Opinion
By Jeff Childers
2/11/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Yesterday was another day packed with progress. Today we’ll focus on some small wins that are bigger than they appear and try to defuse panic over a basket of bad judging. In the roundup: the Gulf of America soaks into official systems; Google de-wokes the world’s calendars; liberal media steps on the Third Reich-rake by comparing the NIH to the Boys from Brazil; more Lilliputian leftist restraining orders tie down the Gulliver of government reform; the latest developments in the Treasury restricted-access case; and our long, slurpy straw nightmare is finally over.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
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Newsweek reported the beautiful news yesterday under the headline, “FAA, Google make it official: Gulf of Mexico is Now Gulf of America.” I hate to quibble, but President Trump’s executive order made it “official,” but I take their point. Now, when the spring breakers fly from Tampa to Cancún, they won’t first be humiliated by crossing the Gulf of Mexico’s tepid waters. Both the plane’s flight tracker and their phone’s map will show the ocean’s correct name.
How Mexico snaked the Gulf right out from under us in the first place is a mystery lost among the gossamer shrouds of history, which we were just hanging out to dry when we reached around for another clothespin and saw the freshly-painted sign reading “Gulf of Mexico.” Those sneaky Mexicans got us again. But now, adíos, sombreros, we have got it back.
I get the concerns. Will the world now be forced to memorize a lengthening litany of alternative landmark names that flip and flop every time the party in power changes? If so, blame President Obama, who started the Name Wars by renaming “Mount McKinley” to “Denali,” which in native Alaskan means, I just sold that American ten dollars worth of yellow snow.
For those feeling bemused by all of Trump’s landmark renaming, just consider the alternative. Had Harris been elected, we’d be watching romantic sunsets over the Gulf of Equity and Inclusion right now.
🔥 But that wasn’t all. Yesterday’s news delivered another delicious moment of corporate de-wokening. Google giveth, and Google taketh away. The search giant’s unavoidable, pre-programmed calendar events have been pared back to the minimum, now reduced to some default list supplied by a Norweigan holiday-tracking contractor. I did not make that up.
For example, Google deleted “Indigenous People’s Month,” just like the buffalo, but fortunately, and soothing widespread progressive worries, the Indians were not literally erased. The casinos are still there. Google also clicked the little minus button next to June’s “LGBTQ+ Pride Month.” Hopefully, that one will erase the NSFW parades. Keep it in the leather festival, gents. And the little colored blocks labeled “Black History Month” and “Women’s History Month” have both passed into history, just like the civil rights era.
Wokeness sought to change the times and seasons, to suit its insatiable demand for universal virtue-signaling compliance. Good morning! It’s Polynesian-Nigerian Remembrance Week! The irony is Gulf-of-America deep: the howls of fury from progressives about Google’s ‘remembrance’ tweaks show how rice-paper thin these made-up holidays were to start with, as if historical recognition somehow requires a Google notification.
Maoist cultural mandates can demand performance, but they can’t create reality.
Google’s calendar concession might be the smallest win in the culture wars, but it symbolizes a larger restoration of sanity. Sayonara, little colored blocks of carefully curated woke culture, we won’t miss you. We probably won’t even notice you’re gone.
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I did not make this up. You aren’t going to believe how badly the sensible reduction in “indirect overhead” for science grants has triggered the left. So badly that this is a real, non-satirical headline published yesterday in the far-left American Prospekt, I mean Prospect, which in its mad dash to dunk on President Trump literally praised Adolph Hitler:
The joke writes itself. Even the Führer knew a communist when he saw one. Even the Führer knew what to do with unfriendly media. Even the Führer knew that you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs … no wait, that was the other one.
The last thing the biomedical research community needs right now is a friend like The American Prospect tying NIH funding to Third Reich science policy. Talk about a PR nightmare.
“Hitler did,” the Prospect graciously allowed, “seek more efficient ways for the mass killing of Jews.” But in the very next sentence, it expansively praised the mad dictator: “Yet civilian German science, long a mark of German pride, also thrived.”
Well, everybody break into goose-stepping, Hitler has shown Trump the way.
