Notices by Chuck Darwin (cdarwin@c.im), page 2

Errol Musk, the father of U.S. billionaire Elon Musk,
has arrived in Moscow to attend the Forum of the Future 2050,
a pro-Kremlin event scheduled for June 9-10,  the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported on June 8.

https://kyivindependent.com/elon-musks-father-attends-pro-kremlin-event-in-russia-hosted-by-far-right-ideologue/

The Trump administration’s
“border czar” warned that
immigration enforcement will continue
“every day” in Los Angeles,
hinting that even elected officials
could face arrest
if they interfere with agents on the ground.
Tom Homan appeared undeterred
by the volatile protests
against federal agents
in Los Angeles
who were carrying out
immigration raids.
Enforcement will be daily,
he said late Saturday
in an interview.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tom-homan-trump-border-czar-los-angeles-rcna211701

We are the revolution, apparently, so dangerous only a seasoned military can stop us.

The only problem, of course, is that Los Angeles is not in chaos on this particular sunny Sunday
and the vast majority of Angelenos are just trying to enjoy the weekend without becoming a federal prisoner.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-06-08/the-insurrection-that-wasnt-and-other-trump-fantasies

Trump walked out to a thunderous standing ovation as Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass” boomed from the sound system.
He watched martial artists slug it out behind a chain-link fence.
A female champion let the US president try on her gold belt.
It was a night of machismo, spectacle and violence.
Shortly before he joined an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event in Newark, New Jersey, on Saturday night,
Trump had signed an order deploying 2,000 national guard troops to Los Angeles,
where protests sparked by sweeping immigration raids led to clashes between authorities and demonstrators.

The White House said Trump was sending in the guardsmen to
“address the lawlessness that has been allowed to fester” in California.
Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said the move was “purposefully inflammatory
and will only escalate tensions”.

It was the first time in 60 years that a president has activated a state’s national guard – a reserve military – without a request from its governor.

Critics also saw it as an authoritarian flex by a strongman president
who has relentlessly trampled norms and burst through guardrails.
Since returning to office in January, Trump has sought to crush dissent at cultural institutions, law firms, media companies and universities.
Many believed it was only a matter of time before he took the fight to the streets.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/08/trump-la-protests-enemy-within?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

NBC News reports that top Trump adviser ❌Stephen Miller ❌recently eruptedin anger over what he sees as woefully lagging deportation numbers,

privately threatening to fire senior Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials over it.

He demanded the detention of 3,000 migrants each day, sources told NBC

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/ice-operation-trump-focus-immigration-reshape-federal-law-enforcement-rcna193494

Unions and allies in California and across the United States on Saturday are demanding the immediate release
of David Huerta, president of SEIU California and SEIU-United Service Workers West,
after the highly regarded labor leader was injured and then arrested while witnessing a raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on Friday.
“SEIU California members call for the immediate release of our President,
David Huerta, who was injured and detained at the site of one of today’s ICE raids in Los Angeles,”
said Tia Orr, executive director of SEIU California, in a statement.
In a later update, the union said Huerta
— a veteran labor leader whose union represents over 45,000 janitors, airport workers, security guards, and other property service workers
— had been released from the hospital where he received treatment for injuries sustained during his arrest,
but that he remained in custody
https://www.commondreams.org/news/david-huerta-arrested

The IRS open sourced much of its incredibly popular Direct File software as the future of the free tax filing program is at risk of being killed by Intuit’s lobbyists and Donald Trump’s megabill.

Meanwhile, several top developers who worked on the software have left the government and joined a project to explore the “future of tax filing” in the private sector

https://www.404media.co/directfile-open-source-irs-tax-filing-software-turbotax-is-trying-to-kil/

Though Republicans do not say they are explicitly trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act,
a series of small, technical changes in Trump's budget bursting bill would substantially reduce Obamacare enrollment and increase the cost of coverage

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/05/upshot/obamacare-cuts-republicans.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

The Trump administration found
“no viable path” forward
to complete California’s high-speed rail project
following a nearly four-month investigation that jeopardizes
$4 billion in federal funding.

