Category: Winners & Losers

Every Friday morning at 8:30 AM, I help choose the week’s Winners & Losers on the Cardle & Woolley show, Talk 1370 Radio, in Austin. It’s a lightning round that runs the gamut from public policy and political trends to sports and culture in Texas, America and the world. Here’s my list for the week ending May 10, 2024.

While Harvard, MIT and Penn whine that they can’t shut down the encampment protests on their campuses, University of Texas System Board of Regents Chair Kevin Eltife is at the top of the Winners list this week for a trifecta at Wednesday’s Regents meeting when he said flatly that divestment is not an option for the Longhorns. Eltife also dismissed a threatened vote of no confidence against UT President Jay Hartzell by UT faculty, saying when it comes to the President, the Board of Regents is the only vote that matters. Finally, Eltife praised the state police who stopped those breaking the rules on the UT campus. He invited DPS Director, Col. Steve McGraw to the meeting and the Board gave him a round of applause.

This is clearly bad news for those UT faculty who are angry at the UT President, some of whom claim that UT is pushing “a very right wing agenda.” However, a poll released this week by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) found that almost 70% of Texans agreed with UT’s decision to call in the state police. That includes Democrats, Republicans and Independents – they can’t all be “very right wing.”

The protesters clearly believe they have the moral high ground, but the state police uncovered propaganda leaflets the protesters left behind which included materials that celebrated the killing of innocent Jews and bragged about rockets launched into Israel. The Free Press did a long piece on the role of the so-called “outside agitators” in the campus protests. Almost 50 of the people arrested at UT were not affiliated with the university.

Another big Winner this week is U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson who survived a motion to vacate the Speaker’s Chair from Marjorie Taylor Greene, who earned a spot on the Losers list for ignoring former President Donald Trump, who rightly noted that attacking the House Speaker in an election year is a show of “disunity.” U.S. Rep. Chip Roy was the only Republican to vote with Greene. Four Texas Democrats also voted to vacate Johnson.

President Biden maintains his spot on the Losers list for a bunch of really bad policy statements this week:

• Announcing that he was withholding weapons for Israel right after he delivered a Holocaust Remembrance speech
• Announcing an incremental change in the asylum process that will make no difference in shutting down the border.
• Continuing to insist that Bidenomics is working. He says people have more money, they are just annoyed they have to spend more. Actually, many people are earning less.
• To back up his economic case, the President told CNN that inflation was 9% when he took office. It was actually 1.4%. The President appears to have no clue that consumer confidence is at its lowest point in two years.  
• Biden plans to spend more on student loan forgiveness than on Pell Grants which provides grants to financially needed students.

U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar is a Loser for suggesting that some Jewish students are “pro-genocide.” She also credits the campus protesters with getting Biden to hold back weapons for Israel. She may be right about that.

It goes without saying that Stormy Daniels is on the Losers list, but let’s not waste space talking about the many reasons why. The whole thing is beneath us.

The Board at Katy Independent School District is a Winner for adopting a policy that notifies parents if their child asks to use a different name or pronouns while they are at school. Taking this stand for normalcy has made the Board a target of the U.S. Dept. of Education Dept. of Civil Rights which is investigating gender harassment under Biden’s wacky new Title IX Policy.

Lost Creek is also on the Winners list for voting themselves out of the City of Austin over the weekend. If you’ve ever spoken to anyone from that neighborhood, you know it’s been a long war over there.

The announcement by the Boy Scouts that they are changing their name to “Scouting America” in order to be more “inclusive” clearly makes them Losers. Give me a break.

Finally, last week comic Jerry Seinfeld made the Winners list for saying that the “P.C. left and liberal crap” had ruined comedy, but his new movie “Unfrosted” proves that’s not entirely true. Worth watching just for the spoof of Jan. 6 where Tony the Tiger in a Viking helmet crashing into the Kellogg’s headquarters is worth the price of a ticket.

