Every Friday morning, I join the Cardle & Woolley Show on Talk 1370 Radio in Austin to announce the week’s Winners & Losers. Today marks Day 31 of the government shutdown and it’s been 12 days since the big heist at the Louvre. In this special Halloween edition, here’s who made the list:
WINNER: Three More Years! Three More Years!
It won’t stop the “No Kings” crowd, which spend long and hateful days insisting that President Donald Trump is a dictator who will never leave office. But the President tried to put the issue of his running for a third term to rest this week when he told reporters that he won’t be a presidential candidate in 2028. Flying back from Asia on Air Force One he said: “…it’s pretty clear I’m not allowed to run.”
There are plenty of reasons for the president to have been cagey about a third term. Lame duck presidents simply aren’t as powerful as those who have the potential of another term ahead of them, but that pesky 22nd Amendment is what it is.
The whole third term thing had become a distraction, and it’s good that Trump has taken it off the table, although the New York Times insisted yesterday that Trump’s plan to become a dictator is still moving forward.
In ruling himself out, Trump again reminded the media and their Democrat allies that Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are coming up behind him, along with a half dozen other strong leaders, while they have virtually nobody on their bench, unless they can convince “The Rock” to run (see below).
WINNER: TPPF Sues Dallas on Death Star Violations
One of the many things Democrats have done in Texas to make sure conservatives keep winning elections is to hamstring the state’s big blue cities with dramatic “virtue signaling” regulations that reduce Texans’ freedom. To undo what has become a mess, conservatives passed House Bill 2127 in 2023, the so-called “Death Star” law, which, despite its name, only means that cities and counties “must rein in their regulations on Texas business that do not conform with state law.” The goal is to address overregulation and ensure that if it is against the law in Dime Box, it is against the law in Dallas, too.
Big D didn’t seem to get it, so this week, my colleagues at the Texas Public Policy Foundation sued the city of Dallas on behalf of several plaintiffs, charging that 83 local ordinances on a wide range of issues, ranging from minimum wage and labor regulations for city contractors to recycling guidelines to restrictions on drilling and producing oil and gas, did not comply with state law. These are the kind of job-killing regulations that have stifled growth and bankrupted coastal blue cities like San Francisco and New York for decades.
Dallas has also piled on a patchwork of noise and airport parking regulations, including their own rules for Uber and Lyft and a host of DEI-based laws, which they describe as “protections” for LGBTQ+ people, apparently unaware that it is illegal in America to discriminate against anybody in hiring, promotion and firing.
In filing the suit, TPPF Senior Attorney Matthew Chiarizo said, “Cities don’t get to pick and choose which state laws they follow…this lawsuit is about protecting Texans’ freedom to live and work without being smothered by layers of needless local regulation.”
WINNER: Light at the End of Shutdown Tunnel?
We can all hope that National Review columnist Jim Geraghty had the quote of the week on the shutdown when he said:
“We might as well amend the Constitution to make it official: A federal government shutdown remains in place until the nation’s air traffic controllers get tired of it and stop showing up to work.”
Geraghty notes that over half of Americans take at least one commercial flight a year and people begin to get anxious, then angry, when there are ground stops and flights start piling up like they did today because there weren’t enough air traffic controllers on the job.
The pilots are angry too and, like the air traffic controllers, they have called on the Democrats to vote for the GOP proposal to end the shutdown. The largest union of federal workers—which has always been part of the Democrat base—has also called on Democrats in the Senate to agree to the Republican compromise and end the shutdown, but the Democrat leaders in the Senate are refusing to budge.
The Hill is reporting what they call “shutdown fatigue” in Washington, which could mean Geraghty is right that it all depends on the air traffic controllers.
Amid all the shutdown noise, CNN’s Caitlin Collins caught House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a big lie this week when Jeffries said that Republicans were refusing to talk with Democrats about shutdown issues. Collins noted that Jeffries had told her he had just talked to House Speaker Mike Johnson on the phone. When Collins asked who had called whom, Jeffries admitted that the Speaker had just phoned him to talk about a possible solution. Busted.
LOSER: Democrats Own “Fake But Accurate”
The term “fake but accurate” has deep Democrat roots, first employed by Texan pseudo-journalist and Democrat activist Dan Rather, back when he anchored the CBS News. In 2000, when George W. Bush was running against Al Gore for president, Rather ran with a story that Bush had falsely claimed to have served in the Texas National Guard.
According to Rather’s story, the former president never showed up for duty. Rather provided the nation with documents on CBS News that appeared to confirm the story.
