Author: thegraymaniac

It’s just my “opinion” but our current SCOTUS is not doing the right thing by the citizens of our country by making SO many “shadow docket” rulings, I.e. decisions made secretly with no explanations at all to citizens of this country as to the “why” of the case? 14 out of the last 15 shadow docket decisions have been made this year. I’m including a list. I believe I understand why they are doing this, but just don’t think it’s right to be arbitrarily handing out so much power to another branch of the government.

The “shadow docket” refers to the US Supreme Court’s use of emergency orders and summary decisions, typically outside of its usual schedule and without oral arguments or full explanations. While traditionally used for relatively routine procedural matters, the Court has increasingly used the shadow docket in recent years to address significant and often controversial issues with major policy implications.
Here are 15 notable shadow docket decisions, primarily from the last few years, highlighting the range of issues addressed and the concerns surrounding this method of adjudication:

United States v. Skrmetti (2025): Upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors, allowing similar bans in other states to proceed.

Trump v. CASA Inc. (2025): Significantly curtailed the ability of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions blocking presidential policies by scaling back a hold on a Trump administration policy regarding birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and foreign visitors.

Kennedy v. Braidwood Management Inc. (2025): Upheld a portion of the Affordable Care Act requiring health plans to cover preventive care, rejecting religious objections to coverage for medications that prevent HIV transmission.

Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton (2025): Upheld a Texas law requiring age verification to access online pornography, rejecting First Amendment challenges.

Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025): Sided with parents seeking to opt their children out of public school lessons featuring LGBTQ+-themed books, citing religious freedom concerns.

Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County (2025): Narrowed the scope of environmental reviews for major infrastructure projects, limiting consideration to impacts directly tied to the project.

Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission (2025): Ruled unanimously that Wisconsin discriminated against a Catholic charity by denying it a tax exemption available to the Catholic Church.

Smith & Wesson Brands v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos (2025): Blocked Mexico’s lawsuit against US gun manufacturers, ruling Mexico failed to establish a strong enough link between US-made guns and cartel violence.
Ames v. Ohio Dept. of Youth Services (2025): Made it easier for members of majority groups to prove job discrimination claims by striking down a higher standard of proof previously required in nearly half the nation’s federal circuits.

FDA v. Wages and White Lion Investments, LLC (2025): Ruled unanimously that the FDA properly rejected applications to market flavored e-cigarette liquids, citing public health concerns about youth vaping.

Garland v. VanDerStok (2025): Upheld a Biden administration regulation treating “ghost guns” (untraceable weapons assembled from parts kits) as firearms under the Gun Control Act, requiring background checks, serial numbers, and sales records.

San Francisco v. Environmental Protection Agency (2025): Struck down generic environmental regulations required as part of EPA permits for wastewater discharge, potentially weakening the Clean Water Act.

Glossip v. Oklahoma (2025): Ordered a new trial for death row inmate Richard Glossip due to the prosecution’s withholding of evidence, highlighting broader concerns about the death penalty and prosecutorial conduct.

TikTok Inc. v. Garland (2025): Unanimously upheld a federal law requiring TikTok to be sold or banned in the US due to national security concerns, finding it does not violate free speech rights.

Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson (2021): This decision, in which the Supreme Court declined to block a Texas law banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, was a major signal of the Court’s stance on abortion rights before Roe v. Wade was overturned, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

The increasing use of the shadow docket, particularly for consequential decisions, has drawn criticism regarding the lack of transparency, explanation, and opportunity for full debate that characterize the Court’s regular merits docket. This raises concerns about judicial accountability and the perceived politicization of the Court’s rulings.

I’ve been looking at the photos of the sweet little girls who are missing, and those who have been confirmed dead, and I’m blinded by tears as I’m typing this. I cannot even comprehend how the parents and grandparents feel. I’m terribly sad for what they are going through. Camp Mystic. I saw where one of the Mom’s whose little girl died said that she would always think of her daughter as “living her best life at Camp Mystic”.

Already people are coming with the “blame game” even before all of the waters have receded. Even before all of the bodies are recovered, and all of the mourning has begun.

Can we not just once ….feel empathy, sympathy, and shared pain for other human beings who need it? Can’t we pray for them, and bear them up during their sorrow before we start politicizing this tragedy?