That’s it. Have a great Mother’s Day!

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

Sign up to receive this in your inbox every week at www.texaspolicy.com/9thandCongress.

Follow me on X @sylvester1630 and follow my podcast, the Sherry Sylvester Show on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Every Friday morning at 8:30 AM, I discuss the week’s Winners & Losers on Talk 1370 Radio with Jim Cardle and Lynn Woolley on the Cardle & Woolley show. It’s a lightning round that runs the gamut from public policy and political trends to sports and culture in Texas, America and the world. Here’s who gets a thumbs up and thumbs down for the week ending May 3, 2024.

I’m making an executive decision to break protocol and pronounce University of Texas at Austin President Jay Hartzell a Winner for the second week in a row for taking quick and decisive action to bring in state police to stop pro-Hamas protesters from taking over the 40 Acres. Even rational college presidents frequently buckle under intimidation from left-wing faculty, but the list of professors at UT who want a “no confidence” vote against Hartzel has grown to over 600 and the UT President hasn’t blinked.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott is also on the Winners list for telling the Biden administration that Texas will ignore the President’s destruction of historic Title IX Legislation. The President announced he wants to include men who think they are women to those who are protected by the law. Attorney General Ken Paxton joins Abbott as a Winner for suing the federal government for attempting to expand Title IX, which literally created women’s sports in America and is protecting women athletes now. The Governor and the Attorney General are fighting to make sure the feds don’t screw that up.   

The men of Pi Kappa Phi at the University of North Carolina also top the Winners list this week for their courage during the pro-Hamas protest on their campus. They stood for over an hour amid heckling and jeers to block the hoisting of a Palestinian flag at UNC and to make sure the American flag did not touch the ground. They were pelted with insults and solid objects but they did not back down.

Another Winner is U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, who is up 13 points over his Democrat opponent Colin Allred according to the latest Texas Politics Project Poll, which historically leans a little Democrat, so Cruz is probably ahead by more than 13. That poll is on this week’s Losers list for a sloppy report on what Texans think about the war in Gaza.

Echoing that poll, headlines all over the state read that Texans are divided on how they feel about the war in Gaza, but that’s probably a problem with how the questions were asked. According to a Harvard-CAPS Harris Survey American support for Israel over Hamas is 80 percent to 20 percent in almost every age group and it hasn’t changed since October 7 despite the campus protests. Even among younger people aged 18-24, support for Israel is almost 60 percent. It is highly unlikely those sentiments are much different in Texas where, despite what you see on some college campuses, Texans tend to oppose terrorists like Hamas.

In chalking up other Losers, we have to pick the worst policy idea President Joe Biden laid out this week. It’s a multiple choice:

1. Resettling Palestinian refugees in America
2. Announcing $6 billion more in student loan forgiveness for art students
3. Biden’s too little, too late statement on campus protests where he equates the current threat of Islamophobia with the anti-Semitism we are seeing everywhere.
4. His pronouncement that Japan, India, China and Russia’s economies don’t thrive because those countries are xenophobic and don’t welcome immigrants. Those countries can join New Guinea which is still waiting for an apology for his story that cannibals there ate his uncle.
5. His micromanaging Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, announcing the U.S. won’t support Israel’s invasion into Rafah.

You probably have your own list. This is undoubtedly why CNN put out a poll this week showing that 61 percent of American’s view Biden’s term as president as a failure. Only 39% believe it was a success.

The reality of that CNN poll seemed to hit left-wing cable news site MSNBC particularly hard when former commentator Al Sharpton noted that the campus protests look remarkably like January 6. Sharpton makes the Winners list by stating the obvious. Of course, MSNBC is a loser.