In a 310-page compliance review released Wednesday,
the Department of Transportation cited budget shortfalls,
missed deadlines and a misleading projected ridership to connect San Francisco to Los Angeles via fast rail.

The review targets federal grants for construction in the Central Valley.

Those funds could be pulled within the next 37 days following the high-speed rail authority’s response.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-06-04/trump-administration-sees-no-viable-path-forward-to-finish-high-speed-rail-project-moves-to-pull-federal-funding

The C.B.O. estimate is all but certain to inflame debate within the G.O.P. about the spending bill.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday that the broad Republican bill to cut taxes and slash some federal programs
👉would add $2.4 trillion to the already soaring national debt over the next decade,
in an analysis that was all but certain to inflame concerns that President Trump’s domestic agenda would lead to excessive government borrowing.
The C.B.O. analysis focused on the version of the bill that passed the House late last month, but the cost estimate could change as Republicans in the Senate begin to put their imprint on the legislation.
G.O.P. Senators want to deepen some of the bill’s tax cuts, while others are pressing to pare back some its cuts to Medicaid, the government health care program for the poor, and clean-energy tax incentives.
Conservatives and Wall Street investors had already expressed grave concerns that the measure would swell federal deficits,
and some Senate Republicans have said they cannot back the legislation in its current form.

That could derail the bill’s progress, given that the party can afford to lose no more than three votes in the Senate if all Democrats vote against it.
The legislation had long been expected to add significantly to the debt, given the enormous cost of extending the tax cuts that Republicans first put into place in 2017, the central pillar of the bill.
Hard-right lawmakers demanded that the party use their total control of Washington to also slash spending and contain the cost of the legislation,
but the C.B.O.’s estimate was a reminder that the party fell well short of covering the roughly $3.8 trillion cost of extending the tax cut.
In the House version of the bill, Republicans also turned to some well-worn #gimmicks in a bid to lower the sticker price of the legislation.
Several of the bill’s tax cut provisions, including Mr. Trump’s campaign pledges to not tax tips and overtime pay, would last for only a few years. Those cuts could become far more costly if they were continued.
In recent weeks, some analysts on Wall Street have started to voice their worry about the consequences of the legislation, given the nation’s already-precarious fiscal situation. Moody’s downgraded the credit rating of the United States last month, the last of the major rating firms to cast some doubt on the country’s ability to pay its bills.
To defend their legislation, some Republicans and White House aides have taken to attacking the C.B.O. as politically motivated and unreliable. But several nonpartisan independent groups that have analyzed the bill have also concluded that it would add significantly to the federal debt.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/04/us/politics/trump-policy-bill-deficit-estimate.html?smid=url-share

Trump learned about the timing of Musk’s departure in the same manner that the president himself has often used to share significant personnel news:
via a social-media post

"The president knew that Musk would be leaving soon, but not the exact timing until the post was sent"

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-blindsided-by-elon-musk/?cx_testId=15&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=0&cx_experienceId=EXQZWTHDAGO3&cx_experienceActionId=showRecommendationsSZFBANK586LR14#cxrecs_s

Why Trump’s push for
‘gold-standard science’
has researchers alarmed

A new term keeps popping up in messages from Trump administration scientific agencies
— a pledge to restore “gold-standard science.”

Many scientists say the opposite is happening.

The administration’s
“MAHA Report,”
intended to diagnose the root cause of poor health in American children,
was written by Cabinet officials and political appointees,
most of whom lack scientific and medical expertise.

It included numerous errors,
such as garbled references and invented studies.

Thousands of grants that went through expert peer review have been terminated because they conflict with political priorities.

The administration is proposing to reclassify government officials involved in grantmaking to
“increase career employee accountability,”
which critics see as a way to inject politics into science.