German pride! In equal parts projection and woke derangement, the American Prospect just glowingly compared America’s biomedical research community to Nazi doctors. With allies like the American Prospect, the NIH doesn’t even need critics.
The Prospect, though, may have learned its lesson. After the merciless mocking it has endured over the last 24 hours, they plan to tone things down, with next week’s installment headlined, “What Stalin Could Teach Trump About Railroad Efficiency.”
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The Washington Post ran a troubling story yesterday under the headline, “Trump allies suggest defying court orders after stinging legal rebukes.” It is true there is a lot of that kind of talk surging around on our side, but defying court orders would be a terrible idea. We are nowhere close to a “defy the courts” moment. Don’t panic until I give the signal.
It is true that a pleonastic series of left-wing judges have been tossing out wokabulary-packed TRO’s like obscenely shaped candy tossed in hairy handfuls from a Pride Parade float. “The president,” WaPo crowed, “has lost nearly every battle in court in the opening weeks of his administration, with some judges using biting and incredulous language to push back on administration plans they have deemed unconstitutional, ill-planned or cruel.”
Indeed, yesterday a Massachusetts federal judge blocked the prefectly sensible 15% overhead cap on NIH grants. Also yesterday, Rhode Island Judge John J. McConnell Jr. scolded the administration for failing to comply with the “plain language” of his earlier TRO requiring the OMB to unfreeze trillions in wasteful and abusive federal grants and loans.
It is starting to seem like the courts would rather run the Executive Branch for themselves.
It is worth noting that amnesiac corporate media completely forgot all the glowing words of praise it heaped on Joe Biden’s “creative” circumvention of a series of Supreme Court decisions stopping his student loan forgiveness schemes. The media’s hypocrisy is frustrating, but it is bait we should not eat.
Let them step on the legal rakes.
Three weeks ago, when Trump first issued his blanket pause on federal spending and his new, Schedule-F “at will” category for federal workers, I suggested that he was laying a trap. You’ll recall we discussed the Reagan-era “unitary executive” theory of Executive Branch powers. I told you then that Trump’s blanket orders were inviting lawsuits right out of the gate to tee up a final showdown at a Supreme Court poised to cement Trump’s budgetary and employment powers into law.
Well, the judges couldn’t resist and have taken the Trump bait. The dizzying slew of TRO’s contains some of the worst and weakest judicial reasoning ever excreted from the federal bench. Patience, young Jedi. We should celebrate these particular TRO’s instead of freaking out over them. Weak, injudicious, poorly reasoned orders are much easier to beat than judicious, well-reasoned orders.
My appellate mentor once told me that an overlong long, apparently devastating order packed with pages of ridiculous factual findings is the best kind of order— even though at first it looks like a death sentence. “The more the robes talk,” my mentor said, “the more we have to work with on appeal.” That advice is truer now than it ever has been.
There is no need for panic. The worst thing Trump’s team could do is overreact and start openly defying court orders—that’s a losing strategy with long-term constitutional consequences. Trump has the Supreme Court. It’s much smarter to let these weak orders pile up and then race them up the appellate ladder, which is exactly what is happening now.
It would be different if the Supreme Court were adversarial. That is what happened to President Lincoln, forcing him toignore the order and arrest Justice Taney’s messenger rather than comply with the ruling in Ex parte Merryman. Lincoln faced an existential crisis where compliance with the court’s order would have crippled the Union’s ability to suppress the rebellion— or to facilitate the Northern Aggression, depending on your point of view.
But either way, in 2025 the Supreme Court is not adversarial to President Trump—it is more inclined to define and reinforce his executive authority rather than dismantle it.
That’s why we must show restraint and hew to the rule of law. Let these leftist lower courts exhaust themselves with legally dubious rulings, and then let the Supreme Court do what it was built to do: settle the matter decisively.
I don’t believe it was accidental that Trump practically invited these challenges from Day One. The President knows all about this kind of lawfare—it was background music throughout Trump 1.0. We have enjoyed a brief, encouraging sprint of cheap success while the Swamp was caught off guard, but we always knew this day of lawfare would come. We are now entering the second phase. Trump is playing a longer game. Everything he is doing now is intended to expand his legal authority—constitutionally—using the very same court system that is currently chucking sand into the machine of reform.