Jerry Seinfeld and sports commentator Charles Barkley both make the Winners list for straight talk. Seinfeld told the New Yorker that “P.C. crap and the extreme left” have ruined comedy by making people deathly afraid of offending other people. Then, while the New Orleans Pelicans were being eliminated from the NBA playoffs by the Oklahoma City Thunder, Barkley took a shot a Galveston Bay, saying the water wasn’t blue. Read the story to get the drift. Beyoncé’s mother hails from Galveston, and after she called him out, Barkley backed down, but he pivoted to re-activate his long-time allegation that San Antonio women are fat. Barkley has absolutely no room to talk, but he’s a Winner for not letting himself be silenced by “P.C. crap.”

Speaking of comedians, how about U.S. Senator John Fetterman who said this week that there are two factions among the Palestinian protestors at Columbia, “pro-Hamas and really pro-Hamas.” Funny. Winner.

Finally, it almost goes without saying that Kristi Noem is a big-time Loser for this week and many weeks to come. Don’t shoot your dog.

Gotta cut it off here. Have a great weekend!

Listen to Winners & Losers on Talk 1370, the Cardle & Wooley show, every Friday morning at 8:30 AM.  Here’s the listen live link.

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

Sign up to receive this in your inbox every week at www.texaspolicy.com/9thandCongress.

Follow me on X @sylvester1630 and follow my podcast, the Sherry Sylvester Show on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Every Friday morning at 8:30AM, I discuss the week’s Winners & Losers on the Cardle & Woolley show on Austin’s 1370 Talk Radio. It’s a lightning round with Jim Cardle, Lynn Woolley and me that runs the gamut from public policy and political trends to sports and culture in Texas, America and the world. We just finished a jam-packed week in Texas. Here’s list of Winners & Losers for April 26.

The biggest Winner of the week is University of Texas at Austin President Jay Hartzell who showed college presidents across the country how to make it clear to fact-challenged students who is actually in charge of taxpayer funded academic institutions. As soon as the Palestine Solidarity Committee announced they were going to take over the campus, Hartzell said very clearly, “our university will not be occupied.” He followed up with the list of rules governing peaceful protest on campus and warned students if they violated the rules, they would be arrested. They did and they were.

The protests at the 40 Acres also generated the top Losers of the week, including the American Association of University Professors (AAUP at UT) which has petitioned the Faculty Council for a “Vote of No Confidence” against Hartzell. The Faculty Council Executive Committee said they are “gravely concerned.” If the elites at UT go after Hartzell, he should treat it as a badge of honor.

Austin’s uber-progressive State Senator, Sarah Eckhardt, who texted Hartzell to complain the Texas Dept. of Public Safety had been called to the UT campus is also on the Losers List. Hartzell responded that he’d asked for DPS help because the campus police could not manage the protest alone. We know this because the Senator sent copies of their text exchange to the media. Hopefully, Hartzell won’t bother to communicate with the Senator via text going forward.

It’s not fair to pick on the Austin American-Statesman by adding them to the Losers List since, as I wrote earlier this week, pretty much all Texas media is deeply embedded in the left-wing narrative on the war in Gaza and everything else. In case you missed my newsletter, you can read it here.

That said, if you want to see an analysis of the war in Gaza that is completely devoid of the Israeli perspective or any concerns about anti-Semitism, take a look at this Statesman “explainer” on why the students are protesting. The “explainer” also includes no information on the links between UT’s Palestine Solidarity Committee and the Committee for Justice in Palestine and its reported links to Hamas.

Originally, Thursday’s protest at UT Austin was going to focus on the DEI ban, but the Palestine Solidarity Committee convinced whoever decides these things that going after Israel was more important. The protest of the firing of DEI employees at UT who violate the Senate Bill 17 ban against segregating students by race and gender is currently scheduled for April 29 – but who knows.

Another big Winner this week is Texas Governor Greg Abbott who has made it clear for months that every Texas university should make protecting Jewish students a priority. That’s the difference between living in the Lone Star State and living in New York.

