Notices by Chuck Darwin (cdarwin@c.im), page 22

Marsha P. Johnson has become an icon of gay, trans, and queer liberation,
and yet little is known about her life beyond her participation in the Stonewall Uprising of 1969 and the decades long controversy after her lifeless body was found floating in the Hudson River in 1992.
In "Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson", T
ourmaline, an award-winning Black trans artist, filmmaker, and activist who has dedicated her life to uplifting Marsha P. Johnson’s legacy, recuperates her life from the flatness of postmortem deification.
Here we find a fully embodied story of a 1950s New Jersey kid;
a 1960s Times Square Hustler and den mother;
a fiercely talented performer;
and a dedicated activist and AIDS care worker whose unconventional way of thinking and being paved the way for generations of street queens and trans people.
Her influence looms large, and Tourmaline is intent on presenting the full range of her choices, inspirations, limitations, and visionary imaginings for us to learn from today.

https://truthout.org/articles/what-we-can-learn-from-the-defiant-life-and-legacy-of-marsha-p-johnson/

Ex-FBI agent on ICE masking:

“Masking has always been associated with police states.

I think the masking symbolizes the drift of law enforcement away from democratic controls.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/25/immigration-officers-wearing-masks?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Having to go to a food bank sticks with you
– it's time politicians knew about it

Amie, a town councillor and mother-of-two, had no choice but to use a food bank.

She’ll be joining more than 700 campaigners in Westminster on 18 June calling for urgent action against the rising tide of poverty in the UK

They are calling for an essentials guarantee,
which would help ensure universal credit provides enough to cover the essentials of life -- without having to go to a foodbank

#essentialsguarantee
https://www.bigissue.com/opinion/food-banks-politicians-trussell/#Echobox=1751046777

Public health lawyers and experts praised Friday’s Supreme Court decision upholding Affordable Care Act-directed coverage of preventive services
-- but cautioned that legal challenges to health policy may now shift toward the evidence underpinning federal recommendations.
The 2010 Obamacare law requires task force-recommended services be covered by private insurers with no cost-sharing.
The high court ruled 6-3 that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is constitutional because the Health and Human Services secretary has the power to fire and appoint members and to reject their recommendations of which screenings or drugs should be offered to certain populations.
But those experts say Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent decision to remove all members of a vaccine advisory panel and reconstitute it with individuals skeptical of immunizations illustrates the consequences of that sweeping authority.
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/06/27/supreme-court-rulings-decisions-today-news-analysis/the-next-legal-frontier-in-health-care-the-definition-of-evidence-00429836

Establishment Democrats worked overtime to oppose progressive upstart Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral primary race
— and yet, claim to be baffled over why the Democratic Party is losing support, freshly ousted Democratic activist David Hogg said in a fiery post on Monday.
“The same establishment that is spending millions to destroy Zohran will say in a few months that we need to spend millions on polling and testing to win back young people.
Open your god damn eyes — it’s free,” Hogg wrote, the day before the primary election on Tuesday.
Indeed, like most major left-leaning candidates in the U.S., Mamdani is no stranger to attacks from establishment politicians and their donors.
https://truthout.org/articles/david-hogg-same-dems-opposing-mamdani-question-why-partys-losing-young-voters/

During a closed-door meeting of Republican senators on Tuesday, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) tried to tamper down fears of voter blowback against the proposed cuts to Medicaid spending in the GOP’s budget reconciliation bill,
⭐️claiming that voters will ultimately “get over it.”
The former Republican Senate leader’s comments came after Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), one of the most vulnerable Senate GOP incumbents in the 2026 midterm elections, expressed concern that
⭐️the cuts included in the bill could lead to major electoral losses for the party
https://truthout.org/articles/voters-will-get-over-it-mcconnell-tells-gop-colleagues-about-medicaid-cuts/

Trump's budget bill — the one and only major legislative effort of Trump 2.0 — is the most regressive, least populist policy package in living memory.

With its distinctive mix of tax cuts laser-focused on the rich and spending cuts that most hurt middle- and low-income Americans,
it would shift more resources up the income ladder than any bill passed since scorekeepers started keeping track.

And when voters learn what it would do — even Republican voters — they recoil against it.

We know, because we asked them. In a survey we ran after the House version of the bill passed,
we showed a random selection of voters how the bill would affect the take-home income of less affluent Americans versus the top 1 percent.

Opposition exploded, with only 11 percent of Americans supporting the bill
— one-third the level of support seen among those not shown the distributional results.
Among Republicans, the shift was even larger: Support and opposition flipped
— to nearly 3 to 1 opposition from nearly 3 to 1 support.
As unpopular as the bill is, however, Americans have yet to fully understand the special alchemy of inegalitarianism that defines it.

Break through the deception and misdirection, and Republicans’ signature policy bill,
which President Trump and G.O.P. lawmakers call the “one big beautiful bill,”
seems more aptly named Elites Over Working Families.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/opinion/trump-republicans-megabill.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Trump had been eager to celebrate the U.S. strikes on Iran,
but a new report indicates the attack set back Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/us/politics/trump-nato-iran.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

AOC and Republican Tim Burchett introduced a bill to stop members of congress from enriching themselves

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D) agrees:
it's "time to ban Congressional Stock trading"

Sign the petition to ban corrupt congressional stock trading
>> https://bantt.us

ICE Detains Wife of Trump-Supporting US Marine Corps Veteran
I supported President Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
I donated almost all my net income in 2015 to his campaign,
earning an inaugural invite," Prine told Newsweek.

https://www.newsweek.com/ice-detains-wife-trump-supporter-us-marine-veteran-david-prine-2089296#Echobox=1750713237

Two supertankers both capable of hauling about 2 million barrels of crude U-turned in the Strait of Hormuz after US airstrikes on Iran raised the risk of a response that will ensnare commercial shipping in the region.

https://bsky.app/profile/bloomberg.com/post/3lsacf4sjzt2a

Abelardo Avellaneda Delgado’s exact cause of death remains under investigation, according to ICE

But the Guardian’s reporting reveals a confusing and at times contradictory series of events surrounding the incident.
The death occurred as private companies with little to no oversight
are increasingly tasked with transporting more immigration detainees across the US,
in pursuit of the Trump administration’s recently-announced target of
arresting 3,000 people a day.