There will be plenty of time for all that later. Plenty of time to point fingers. I remember a time when the whole country used to come together when these types of tragedies happened. I wish it could be that way again.

Two Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota, State Senator John Hoffman and State Representative Melissa Hortman, were shot in their own homes overnight.

What Happened

• 2:00 a.m. – A man dressed in police-style body armor opened fire at Senator Hoffman’s home in Champlin, MN, shooting Hoffman and another individual.

Shortly after – The same attacker drove roughly 8 miles to Brooklyn Park, where he entered Representative Hortman’s home and shot both Hortman and her spouse. A third person may have also been wounded.

5:30 a.m. – A shelter-in-place order was issued across a wide area of Brooklyn Park. Residents were told a man impersonating a police officer was at large and considered armed and dangerous.

7:00 a.m. – Authorities warned residents not to open their doors unless two verified officers were present, and even then, to call 911 to confirm their identity.

Morning – Governor Tim Walz activated the State Emergency Operations Center, pledging full support to local police and urging calm while the investigation continues.

Facts

• The suspect remains at large.
• He was wearing body armor and pretending to be a cop.
• The attacks appear targeted and premeditated.
• No motive has been confirmed, but both victims are Democratic lawmakers.
• The state is now on high alert.

Their conditions are serious. We are praying for them and their families.

A couple of things on my mind. One of them is the vast increase in phishing emails, texts and phone calls since the last part of January. These intrusions, which have all gotten more detailed I.e., they have Social Security numbers and other information they should not have, …..all of them seem to coincide with the DOGE intrusions into the Social Security Network, and other federal institutions where all of our….we American citizens…where all of our pertinent information lies.

Who knows what information was downloaded onto hard drives, by young and unverified, unvetted individuals? Who knows what they did with it? Was it surreptitiously sold to the highest bidder?

Pair with with the UNPRECEDENTED release (yes I will call it a release and not a theft) as follows:

1. Data Breaches & Leaks: This is a common meaning, where massive amounts of sensitive data are released without authorization, often due to security vulnerabilities or breaches.
   Notable examples include the Yahoo breach affecting 3 billion accounts, the National Public Data breach impacting 2.9 billion individuals, and the 2024 “Mother of All Breaches” involving 26 billion records.
   These breaches can lead to significant financial costs for companies and expose individuals to identity theft and scams.
2. Government Data Sharing: The term is also being used to describe governmental efforts to collect and share large amounts of personal data from state and other entities.
   For example, the Trump administration’s initiative to amass data from state databases for immigration enforcement purposes.
   This type of data sharing can raise legal questions and privacy concerns.
3. Scientific Data Generation: With advancements in technology, particularly in fields like astronomy and physics, massive amounts of data are being generated and made available for research.
   The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, for example, will generate 20 terabytes of data per night, offering opportunities for groundbreaking discoveries.
   The growing volume of data presents challenges and opportunities for organizations to manage, secure, and extract valuable insights.
4. Open Data Initiatives: Governments and organizations are increasingly releasing large datasets to the public for analysis and innovation, fostering transparency and citizen engagement.

All this is causing my wife and I to have dozens of phone calls a day, and just today my wife has had to call credit cards companies because scammers have gotten part of her social security number and are attempting to open accounts in her name.

I’ve frozen all my accounts, and intend to use cash for personal purchases. I already did that last month, and ended up spending less anyway. I intend to see about switching all the accounts possible back to sending me statements, so I can mail them checks! My opinion is that this is only going to get worse…not just for us older folks, but for everyone! Everyone just be careful what you say when someone calls IF you answer.

As for me, I don’t even answer these calls if they are not in my contact list. Then I block the numbers. I have over a thousand blocked numbers….and they are still calling!

I got a job as a groundskeeper at the IHOP and I’m out doing my work. I’m an old dude as you know, and this is hard work out in the sun! I’m down to weed eating around the bushes, when all the sudden I’m surrounded by several guys in masks and vests with big guns! My flight or fight instincts kick in and I start to run!

The men start yelling “you’re under arrest”! …but what for? I haven’t done anything, I was just working my job! As I run, I am afraid. I point my weedeater at them…as everyone knows, it’s the weapon of choice for self defense. One of the men tackles me, and one of them punches me, as they put zip ties on my hands. Another shoves a baton roughly in my face and then against my throat…choking me, as they shove me with force and throttle me as they put me in a car. They say they are police, or “ICE”.