Abbott also gets more kudos for Operation Lone Star’s success in shutting down the flow of migrants across our southern border. San Diego is now the top spot in the country for arrests of people entering the country illegally. And for those keeping score on the hypocrisy of so-called “Sanctuary Cities,” officials from Denver visited El Paso this week looking for ways to dissuade illegal migrants from coming to the Mile High City.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis makes the Winners List for telling President Joe Biden that Florida schools will ignore his latest move to expand Title IX, the historic protection for women’s sports. Under Biden, Title IX will now include men who say they are women and vice versa, which is one reason Biden is on this week’s Losers list.

There are a few other policies that also landed the President on the list. First, Biden said he’d repeal the Trump tax cuts if he’s re-elected. Then, while New York City was engulfed in campus riots and House Speaker Mike Johnson showed up to denounce anti-Semitism, Biden went into the Virginia woods and made an Earth Day commercial with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, praising the Green New Deal. Then, his own press, meaning the New York Times, went after him, for “systematically avoiding interviews and questions from major news outlets”, noting that his refusal to talk to the media sets a very bad historic precedent. Finally, his wacky story that his uncle was eaten by cannibals in World War II has created an international incident and soured relations as New Guinea protests being disparaged by the charge that their country is home to people eaters.

Texas Public Policy Foundation makes the Winners List for bravely going after off-shore wind turbines and making a difference. New York State announced they are shutting down several wind power projects. TPPF made it clear from the beginning that they weren’t just tilting against windmills!

In Sports News, Tyler Guyton was selected by the Dallas Cowboys in the NFL Draft last night. Tyler played at Oklahoma, but we are going to forget that. He’s from Manor.

Could go on, but we gotta stop. Listen to Winners & Losers on the Cardle & Woolley show every Friday morning at 8:30 AM on 1370 Talk Radio in Austin. You can listen live online here.

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

Sign up to receive this in your inbox every week at www.texaspolicy.com/9thandCongress.

Follow me on X @sylvester1630 and follow my podcast, the Sherry Sylvester Show on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We have to shift the focus off Texas for a minute to declare that the week’s big winner is Israel. The weekend attack on Israel directly from Iran finally made it clear to foggy thinkers in both America and the world that what is going on in the Middle East is a war against Western Civilization. Israel didn’t “take the win” as the U.S. administration advised after it fended off the weekend attack. Instead, it fired back last night.

Shortly after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, two of my colleagues at TPPF, Chuck DeVore and Erin Valdez, along with Rabbi Dan Ain, discussed Iran’s role in the conflict and other issues. Six months later, almost nothing has changed. You can view the panel here.

The biggest losers of the week are Texas kids, who will continue to be able to find pornography in public school libraries after the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a Texas law that would have required booksellers to rate books for sexual and violent content—just as movies are rated. The American Library Association, along with Texas librarian groups, falsely called the law a “book ban.” They celebrated the ruling and recently announced support for the most banned books in the country which include “All Boys Aren’t Blue” and “This Book is Gay.” “Gender Queer” is at the top of the list. If you haven’t read it and wonder if it belongs in a public school library, read my review here.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott is a winner for being named to Time’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. Although the left-leaning magazine called it a “stunt,” they could not ignore the fact that Abbott showed the country and the world the true impact of an open border when he began busing illegal immigrants to so-called “sanctuary cities” in the north. Abbott successfully changed the narrative on illegal immigration from a border state concern to a top priority in many of the nation’s largest cities.

Former President Donald Trump also made it to the winners list for his visit to a Harlem bodega after his court date in New York City this week that drew crowds and cheers. Following up on his successful visit to a Chick-fil-A in Atlanta last week, Trump again demonstrated that he knows more about how the media works than almost anyone—including the media.

There’s lots for conservatives not to like about Google, but it made the Winners List this week for firing 28 employees who staged a sit-in at Google’s New York and Sunnyvale, California offices to protest a Google computer contract with Israel. A great quote from Google CEO said Googlers need to be “more focused in how we work, collaborate, discuss and even disagree.”

