was pretty clear to me they didn't enforce during the heights of the primary and the following election because the staff decided they had no time to do so, just as they decided it was no time to fix all the software problems. So, if some users thought the announced comment policy was never going to be enforced, what they were really doing is betting that staff here would stay too busy to do what they said they were going to do.

The "Terms of Use," page, on the other hand, looks to me like intentionally broad and vague legalistic gobbledygook, like it is based on something some lawyer wrote back during the dotcom boom era, and which now is included with blogging software packages, then altered by thousands of bloggers in order to protect themselves legally, intended only to be pulled out when something gets so out of hand that legal threats begin. I humbly suggest to management that it is a mistake to point to "terms of use" as something people should use as regards behavior guidelines on the site, as it just confuses people because of its legal purpose..