Every Friday morning at 8:30AM, I join the Cardle & Woolley show, Talk 1370 Radio, in Austin to pick the week’s top Winners & Losers. We run the gambit from public policy and political trends to sports and culture in Texas, America and the world.
Here’s my list for the week ending June 7.
It was a week filled with gratitude for the courage and heroism of those brave Americans who stormed the beaches on D-Day. Those of the greatest generation will remain winners for all time. American pride seemed to bring the country together for a bit as Americans remembered our connection to those who risked their lives and died to save Europe and the world expanding the American legacy of freedom that is part of our DNA.
Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton apparently was not moved by it all. She took the opportunity to push the tiresome partisan trope that her former political opponent, Donald Trump, is a threat to democracy. She posted:
Eighty years ago today, thousands of brave Americans fought to protect democracy on the shores of Normandy. This November all we have to do is vote.
It was also noted this week that Hillary was fined $8000.00 for misrepresenting the money she paid to create the Steele Dossier, her phony report on Russian involvement in her 2016 campaign, as “legal expenses,” precisely what Trump is now facing jail time for. The term “loser” doesn’t adequately to cover it.
The Texans who want to challenge the New York Stock Exchange by establishing a Dallas–based stock exchange have a tough hill to climb, but it’s likely a big win for the state no matter how it turns out. The Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE) would be an ongoing demonstration that the Texas pro-business formula of low taxes and reasonable regulation works. Texas is routinely one of the top job creators in the country and businesses come online, without the requirements of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and environmental social governance (ESG) that hamstring companies, depress profits and inhibit productivity and innovation. Reports indicate Blackrock and Citadel Securities are leading the charge while Elon Musk, Mark Cuban and Texas Governor Greg Abbott are cheering it on. Where do you sign up to ring the bell?
Another winner is Houston Mayor John Whitmire. He faced a huge backlash in March when he ignored the demands of pro-Palestinian groups in the Bayou City who threatened the Mayor with a loss of “audience” and “business partnerships” if he did not call for an immediate ceasefire in Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists. The Mayor ignored the threat and this week he celebrated the 76th anniversary of the founding of Israel with the Jewish Community in Houston where he vowed to continue to fight anti-Semitism anywhere he sees it.
President Joe Biden is on the loser list again, this time for his Executive Order pretending to address the crisis at the southern border. After three years of policies that have allowed eight million people to enter the country illegally, Biden finally issued an executive order that cannot even be described as “too little, too late.” Instead it’s “nothing, too late.” My colleagues at TPPF, Rodney Scott and Selene Rodriguez call it political theatre, noting Biden’s only goal was to try to get some good press on the border issue, undoubtedly because it is now the top concern of voters across the country who will decide whether to re-elect him in November. Biden rolled back dozens of border policies that were keeping the border secure when he came into office in 2021. Jiggering with the asylum application process at this late date is, frankly, pathetic.
Two professors at the University of Texas at Austin, Daniel Bonevac and John Hatfield make the winners list this week for pushing back on President Biden’s Title IX revisions. Biden expanded Title IX to include men who say they are women. According to the Austin American Statesman, the professors say they would not discriminate against men who dress as women in hiring but they would not allow them to dress in drag or appear in clothing of the opposite sex while they are teaching. They also said they would not give excused absences for non-medically necessary abortions or address any student with a plural pronoun like “they” instead of him and her. Obama tried to legalize and normalize men saying they are women in 2017 with a threat to take away funding to public schools if they didn’t open girls bathrooms to boys. He was not successful. Like the professors, most Americans don’t want to discriminate against anyone, but they simply don’t support the so-called “trans agenda” being pushed by progressives. That’s probably why there is growing concern that guy who just became the new Miss Maryland USA will be spending so much time around children. Put him on the losers list.
The National Center for Energy Analytics is a winner this week for giving us more news about what transitioning to electric cars is actually going to cost. The NCEA’s new report finds that the cost of building the charging stations and infrastructure to service electric cars will run somewhere between $2 to $4 trillion. That’s the cost of the charging stations and getting electricity to those charging stations – something that hasn’t been in the calculation so far. Taxpayers have already put down billions to subsidize electric cars – which most people still don’t want — and now this. But wait, there’s more. The $4 trillion doesn’t include the cost of new power plants that will also be required. Take a look at the new report.
The pandemic continues to be a loser. Pollster Scott Rasmussen reported this week 61% of Americans believe that at least some of the information released by the federal government during the pandemic was intentionally false and misleading. This includes 34% who say that most of it was false, 19% who think just about all of it was false and 15% who think everything the government told us was a lie. Given that, a healthy majority of Americans were undoubtedly not surprised to hear Anthony Fauci tell Congress this week that he had nothing to do with any of it. Fauci, who referred to himself during the pandemic as “the science,” is also on the loser list. He told Congress that even though he was leading the national response to COVID, the 6-foot separation rule “just appeared.” It wasn’t him. He denied ever telling the country that COVID couldn’t have been the result of a leak in a Wuhan lab and when emails were revealed from his long time senior advisor saying they had a system for avoiding public information disclosures, Fauci said he hardly knew the guy. Expect the percentage of Americans who believe the government gave us intentionally false information during the pandemic to increase soon.
In other loser news, we’ve all been waiting to see what would happen if the pro-Hamas protests continued into Gay Pride Month which is always replete with parades. Sure enough, two parades collided in Philadelphia where the pro-terrorists belted out chants comparing the Philadelphia Pride Parade (PPP) to the KKK. The counter parade was led by Queers for Palestine, a group that has been likened to “Chickens for Colonel Sanders.” There’s a concept called “intersectionality” within the DEI ideology where the goal is to determine who is the biggest victim. To see where such one-up-manship ultimately leads, take a look at this footage from the Philadelphia streets last weekend.
Finally, as college football continues its massive realignment, news dropped this week that San Antonio’s Alamo Bowl has lost the option to include University of Texas or Oklahoma in its selection pool for the bowl game this year. Alamo Bowlers were hoping to put either Oklahoma or Texas in a slot in place of picking from what is left of the PAC-12, but the powerful SEC, the new home for Oklahoma and Texas, said no. An unnamed SEC source gave what may well be the best quote of week when he said: “Allowing the Alamo to take OU or Texas instead of a Pac-12 legacy team would have caused a lot of issues with the SEC bowl, and we don’t like issues.”
Got it. We’ll just leave it there. Have a great weekend.
Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.
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