I agree, but I'd also like to have the ability to down-vote submissions.

considering that TC employees regularly check news.yc it's plausible to assume they automatically upvote all TC stories.

Yeah, which is why you should be able to downmod.

If you add in the ability to downmod submissions this place will rapidly turn into Digg. i.e. An environment where a handful of people control the majority of the information.

As far as excluding TC content goes, while I could live without it, think about the number of AWESOME discussions that would have killed in the past, then ask yourself if that's what you want for the future.

A handful of people already control the majority of the information on this forum.

ValleyWag posted a flurry of articles which were counter to YCombinator interests and now ValleyWag articles are automatically posted with the dead attribute. The same scenario could happen with TechCrunch.

I occasionally skim TC to find articles about photo sharing, since that's related to my startup and possibly not as interesting for other news.yc readers. I mostly find interesting non-photo-sharing TC articles by seeing them rise up on news.yc.

Very true indeed - perhaps it would be better to have filters :-)