In only a couple days, the documents were proved to be fake, but Rather, along with many of his colleagues in the media and most Democrats, continued to push the story, insisting that even though the documents were fake, the story was accurate. Rather was fired and the term “fake but accurate” will always be his tagline.
After the Democrat nominee for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, made a speech this week commiserating with his fellow Muslims about how much they suffered following the September 11 attacks, he pulled out a story from his personal life that also turned out to be “fake but accurate.” Mamdani said that his aunt had been afraid to ride the subway after September 11 because she got so many dirty looks, and she was afraid of violence.
Turns out his aunt wasn’t in New York at the time. Then Mamdani said it was actually his cousin, who is now deceased, but there’s no evidence anyone in his family was in New York City after the 2001 terrorist attack. Still, in a city that lost almost 3,000 people on September 11, Mamdani has doubled down on his insistence that Muslims were victims too, insisting that even if his story was “fake,” it is “accurate.”
LOSER: Democrats’ Brand Sinks as “The Rock” Beats Kamala
Granted, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg get bigger numbers, but a report on the betting markets shows that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson edges out former Vice President Kamala Harris in support for the next Democrat presidential nomination. Johnson got polling support from 46% of voters a few years ago, and I’m betting most Americans are like me and loved him when he played the “Tooth Fairy,” in that kids’ movie. He’s an independent—says he has voted for both parties from time to time—so he might not even think of himself as a Democrat these days.
Especially after a new report came out this week from a group on the left stating that the messages that most people identify with Democrats, like protecting the rights of LBGTQ+ Americans and fighting climate change, only resonate with white liberals. If The Rock has a different message, like securing the border or fighting crime, he might quickly zoom past Newsom, Buttigieg or Ocasio-Cortez. Or perhaps he’ll decide to ditch the Democrats altogether. I’m going to watch that “Tooth Fairy” movie again to see if there are any clues there.
LOSER: The French Are as Dumb As We Thought
No one will ever have to suffer through the condescending attitudes and haughty sighs of the French when traveling in Europe again, now that we know they couldn’t even protect the crown jewels—including the necklace Napoleon gave to his second wife, Maria Louise. French security had so few digital cameras on the outside of the most famous museum in the world that the thieves were literally able to scale up the side of the building and climb through a window.
According to a New York Times report, police stationed near the Louvre were blind to the break-in, and the thieves—who turned out to be pretty sloppy too—knew how to get inside the glass jewelry cases because the museum manual told them what kind of disc grinder drill to use.
Fans of the old Pink Panther movies who have watched this for a week or so and assumed that a real-life version of Inspector Jacques Clouseau was somewhere on the job are going to be disappointed. Authorities think they have the thieves, but so far they don’t have the jewels.
LOSER: More in the “What’s Wrong with England?” Series
This week, the UK Edition of Glamour Magazine has nine men who think they are women on the cover. No actual women are pictured. There’s no more to say on this. Here’s the photo.
Happy Halloween—The Truth about the Salem Witch Trials
A few years ago, I wrote a piece about the Salem Witch Trials, making it clear that in the 17th century, if you were a woman—or even a witch—the best and safest place in the world was in the American colonies. TPPF put it in the Cannon Online today, but here’s my personal backstory about the piece:
In the old Plymouth Colony General Court records, it is reported that in 1661 one of my ancestors, Dinah Sylvester, accused one of her neighbors, Goodwife Holmes, of witchcraft. Dinah said she saw Mrs. Holmes transform herself into a bear. This was 30 years before the more famous Salem trials, but the Plymouth Court quickly dispensed with the case. They got Dinah to admit she was lying. She pleaded guilty to perjury and was fined. Then the Holmes family sued Dinah for defamation, and Dinah lost that case too, which resulted in even bigger fines and court costs. She also had to issue a public apology.
Making a false allegation of witchcraft was very serious and nothing good happened to Dinah after that. Her fiancé broke their engagement and, unlike her brothers, whose life stories I can trace, it’s not clear exactly what happened to her—it’s all here in my Halloween op-ed.
Wreck ‘em, Hook ‘em
Texas A&M’s No. 3-ranked Aggies have a bye week, while the Longhorn are playing Vanderbilt in Austin. Vanderbilt moved up in the charts after beating Missouri last week in one of the most exciting games on Saturday, but I’m sure the Longhorns are ready for them. Texas Tech is at No. 13 and they play at Kansas State tomorrow afternoon. Hopefully, those of us who watch football on YouTube TV will be able to see it all.
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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