If he's doing it from the White House, it's not personal business. Actually, it's really difficult to be sure that anything a sitting president does is purely personal. Proper presidents address this by avoiding anything that even looks like it might be a conflict of interest.

Because Bondi doesn't know what the Attorney General's job is. She -- and Trump -- think it's to be his lawyer and advocate. It's not. It's to be the American people's lawyer and advocate, which would include going after the president except the DoJ has a long-standing policy that due to the complicated conflicts it will not prosecute a sitting president.

Trump and Bondi affirmatively declaring that the Trumpcoin dinner was not official business may enable prosecution after he leaves office, though the incredible breadth of the Supreme Court ruling will make that hard. SCOTUS ruled that not only can a president not be prosecuted for any official acts, nothing that even looks like an official act can be used as evidence to substantiate personal criminal behavior. This effectively means that as long as Trump is talking to a government employee, even if it's about personal business, the judiciary has to consider it an official act which makes it inadmissible in trial.

Also, at the rate he's going downhill, by the time Trump leaves office he'll be incompetent to stand trial.

Of course, what really should happen when a president abuses his power for personal gain is not that the DoJ should prosecute him, but that Congress should impeach and remove him. Of course, there's no way the GOP is going to do that, no matter what Trump does.

In theory, Congress is supposed to be the check on this sort of thing, which is why it's generally fine that the DoJ is part of the executive branch. There's significant value in ensuring that the judiciary and the cops don't report to the same boss, because there needs to be a little tension between them.

So the way it's supposed to work is If the president is abusing his control of the DoJ for personal or political purposes, Congress should impeach and convict. This is perhaps the clearest and simplest form of "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" (which is a phrase that doesn't refer to either crimes or misdemeanors in the usual sense). But this assumes that there is also tension between the legislative and executive branches, so they can check and balance one another. In the current situation, the GOP does whatever Trump says, no matter how corrupt, and the GOP controls both houses.

When you do drugs how does housing that polices you help?

Is Stockton Rush's ghost in charge of Boeing safety? What caused the recent India crash, hubris?

What if you legalized drugs? How much are you willing to pay to force your fickle, arbitrary moral agenda on others?

Why isn't an inflation-proofed basic income the best policy response?

This isn't advice for slashdotters, all of you will have your own approaches, many quite sophisticated. But, if you have family or friends who use gmail and want a simple suggestion that they can easily understand and follow, and from which they'll get results that are about as good (and maybe better), tell them to click the "report spam" button instead of using the unsubscribe link. If Google believes the unsubscription flow to be legitimate, gmail will prompt with a popup that asks if they want to unsubscribe. If they click "unsubscribe", gmail will attempt to take care of the unsubscription.

If they click "report spam" on another email from that sender, gmail will consider it spam and ask if they'd also like to block the sender. They should, of course, click "yes".

Before Trump, indeed before Trump's second term, everyone understood that this would create nasty conflicts of interest which would undermine the integrity of the office. Because all previous presidents acted responsibly, trying to avoid not only actual corruption but even the appearance of corruption, it was never an issue that had to be legislated. Now we have a blatantly corrupt president who openly sells access to the White House, not for campaign contributions but for cold cash directly into his pocket. He's almost certainly selling pardons and other political favors, too. It's a very, very sad day.

Assuming we don't continue our descent into corruption and autocracy, and assuming we can get SCOTUS to eliminate the near-total immunity they've granted to presidents, I expect we will have legislation to specifically ban presidents from "doing business" while in office, requiring them to put all of their assets into a blind trust, over which they can have no control, and can't even know what investments it holds.

Irony was:

I paid for Whatsapp, a long time ago. It wasn't much but I paid to have it.

Then they changed to a free model and at no point were able to give me a refund. A bit like Slashdot... which still has a Disable Advertising button on my account that I paid to get, and that now doesn't disable advertising.

Now they're gonna load it with ads.

Part of the reason that I talk to people on Signal first and only fall back to Whatsapp if people have nothing else.

It's a chat app. One of thousands. I have no attachment to it. Making it ad-supported will just make me go elsewhere. Meta know this, they're just selling it to their... shareholders, investors? as some kind of revenue generation. It won't work.

What will happen is it will become like Facebook - where I use it to talk to people but nothing else, because scrolling the front page is basically 9,999 posts of duplicated irrelevant uselessness, and one ancient post from a friend that it decided to dig up while not showing me any of the recent posts from all my other friends on there.

Oh, I don't know. They're now subject to the UCMJ. I doubt they've realized how many constitutional rights they've given up, and how much stiffer the justice system they're now subject to is.

If they knew what they were getting into, they might well have refused and insisted on working only as the aforementioned overpaid consultants. Their new commissions come with a lot of responsibilities and obligations they don't understand, and basically no real benefits. Light colonels make less money than they'd have been paid as consultants, and since no one will be in their chain of command the position doesn't come with any real authority. All they get is some meaningless military courtesies.

As for the obligations/risks... I wonder if they realize they could now be court-martialed for making public political statements that they could make with impunity as civilians. Or the fact that the UCMJ applies the death penalty in some cases where civilian law does not (e.g. sedition and child rape), and often defines crimes much more broadly. The UCMJ penalizes things like "Conduct unbecoming of an officer" which can apply to things that aren't normally crimes at all, or can be prosecuted even the officer is acquitted of a crime that provoked the charge.

Probably they'll be fine, but they've opened themselves up to significant risk, likely without realizing it. I hope they at least had a sit-down with a JAG or similar before being sworn in.

He really doesn't. He swings his arm around improperly, and puts his hand in the wrong place, and at the wrong angle. I'll grant that his "salutes" aren't as awful as some actors' are but they're definitely not good.

Saluting correctly is actually quite simple. If you're not wearing a hat, your middle finger should come to the right end of your right eyebrow. Your hand should be perfectly flat, with your thumb tight against your hand and in the same plane, which should be angled about 45 degrees to the ground, palm towards your face. If you are wearing a had, it's the same except your middle finger should be at the forward right corner of your hat brim.

How your hand should get to that position is very simple: a straight line. Generally your hand starts from a position alongside your right thigh and it should track the straightest possible line from that position to the final position, with no extraneous movement, no unnecessary elbow or shoulder movement. For example, no throwing your elbow out and then swinging your forearm up, or swinging your hand out in a big circle or anything else likely to smack the guy next to you in the ranks. Note that fancy drill presentations do alter this for effect, but that's only certain sorts of ceremonies. Outside of those, a smooth, straight, crisp line from starting position to ending position is how the US military salutes. (Officers are generally not as good at this as enlisted.)

Ending the salute is the same. A straight line from the salute position to wherever the hand is going to go, generally to a position along the seam on the outside of the right thigh. Along the way the hand transitions from the flat plane to the "holding a roll of quarters" configuration with the thumb on top and parallel to the pant seam.

Indeed. The UCMJ is considerably less gentle than the civilian judicial system, and deliberately sets aside many constitutional rights. I would find it hilarious if some of them got court-martialed for things they didn't even realize were crimes. I'm not so concerned about how they learn about the UCMJ and its implications for them. They chose to accept commissions, they spoke the oath. If they don't bother to learn what that means, that's their problem. Ignorance of the law is no defense, and this is at least as true under the UCMJ as the civilian system.

Sorry, that's just petty, and irrelevant.

OTOH, this does make them subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It's quite a bit less lenient than the civilian justice system.

Hey ICE, does this guy sound like a violent illegal immigrant to you too?

If someone on slashdot, say, accuses you of TDS?

Can I jam with an AI Dixieland band, since no humans will play with me?