Supreme Court Deals Blow to Trump’s Prosecution, Ruling He Has Broad Immunity

 https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/donald-trump-immunity-supreme-court-ruling-7ce6415b

The Supreme Court dealt a major blow to Donald Trump’s prosecution on charges he sought to subvert the 2020 election, ruling 6-3 Monday that former presidents enjoy sweeping immunity for their acts while in office.

The president “may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled, at a minimum, to a presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court, joined in whole or part by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

The court on its own threw out parts of the prosecution’s case against Trump, including on his alleged efforts to use the Justice Department to advance his unsubstantiated claims of election fraud and submit slates of false electors to replace those President Biden won.

The ideologically divided decision didn’t kill the prosecution entirely, with the chief justice saying a president “enjoys no immunity for unofficial acts, and not everything the President does is official.”

Scathing Sotomayor dissent: "The President is now a king above the law"

 https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-immunity-supreme-court-decision-07-01-24#h_970d5ce788355fc04d44ed8795e178fb

Justice Sonia Sotomayor did not hold back in her dissent.

“Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today. Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”   

“Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.” 

“Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.”  

The justice did not end the dissent with the traditional “respectfully” language.

“With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” Sotomayor wrote.  

Psychological projection

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection

Projection (German: Projektion) was conceptualised by Sigmund Freud in his letters to Wilhelm Fliess,[12] and further refined by Karl Abraham and Anna Freud. Freud considered that, in projection, thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings that cannot be accepted as one's own are dealt with by being placed in the outside world and attributed to someone else.[13] What the ego refuses to accept is split off and placed in another.[14]

Freud would later come to believe that projection did not take place arbitrarily, but rather seized on and exaggerated an element that already existed on a small scale in the other person.[15] (The related defence of projective identification differs from projection in that the other person is expected to become identified with the impulse or desire projected outside,[16] so that the self maintains a connection with what is projected, in contrast to the total repudiation of projection proper.)[17]

Some studies were critical of Freud's theory. Research on social projection supports the existence of a false-consensus effect whereby humans have a broad tendency to believe that others are similar to themselves, and thus "project" their personal traits onto others.[37] This applies to both good and bad traits; it is not a defense mechanism for denying the existence of the trait within the self.[38] A study of the empirical evidence for a range of defense mechanisms by Baumeister, Dale, and Sommer (1998) concluded, "The view that people defensively project specific bad traits of their own onto others as a means of denying that they have them is not well supported." [38] However, Newman, Duff, and Baumeister (1997) proposed a new model of defensive projection in which the repressor's efforts to suppress thoughts of their undesirable traits make those trait categories highly accessible—so that they are then used all the more often when forming impressions of others. The projection is then only a byproduct of the real defensive mechanism.[39]

Biden Trump debate - Significance

Freud Was a Fraud: A Triumph of Pseudoscience

 https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/freud-was-a-fraud-a-triumph-of-pseudoscience/

Freud was a despicable person with multiple character flaws. He betrayed his scientific training in a tour-de-force of self-deception, succumbing to all sorts of irrational beliefs. His vaunted psychoanalyses never objectively helped a single patient. It is astounding that his ideas and his cult were so influential for so long. Freud was a fraud, a liar, a bad scientist, and a bad doctor; but Crews’ book about him is excellent. Crews’ detailed, well-referenced investigation of Freud’s descent into pseudoscience is a fascinating read. Readers familiar with the development of alternative medicine treatments will find many parallels.

'The end of politics': Rachel Maddow on how to make sense of the new Trump campaign

Moses and Monotheism

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_and_Monotheism

Moses and Monotheism shocked many of its readers because of Freud's suggestion that Moses was actually born into an Egyptian household, rather than being born as a Hebrew slave and merely raised in the Egyptian royal household as a ward (as recounted in the Book of Exodus).[4][5] Freud proposed that Moses had been a priest of Akhenaten who fled Egypt after the pharaoh's death and perpetuated monotheism through a different religion,[6] and that he was murdered by his followers, who then via reaction formation revered him and became irrevocably committed to the monotheistic idea he represented.[1]

KA please provide Torah sources for your hero

The Philadelphia Inquirer calls on Donald Trump to drop out after debate performance

 https://www.foxnews.com/media/philadelphia-inquirer-calls-donald-trump-drop-out-after-debate-performance

"The debate served as a reminder of what another four years of Trump would look like. More lies, grievance, narcissism, and hate. Supporters say they like Trump because he says whatever he thinks. But he mainly spews raw sewage," the Inquirer wrote.

Civilization and Its Discontents Summary

 https://www.litcharts.com/lit/civilization-and-its-discontents/summary

Despite Freud’s initial willingness to entertain the idea of religious feeling, here he takes a more hostile attitude towards exactly that religious belief. Freud admits to not understanding how it is that intelligent, rational, indeed “scientific” people are religious. Thus Freud admits to seeing religion and scientific objectivity as, effectively, opposites.

Reality versus spin

CNN Flash Poll: Majority of debate watchers say Trump outperformed Biden

 https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/28/politics/debate-poll-cnn-trump-biden/index.html

An 81% majority of registered voters who watched the debate say it had no effect on their choice for president, with another 14% saying that it made them reconsider but didn’t change their mind. Just 5% say it changed their minds about whom to vote for.

Trump decries Biden’s poor debate performance overshadowed his ‘fantastic’ showing

 https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4747692-donald-trump-joe-biden-shaky-debate-performance-2024/

Former President Trump took a victory lap Saturday after this week’s debate, but argued President Biden’s poor showing overshaded his own “fantastic” performance.

“As I walked off the stage on Thursday night, at the end of the highly anticipated ‘Debate,’ anchors, political reports and all screamed that I had had the greatest debate performance in the long and stories history of Presidential Debates,” Trump posted to his Truth Social site. “The all said, effectively, ‘Trump was fantastic!’”

“But by Friday evening it was all about the poor performance of Crooked Joe and now so much about how well I did,” he continued. “Oh well, that’s the way it is but, importantly the result is the same!!!”

OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

 https://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/obsessional-neurosis

In "The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis: A Contribution to the Problem of Choice of Neurosis" (1913i), Freud defended the idea that the choice of this neurosis is linked to developmental inhibitions, and he stressed the role of fixation and regression to the anal-sadistic stage. He suggested "the possibility that a chronological outstripping of libidinal development by ego development should be included in the disposition to obsessional neurosis. A precocity of this kind would necessitate the choice of an object under the influence of the ego-instincts, at a time when the sexual instincts had not yet assumed their final shape, and a fixation at the stage of the pregenital sexual organization would thus be left" (p. 325). Thus, in the object relation, hate will precede love and "obsessional neurotics have to develop a super-morality in order to protect their object-love from the hostility lurking behind it" (p. 325). This opposition between love and hate for the object was underscored by Freud in the case of the "Rat Man," related in "Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis" (1909d). He saw it as the source of the doubt, compulsions, and ambivalence that are characteristic of obsessional functioning.

Dying together: Why a happily married couple decided to stop living

 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0jjq2vynq7o

Jan and Els were married for almost five decades. In early June, they died together after being given lethal medication by two doctors. In the Netherlands, this is known as duo-euthanasia. It’s legal, and it’s rare - but every year, more Dutch couples choose to end their lives this way.