And in a “Gold Standard Science” executive order last week,
Donald Trump outlined a new level of oversight over what counts as quality evidence and what does not,
putting “a senior appointee designated by the agency head”
in charge of overseeing
“alleged violations.”

Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in a briefing that
the goal of the executive order is to “rebuild the American people’s confidence in the national science enterprise … the status quo of our research enterprise has brought diminishing returns, wasted resources and public distrust"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/05/31/trump-science-gold-standard-politics/

US changes, which are in keeping with a global trend of increasing state surveillance of noncitizens, have implications for the free expression and due process rights of the population as a whole.
Social media surveillance differs legally and technically from other forms of surveillance.
Because it is based on publicly available information, law enforcement agencies generally do not need to follow the robust legal safeguards that are associated with wiretaps and other covert types of monitoring.
Autocratic leaders have used monitoring tools to silence political opponents and repress minority populations.
In democracies, courts have found that security and law enforcement agencies have sometimes overstepped their authority and even abused antiterrorism policies to target protected speech
As monitoring has increasingly been outsourced to the private sector, a new industry of data brokers can collect, analyze, and share with law enforcement agencies people’s personal data without their knowledge -- undermining privacy and due process.
Ubiquitous monitoring of speech, even public speech, has a chilling effect on free expression.
Further, the automated tools officials use during investigations can produce costly errors, such as misinterpreting speech or context to arrest the wrong individual.
https://freedomhouse.org/article/trumps-immigration-crackdown-built-ai-surveillance-and-disregard-due-process

Workers at the US Department of Energy say cuts and deregulations are undermining the ability for the department to function
and will result in significant energy cost hikes for consumers.
Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” will raise energy costs for American households by as much as 7% in 2035 due to the repeal of energy tax credits
and could put significant investment and energy innovation at risk, according to a report by the Rhodium Group.
The non-partisan thinktank Energy Innovation calculated the average US household will see its utility bills rise by over $230 by 2035 as a result of cuts to renewable energy investments.

The rises are being driven in part by cuts to the agency.
Trump has proposed cutting the department’s budget by $19.3bn.

More than 3,500 employees at the Department of Energy have reportedly taken delayed resignation buyout offers,
though the Department of Energy declined to provide final numbers or an estimate on the departures.
Some 43% of its workforce of nearly 16,000 employees was deemed “non-essential”, not including 555 probationary employees that were fired earlier this year.

The US Department of Energy announced on 12 May plans to eliminate 47 regulations,
comprising mostly of energy efficiency standards for appliances,
claiming the cuts would save nearly $11bn, but did not provide any analysis or data for how it came to that savings estimate.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/31/us-department-of-energy-job-cuts?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

I’ve treated kids with gunshot wounds, vaccine-preventable infections and chronic diseases..

I’m Democrat Dr. Annie Andrews and today I’m launching my campaign for U.S. Senate. 

I’ve been a doctor for almost 20 years. I’m no stranger to tough fights. 

But honestly, I never thought about running for office. But with MAGA chaos in the White House, I’m fed up and I’m taking a stand to stop the BS.

I’m taking on Senator Lindsey Graham, the posterboy for Washington corruption,
a guy who has been in the Senate for half my life and doesn’t have a damn thing to show for it
— except oodles of OUR taxpayer money for his special interest supporters.

Listen, Lindsey Graham is already raising millions to try to defeat me.

But I don’t scare easily. I’m rolling up my sleeves and building a people-powered movement to defeat Lindsey Graham once and for all. 

I’m trying to reach my FIRST fundraising goal of this campaign to show Lindsey Graham he should be TERRIFIED of our movement.

So please, help me raise $100,000 by chipping in $5 now
>> https://annieandrews4senate.org/l/R0eZUO  

Thank you! 