Texas property taxpayers continue to be big losers as they bankroll the cushy salaries of public school superintendents. Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, outside Houston, always tops the list. Their superintendent hauls in $546,000 a year, one of eight Texas superintendents who make close to a half million annually. Another 81 make more than $300,000. It might be easier to swallow if these same superintendents didn’t constantly show up at the Texas Legislature, hat in hand, insisting their schools are underfunded.

University of Texas at Austin students and faculty also made the Losers List for demanding that UT officials roll back the firing of almost 60 DEI officers by staging a campus protest. Fewer than 200 people out of 52,000 students showed up for the protest. The spokesperson was the head of UT Austin’s Queer Trans Black Indigenous People of Color Agency who said her group was not happy with the direction the university is going. But I’m betting the taxpayers of Texas who put $53 billion into higher education last session are ok with it.

Two more winners. Uri Berliner, a Senior Editor at National Public Radio, resigned this week after being sanctioned by NPR for pointing out that the outlet is biased and has lost the public’s trust. Berliner’s expose was not really news. NPR hasn’t had the public’s trust for years. In fact, I admit I giggled when Berliner reported that he took the time to check the voter registration of almost 100 of his colleagues in Washington, D.C. and was shocked to learn that all of them were registered Democrats. NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher, apparently no fan of free speech, didn’t try to make a case that NPR is unbiased. Instead, she called Berliner’s expose “hurtful and demeaning.” U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., is pushing to defund NPR so taxpayers don’t have to fund this nonsense.

Finally, Shaquille O’Neal makes the Winners List for refusing to join the grievance chorus lamenting that women’s basketball stars including Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, who were just drafted into the WNBA, make only a fraction of what NBA players do. Shaq rightly says that fans need to show their support. The bottom line is that men’s basketball makes lots more money than women’s basketball. When that changes, salaries will change. Want to support the WNBA? Buy tickets, buy fan gear, watch the games!

Listen to Winners & Losers on the Cardle & Woolley show every Friday morning at 8:30 AM on 1370 Talk Radio in Austin. Listen live online here.

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

Sign up to receive this in your inbox every week at www.texaspolicy.com/9thandCongress.

Follow me on X @sylvester1630 and follow my podcast, the Sherry Sylvester Show on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Every Friday morning at 8:30 a.m., I discuss the week’s Winners & Losers on the Cardle & Woolley show on Austin’s 1370 Talk Radio. It’s a lightning round with Jim Cardle, Lynn Woolley and me that runs the gambit from public policy and political trends to sports and culture in Texas, America and the world. You can listen to the segment with everybody’s comments by clicking the 8:30 a.m. segment here.

For the week of April 8 to 12, unfortunately my list begins with the powers that be in Washington, D.C.

The U.S.’s ever-weakening support for Israel escalated this week when President Joe Biden put out his own call to Hamas for a six-week ceasefire. Not sure what happened to the “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” principle, but whatever. The president’s bid to give Hamas a chance to reload didn’t even pretend to be linked to the release of any hostages. Hamas rejected the U.S. offer and America is now busy making it clear to the world that our support for Israel is more than a little mushy. Add that to the news that administration-induced inflation that continues to trend upward at 3.5% impacting not just food and basic necessities, but insurance and car repairs. Mortgage rates are at 7%! Then there’s the administration’s continuing attempts to pander to younger people with a student loan bailout that has a floating price tag of somewhere between $76 billion and $500 billion. The cost to every taxpayer is estimated at over $3,500.

Well, maybe not every taxpayer if Dallas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, R-Dallas, gets her way. She suggested this week that Black people be exempted from paying taxes as a back door to racial reparations. That really terrible idea has earned her a place on the Losers List.

But let’s not plunge into a negative spiral. There were lots of winners this week, including Texas, where the number of millionaires in the state has increased 47% since 2021. Texas’ conservative formula of low taxes, reasonable regulation and fair courts continues to make our great state ground central for prosperity.