As I collapse into the back seat, I think about my three sons who are Marines, two of them still deployed serving this country I am in. What will they think of me now? What did I do to deserve this kind of treatment?

As of June 28, 2025, the Senate’s “big beautiful bill” has not yet been estimated by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for its budget impact. However, the bill does include deeper cuts than the House’s tax bill, which would cut more than $1 trillion from federal health coverage over a decade. The Senate bill also includes these changes:
Medicaid: The bill lowers the maximum tax rate that states can impose on Medicaid providers from 6% to 3.5% in the 41 states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. This would effectively halve the amount that states receive in tax revenue from Medicaid providers.
Medicare: The bill eliminates Medicare physician payment relief.

It has been noted that the larger part of the cuts won’t be enacted until 2028. Wonder why, don’t you?? They voted several billion dollars to shore up local hospitals temporarily, because American’s memories are short. Oh, and I thought there was a “promise” not to cut Medicare? So much for that. Oh well, they have to have that trillion to give tech companies like Google and Meta RETROACTIVE tax cuts of billions going back to 2022 for “R&D”. Don’t believe me? Look it up yourself? Don’t care? You will when people you love die because they can’t find medical care. Also, it’s bound to make insurance premiums for your work insurance go up. Winning yet?

When I heard this tonight on the news it was something that was almost unbelievable. Why would the federal government halt the sharing of this information? The only reasons I can think of is: 1. They want more people to die. 2. They want to be purposefully cruel to people. If any of you, no matter your political stance can think of, or know of a more compelling or different reason, chime right in and let me know:

A critical US atmospheric data collection program will be halted by Monday, giving weather forecasters just days to prepare, according to a public notice sent this week. Scientists that the Guardian spoke with say the change could set hurricane forecasting back “decades”, just as this year’s season ramps up.

In a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) message sent on Wednesday to its scientists, the agency said that “due to recent service changes” the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) will “discontinue ingest, processing and distribution of all DMSP data no later than June 30, 2025”.

Due to their unique characteristics and ability to map the entire world twice a day with extremely high resolution, the three DMSP satellites are a primary source of information for scientists to monitor Arctic sea ice and hurricane development. The DMSP partners with Noaa to make weather data collected from the satellites publicly available.

The reasons for the changes, and which agency was driving them, were not immediately clear. Noaa said they would not affect the quality of forecasting.

However, the Guardian spoke with several scientists inside and outside of the US government whose work depends on the DMSP, and all said there are no other US programs that can form an adequate replacement for its data.

Read that again: NO other U.S. programs that can form an adequate replacement for its data!

I feel like everything in the Universe is connected. Inexplicably but undeniably connected.

I don’t know how. I’ll never know exactly how in this lifetime. But it’s the way I feel.

I feel so privileged to have been able to have a life within the confines of the Universe. To be able to think, to touch, to feel, and to remember. To be able to develop love, affection and empathy for other lives on the same journey, at the same time is awesome.

If it is a gift from a creator…one who set this all in motion, I am grateful. I feel personally as if life is that, but for those who have other theories…whatever they are or are not, life is still a rare and special thing. Obviously, quite a rare occurrence. (I do not resent anyone else’s beliefs as long as those beliefs do not harm others. When beliefs cross that threshold then they become hostile entities and may need to be called out)

So, all of our memories and feelings make us who we are, but we are more than just that.

We are a heart and a spirit, bound together in a mysterious and intricate dance with all other things in existence…and isn’t it wonderful?

Remember this when others who do not realize the privilege of life as a positive thing, try to make your journey dark. Remember this when others try to fill your mind with fear.

Don’t give in to them. Don’t sink to their level. Their darkness is it’s own punishment, whether they realize it or not.

It doesn’t have to be ours.

It is so hot. I got out a little while to water the plants this evening, and the sun was like an oven whose object seemed to be to cook my head! I should have worn a hat. I know that, but was just too caught up in immediately setting out that I didn’t plan things out well. Something which wouldn’t have occurred to me to even care about in the least…before the turn of the century. That’s a statement which gives me an odd feeling. To be a child of two different centuries.

