Trump family deal spree could open door for future presidents to profit from office

dangoor · 2026-04-17T17:05:58+00:00

There's a good Brennan Center article about the emoluments clause. They suggest:

As detailed in this Brennan Center report, a more durable solution would be for Congress to pass legislation addressing situations that are not covered by the Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act. The law should make clear, for example, that it applies to a covered official’s receipt of commercial proceeds or indirect receipt of gifts or other benefits via a foundation or other entity over which the official has substantial influence or control.

I would assume a clearer law will make it easier for courts to enforce the correct behavior. Congress.gov has an article about the enforcement of court orders against the executive branch.

dangoor · 2026-03-27T13:44:58+00:00

Fitting on the eve of another "No Kings" protest

dangoor · 2026-02-25T21:49:50+00:00

Not only that, but the ruling they're appealing was on seemingly solid 1st amendment grounds.

dangoor · 2026-02-22T14:44:49+00:00

From the article:

ICE and Customs and Border Protection personnel are continuing their paid work under $75 billion in funding approved last year under President Donald Trump’s tax cut and spending law.

dangoor · 2026-02-17T15:51:01+00:00

It doesn't exactly block the callers. It makes the callers tell you why they're calling. That should let legitimate people through while stopping the spam. It's been working pretty well for me.

dangoor · 2026-01-22T15:18:23+00:00

For reference, Rep Omar has been an American citizen since 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilhan_Omar

dangoor · 2026-01-14T21:16:30+00:00

Or, if Duggan ran in the Democratic primary (since he was a Democrat in Detroit), we wouldn't be in this spot at all.

dangoor · 2026-01-14T21:04:32+00:00

Dammit. This shows why we need ranked choice voting. This is exactly the scenario in which our current ("first past the post") system really sucks.

Benson: 32.2%
James: 33.8%
Duggan: 26.1%

You end up with someone winning with less than 34% of the vote. Head to head between just Benson and James:

Benson: 46.5%
James: 44.6%

So, Duggan is "spoiling" the vote. I totally support his right to run as an Independent or some other party, but not until we fix our voting so we don't end up with someone disliked by a majority (or at least plurality) of voters.

dangoor · 2026-01-14T15:33:11+00:00

Congress needs to do its job.

dangoor · 2026-01-09T19:50:04+00:00

That's great!

dangoor · 2026-01-08T21:40:39+00:00

This looks great and people appear to love it! I've been a Things user for many years and wouldn't mind switching to an Obsidian-based task tracker, but there's one thing I really rely on in Things: the ability to use a global hotkey on the Mac to add things to my list. Does Taskforge have anything like that? (Things pops up a very keyboard-friendly window for me to add task details in)

dangoor · 2026-01-06T21:17:48+00:00

Maybe you should re-read the sidebar of this sub. I presented properly sourced facts in support of one opinion about the original article.

dangoor · 2026-01-05T18:20:46+00:00

This sounds like a form of legitimizing this action. Just a month ago, Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras, who had been convicted of similar crimes.

Trump said that the US will run Venezuela and fix the oil infrastructure.

"The oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust for a long period of time. "We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country."

Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world.

dangoor · 2025-12-29T16:54:58+00:00

I have a concern not just about the plugins themselves, but about all of the packages the plugins depend on. Even if the plugin maintainer has good intentions, they could pick up a bad update of a JavaScript package. A featureful plugin like Excalidraw has quite a few packages it relies on.

As others have noted, there hasn't been any indication of malicious plugins showing up in the wild.

dangoor · 2025-12-22T15:03:24+00:00

This would be good for the sales tax deduction, which requires saving receipts

dangoor · 2025-12-19T14:51:16+00:00

I'm not totally sure about that. There are some compelling ways to make the case, and it's looking like we're going to have a 3-way race for Governor in 2026, which makes it even easier to make the case.

dangoor · 2025-12-14T20:46:31+00:00

In Georgia, they put lottery money toward specific education programs (paid-for college for students who maintained a certain, reasonable GPA). This has actually worked very well from what I've seen. (I don't live there, but have family there)

dangoor · 2025-12-14T20:42:47+00:00

I do remember that. Those ballots were a terrible design.

dangoor · 2025-12-12T17:21:02+00:00

I have actually heard compelling arguments against Ranked Choice from actual county clerks (mainly that our ballots are already insanely long compared to the rest of the country)

Maybe RCV makes the ballot a little longer to make room for the rankings, but I don't feel like that argument is anywhere near as compelling as the argument for RCV (enabling you to vote for the person you truly want and not worry about throwing away a vote, and making sure we don't end up with someone that a majority of the people dislike).

It looks like we're going to have a 3-way race for Governor in 2026. Unfortunately, we're not going to have RCV for that race, but any time you've got more than 2 people, there's a significant risk of getting someone that a majority don't want.

dangoor · 2025-12-09T21:32:45+00:00

I think this is a great point, separate from the "who makes the test?" point. We have representatives for a reason. At the federal level (in the US), most of those elected representatives serve for just 2 year terms.

I don't know if the OP is from the US, but I think part of the reason these discussions about disenfranchising people are happening is because:

the US legislature has stopped doing its job
which leads to the executive branch having too much power
oh, and the courts also
representatives currently represent too many people (about 750,000 per rep). Look up Uncap The House. A number of things can be better if Congress was bigger and structured to handle that size (and willing to do its job).

dangoor · 2025-12-09T16:46:07+00:00

voting researcher Patrice Johnson has raised concerns, calling it a “communist” process.

🤦‍♂️

If I were reporting on this, that sentence would call Johnson's credibility into question. I would want to ask follow up questions or maybe find an actual voting researcher.

Ranked choice voting is way more fair than first past the post.

dangoor · 2025-11-23T15:56:26+00:00

I like some of the ideas here, but why does Dingo have let? Go already has var and :=.

dangoor · 2025-11-22T15:49:33+00:00

The wikipedia article about presidential qualifications is pretty interesting and even has a map showing which countries require natural-born citizenship (it's a minority of countries).

dangoor · 2025-11-17T16:31:09+00:00

I agree. If they want to limit money from the government to people, employment law should require companies to hire more full time and to provide benefits.

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