“The system is so loaded with people, exacerbating bad conditions
– it’s like a ticking time bomb,”
said Amilcar Valencia, executive director of El Refugio,
a Georgia-based organization that works with detainees at Stewart detention
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/22/ice-detainee-death-georgia?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Sen. Padilla claps back after JD Vance calls him ‘Jose’:
‘ He knows my name'

Sen. Alex Padilla blasted the Trump administration Saturday,
-- calling it “petty and unserious”
after Vice President JD Vance referred to him as “Jose” during a news conference in Los Angeles the previous day.

“He knows my name,” Padilla said in an appearance on MSNBC on Saturday morning.

Vance visited Los Angeles on Friday for less than five hours
after several weeks of federal immigration raids in the city and surrounding areas,
sparking protests and backlash from state and local officials.

Padilla was thrown into the heated nationwide immigration debate
when he was dragged to the ground by federal law enforcement officers
and briefly detained
when he attempted to ask U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question during a news conference earlier this month.
’ https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2025-06-21/sen-padilla-claps-back-after-jd-vance-calls-him-jose-he-knows-my-name

A Reuters/Ipsos poll releasedThursday found that
62 percent of self-identified Democrats said that the party should replace Democrats with new leaders,
with only 24 percent disagreeing with that statement.

A plurality of respondents, at 49 percent, said that they’re unsatisfied with current leaders.

The survey included over 4,200 respondents, including 1,293 Democrats, and was conducted earlier this month
https://truthout.org/articles/62-percent-of-democrats-want-current-party-leaders-to-be-replaced-poll-finds/

Trump is upset that in the lower courts his administration has lost 96 percent of the time so far, accordingto one analysis.

The president’s apologists have asserted that this shows that the courts are biased against Trump.

In reality it is the law that is biased against actions that defy the web of statutes, regulations, rules, contracts, and case law that have long been part of our legal system.

Trump has even suggested that he may not be bound by the oath he swore on January 20 to uphold the Constitution, which commands the president (twice!) to “faithfully execute” the law
— not to kill it, but to effectuate it.

Chief Justice Roberts, who administered the oath, had denuded it of much of its power through his orchestration of the outrageous immunity ruling.

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-lower-court-streak-legal-losses/

I am now heading to Shreveport, Louisiana, the home of Speaker Mike Johnson.

He is the architect of Trump's "big beautiful bill," the most destructive piece of legislation in modern history.

And his constituents need to know that.

@BernieSanders

One under-scrutinized federal agency has been crucial to the Trump administration's effort to detain and deport noncitizens who protested Israel’s war in Gaza (many of them students who are in the U.S. on visas or green cards):

Homeland Security Investigations
-- the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (which markets itself as an elite force that targets human traffickers, drug smugglers, and war criminals).

As it built dossiers on Khalil and others,
HSI deployed its full suite of investigative tools and techniques to
“identify individuals within the parameters” of President Donald Trump’s executive orders about rooting out purported antisemitism,
as one HSI agent explained in an affidavit.

For each target, HSI agents used surveillance tools to build a dossier,
which was then passed to the State Department to confirm that the target was,
in the eyes of the U.S. government,
sufficiently "antisemitic" to be deported.
https://theintercept.com/2025/06/20/mahmoud-khalil-homeland-security-investigations-ice-surveillance/

Four years after Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas would be the first state to build its own border wall,
lawmakers have quietly stopped funding the project,
leaving only scattered segments covering a small fraction of the border.

That decision, made in the waning hours of this year’s legislative session,
leaves the future of the state wall unclear.

Just 8% of the 805 miles the state identified for construction is complete,
which has cost taxpayers more than $3 billion to date

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/06/17/texas-border-wall-funding-ends-abbott-trump/

The 60-year-old man lying on the street, as far as anyone knew, was just a janitor hit by a drunk driver.
There was no mention of it on the local news, no obituary in the morning paper.
His name might have been Anonymous. But it wasn’t. 
His name was Peter Putnam.
He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr,
and two blocks from the crash, in his run-down apartment, where his partner, Claude, was startled by a screech,
were thousands of typed pages containing a groundbreaking new theory of the mind.
“Only two or three times in my life have I met thinkers with insights so far reaching, a breadth of vision so great, and a mind so keen as Putnam’s,”
Wheeler said in 1991.
And Wheeler, who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” had worked alongside some of the greatest minds in science.
https://nautil.us/finding-peter-putnam-1218035/

A young female bear caused a stir after wandering out of the forest and into the leafy suburbs of the Lithuanian capital.
For two days, the brown bear ambled through the neighborhoods of Vilnius, trotted across highways and explored backyards — all while being chased by onlookers with smartphones and, eventually, drones.
The government then issued a permit for the bear to be shot and killed.
That did not go down well with Lithuania’s hunters who refused, aware that there is only a tiny number of the protected species in the entire country.
The Lithuanian Association of Hunters and Fishermen said it was shocked by the government order.
https://apnews.com/article/lithuania-bear-vilnius-protected-species-2e6fd88748f386cd250c2f50a4587ad9