I do have to start planning better though. I never thought when I was a kid that I’d ever live this long. In the 1960’s the 21st century was just a shadow, looming long out ahead. It wasn’t real, didn’t seem real, didn’t seem possible to comprehend. Oh, a lot of writers and seers were thinking about it and predicting what it would be like. None of them got it exactly right. Not Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, or Jeanne Dixon. Not H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, or George Orwell. None exactly right. Predicting the future is a job I wouldn’t want. That, or a weatherman. But now it’s here, and 75 years old is on the horizon if I make it to October. With this heat, I will be glad when it gets to be October. Granny said never to wish your life away, but dang it I can’t help it.

I’ve got to start remembering my hat, my sunblock, my vitamins, my eye drops, my skin lotion, and my fiber. I have absolutely got to keep my mind on my driving, and go to my scheduled Drs. appointments. I have to do these things because no matter that my mind tells me I am still 18, my body tells me the truth. Oh, I’m in pretty good shape for the shape I’m in. I still walk 10 thousand steps most days.

We are not promised tomorrow, as many will say and having lived this long I must agree. I would like to stick around for a while longer though, because I have unfinished business. So if you see me walking around in the blazing sun with no hat on or working out in the garden., you have my permission to verbally reprimand me.

Trying to be honest….or one way to see it:

I grew up in the fifties in America. I was a great time. The middle class was growing. Most of our little families in the mill town where I lived were able to buy the houses which had been duplex apartments owned by the company and convert them into nice little single family homes. My Dad was able to buy his first new car in 1966. A Ford fairlane. It was a pretty good little car. Had a 289, 8 cylinder motor. We ate more hamburgers by 1967, where we had eaten pinto beans and corn bread back in 1958. I think we went to Kentucky Fried Chicken to eat out for the first time in the late sixties. I was able to buy two comic books a week for a quarter a piece in the late sixties, where I had only gotten one per week back in the fifties, even though they were cheaper. I found some friends who had been collecting since the early fifties and was able to catch up on some of the series I had been wanting to read, but couldn’t afford.

By the time I graduated High School in 1968, things were beginning to change in America….and they haven’t stopped changing since that year.

John Kennedy was gone. He left in 1963. He was killed in November of that year. It was the same year that Martin Luther King had given his famous “I have a dream” speech in Washington. That had been in August of ’63. I didn’t get to see it in person, but the news carried it. I remember it well. I remember him saying:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day
live in a nation Where they will not be judged by the color
of their skin but by the content of their character. l I have
a dream … I have a dream that one day in Alabama,
with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips
dripping with the words of interposition and nullification,
one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black
girls will he able to join hands with little white boy’s and
white girls as sisters and brothers.”

Sisters and brothers. He had that dream.

Up until that year, 1968, we still had Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. But they were both assassinated that year. Fighters who would fight for freedom were gone. Heroes who would fight for all people of all colors and all creeds…who would replace them? Who could replace them? Who has replaced them?

Since then we have moved forward with the Vietnam War, Johnson and Nixon…..Reagan and Voodoo economics, Bush II, and the trillions of dollars we wasted in Iraq that could have built free healthcare, infrastructure repair, and educational reform. Not to mention millions of lives lost….for nothing. Millions of lives…..

We have had a pandemic caused by….Well….that’s still indeterminate isn’t it? A lot of uncertainty, dishonesty and misinformation have circulated around this disease. I’ve tried to follow the science, but who knows. Reading that one drug company has tried to withhold information from the FDA, makes me skeptical.

We have had two other executives since then…one on each side, who have done unscrupulous things. We haven’t had a hero amongst any of the above named people, and certainly none in the other branches of government either.

I look at the people who are in this country in 2023 and I wonder…..what have we become a nation of? I realize there has always been hatred and division in America. America is a country which is grounded in division. We were born from division in the Revolutionary war. We killed each other during the Civil war over the division between North and South. We have been divided many times since then. Division and the differences between ideas which is solved through true negotiation and arbitration is not a bad thing really.

But I will have to say I have never, ever witnessed the hatred and vitriole, and the pure purposelessness which I have seen recently in the past couple of years, especially emanating from social media.

I am looking very hard for some of those heroes like we had back in the sixites….I’m not sure there are any around. Are there?