Dr. Annie Andrews

A letter sent Wednesday by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden and Jack Reed cited ProPublica reporting on
how one DOGE aide assigned to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau helped oversee the mass layoffs of the agency’s staff while holding as much as $715,000 in stocks that bureau employees are prohibited from owning.

The DOGE aides’ cases “underscore what appears to be a pervasive problem with Elon Musk and DOGE employees trampling ethics rules and laws to benefit their own pockets at the expense of the American public,”
the lawmakers said in the letter.

Warren and Reed sit on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.

Wyden is the ranking member of the chamber’s Committee on Finance.

The letter asked Attorney General Pam Bondi,
the Office of Government Ethics and three inspectors general with jurisdiction over the CFPB, Treasury and IRS
to investigate the DOGE aides' finances, including whether they’d appropriately divested from any conflicted holdings, and their specific work at the agencies.

“The American people deserve answers regarding whether their own interests may have been undermined by Trump Administration officials that acted in violation of federal ethics laws,”
the letter said.

https://www.propublica.org/article/doge-aides-conflict-of-interest-senators-letter

In recent weeks, ProPublica reported that at least two DOGE aides assigned to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
helped coordinate mass layoffs at the agency while maintaining financial arrangements that experts have said either are or appear to be conflicts of interests.

In the case of Gavin Kliger, ProPublica reported that ethics attorneys at the bureau warned the 25-year-old software engineer that he could not hold onto his stocks and also participate in major agency actions.

Days later, he nevertheless helped oversee the layoffs of nearly 90% of the CFPB’s staff
— an action that one expert called a “pretty clear-cut violation” of the federal criminal conflict-of-interest statute.

https://www.propublica.org/article/doge-aides-conflict-of-interest-senators-letter

Dozens of the roughly 200 cryptocurrency traders who were invited to a private dinner held by Donald Trump last week
hold other crypto assets with symbology linked to far right ideologies, white nationalism and neo-Nazism, a government watchdog says.

According to a recent report by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW),
50 of the invitees hold crypto assets named after Pepe the Frog,
a cartoon figure associated with the far right,
as well as coins with names or symbols referencing bigoted ideologies.

For instance, CREW said, nine of the traders’ wallets contain coins with openly antisemitic or racist names.

“For example, one token is called ‘FUCK THE JEWS,’

while another is simply the n-word.

Four others are variations on the word ‘swastika,’
such as ‘Swasticoin’ and ‘Swastika Coin,’” CREW wrote.

https://truthout.org/articles/trump-invited-traders-with-nazi-linked-tokens-to-private-meme-coin-dinner/

As California positions itself as a leader on climate change,
former Los Angeles mayor and gubernatorial candidate
Antonio Villaraigosa is pivoting away from his own track record as an environmental champion to defend the state’s oil industry.

Villaraigosa’s work to expand mass transit, plant trees and reduce carbon emissions made him a favorite of the environmental movement,
but the former state Assembly speaker also accepted more than $1 million in campaign contributions and other financial support from oil companies and other donors tied to the industry over more than three decades in public life, according to city and state fundraising
disclosures reviewed by The Times.

Since entering the race last year to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom, Villaraigosa has accepted more than $176,000 from donors with ties to the oil industry,
including from a company that operates oil fields in the San Joaquin Valley and in Los Angeles County, the disclosures show.

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2025-05-26/oil-villaraigosa-fossil-fuel-governors-race

US mob boss Donald Trump accused his Russian counterpart of going “absolutely CRAZY,”
blaming Putin for “needlessly killing a lot of people” following yet another massive assault on Ukraine over the weekend.

Trump added: “I’ve always said that he wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it, and maybe that’s proving to be right, but if he does, it will lead to the downfall of Russia"

Russia downplayed Trump’s criticism of Putin, describing the response as a sign of
“emotional overload”.
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/russia-tries-to-downplay-trumps-attack-on-putin_uk_68348f27e4b034e8d0512e4c