“The Trump administration probably will prevail in some cases,” the WaPo finally admitted, late in the article, “as they wend through the appeals courts or make their way to the Supreme Court.”
The Swamp’s strategy is founded on delay and obstruction. Trump’s counter is acceleration and good politics. He isn’t waiting for these fights; he’s forcing them now, when he has momentum, rather than later, when the bureaucracy might recover and dig in. This flurry of weak rulings will provide the leverage needed for the Supreme Court to weigh in decisively—very likely in the President’s favor.
🔥 As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about the TRO cutting off “political appointees” from access to Treasury’s computer systems, things are proceeding as I suspected. No “compromise” was arranged from the court’s order to “meet and confer.” The briefs were filed late into last night—and the DOJ’s reply was strong. Here’s part of its conclusion:
The broader and fundamental flaw underlying the Order remains. Plaintiffs confirm in their opposition that they seek something remarkable: A court order commanding that a segment of an executive agency be cordoned off from properly named “political appointees,” while giving access to select “civil servants.” The government is aware of no example of a court ever trying to micromanage an agency in this way, or sever the political supervision of the Executive Branch in such a manner. This Court should not be the first. The existing TRO cannot stand.
Believe it or not, the best thing that could happen would be for the Obama-appointed judge to uphold the TRO in full or even in part. Trump’s team would then be all set for an emergency appeal.
Remember: we lose nothing by the delay while these cases climb the appellate ladder. The waste, fraud, and abuse have been happily trundling along for decades. Relatively speaking, a few more months won’t hurt. But the highly visible battle for commonsense reforms infuriates the public, spotlights the left’s contradictions, and forces Democrats to waste valuable political capital defending the indefensible. The best prize lays at the end of the fight: a Supreme Court order completely cutting off lower courts from micromanaging the Executive Branch.
Trump’s legal strategy is brilliant, and it is working. Let the man work.
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It was the last straw. The President has finally ended our long national slurping nightmare. Yesterday, the BBC ran a terrific story headlined, “Donald Trump signs order shifting U.S. back towards plastic straws.” At the very end of its article, the BBC admitted that “studies have shown that paper straws contain significant amounts of ‘forever chemicals’ such as polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.” In other words, they don’t drink and also they’re killing you. Thanks, Democrats.
As he signed the new order, the President observed, “These things don’t work. I’ve had them many times, and on occasion, they break, they explode. If something’s hot, they don’t last very long, like a matter of minutes, sometimes a matter of seconds. It’s a ridiculous situation.”
It might seem trivial and ridiculous, but the paper straw is the perfect metaphor for progressive policymaking: a fabulously expensive, grandstanding effort to save the turtles that not only failed at its intended purpose but actively made things worse. Paper straws were supposed to be the virtuous alternative, but instead, they disintegrate mid-slurp and poison you with forever chemicals. Meanwhile, plastic straws—vilified and nearly outlawed—are now returning triumphantly, not because of any deep ideological shift, but for the simple and practical reason that they work.
This ridiculous drinking mandate was the straw that broke virtue-signaling’s back.
In the textbook of unintended consequences, the straw saga will have its own chapter. Instead of just being a ‘minor inconvenience,’ the paper straw mandate spawned a virtue-signaling industry of reusable metal and silicone straws, adding one more damned thing to citizens’ daily routines, and practically ensured an argument with the exhausted waitress every time you went out to eat.
Trump’s decision to bring back plastic straws was more than just a rollback of a failed progressive policy—it was a beacon of common sense in government. The President of the United States should not be spending time on straws; he should be freed to focus on stopping World War Three. Yet here we are. And even more delicious, while the left is surely fuming about it, of the many articles mocking Trump’s straw order, not one of them included a named quote from anyone attempting to defend the porous alternative.
If there is a better example of how leftists always make things worse, I don’t know what could beat the PFAS-poisoned paper straw. Goodbye, poison straws, and take the Gulf of Mexico with you.
Have a terrific Tuesday! We’ll be serving up more hot and spicy essential news and commentary again tomorrow morning, right here, so don’t miss out.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