In a related win, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick issued his interim charges for the next legislative session, which include a number of initiatives that underscore our conservative principles and ensure that Texas will continue to lead the nation in job creation, business innovation, productivity and growth.

Chick-fil-A was a big winner this week when it became a visual confirmation of the latest findings of a new Wall Street Journal poll showing former President Donald Trump’s continued increasing support among African Americans. Amidst a flurry of Trump’s buying free milkshakes for the house, an African American woman proudly told the former president, “I don’t care what the media tells you, we support you.”

Another big winner this week was Pope Francis, who declared transgender surgery a violation of human dignity, making the moral high ground official, for anyone who had doubts. The Pontiff’s move comes as the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) announced that it is banning men from women’s sports—a big win for women athletes at smaller schools. In what should be a new spirit of inclusivity, the NAIA announced that anybody can play in men’s sports—real men, fake men, even women who think they are men.

Of course, South Carolina won the NCAA Women’s Basketball championship on Sunday, drawing millions more viewers for the big game than the men’s final. It was marred only by its coach, Dawn Staley, who earned a spot on the Losers List by saying before the game that anyone who “feels like a woman” should be able to play in women’s sports. South Carolina Congresswoman Nancy Mace called Staley out on it, asking how she would feel if she’d been beaten by a team that had a male player on it. Perhaps Mace was thinking that some guy could block Staley’s MVP, the 6’7” Kamilla Cardoso. The average height in the NBA is 6’6”. The WNBA height average is 6’. Mace rightly called Staley’s statement “absolute lunacy,” earning her a spot on the Winners List.

Other Weekly Winners:

Dan Crenshaw who called out Tucker Carlson for his latest insistence that the U.S. should stop helping Israel because it is killing Christians in Gaza.

Uri Berliner, a long time editor at National Public Radio (NPR), who reported in the Free Press this week how NPR went woke and lost its audience. Similar to James Bennet’s piece in the Economist on the New York Times late last year, Berliner details the process of journalists going from reporters to activists who push a politically correct ideology instead of facts. He talks of being ignored when he suggested NPR should stop calling Florida’s ban on sex education for preschoolers the “Don’t Say Gay” law since the legislation doesn’t even include the word gay. He said a respected NPR reporter told his colleagues they should not cover the Hunter Biden laptop story because it would “help Trump.”

Finally—Eclipse Losers 

Central Texans only got a bit of an eclipse view because of the cloud cover, but Houston Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee shone a whole new light on the celestial phenomenon. Jackson explained to students at Booker T. Washington High School that the moon is a planet made up of gases. She has thoughts on the sun too, but her astronomical theories are too complex to explain. I encourage you to read the news report and then listen to her entire theory on the solar system here.

Meanwhile, Sunny Hostin, on The View, blamed the eclipse, the New Jersey earthquake and cicadas on global warming.

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

Sign up to receive this in your inbox every week at www.texaspolicy.com/9thandCongress.

Follow me on X @sylvester1630 and follow my podcast, the Sherry Sylvester Show on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Every Friday morning at 8:30 a.m., I discuss the week’s Winners & Losers on the Cardle & Woolley show on Austin’s 1370 Talk Radio. It’s a lightning round with Jim Cardle, Lynn Woolley and me that runs the gambit from public policy and political trends to sports and culture in Texas, America and the world. You can listen to the segment with everybody’s comments by clicking the 8:30 a.m. segment here.

Here’s the highlights from my Winners & Losers list for the week of March 30 to April 5:

Big Winner of the Week: The University of Texas at Austin for firing an estimated 60 employees who worked in so-called “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI) programs and projects at UT. Following up on a letter from State Senator Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, the Longhorns took the most visible action of any college or university in the state so far to follow the state’s anti-DEI law, Senate Bill 17 which requires that DEI be ended at taxpayer-funded universities.

Big Loser of the Week: The $20 an hour minimum wage requirement that kicked in in California. This job-killing (and likely small business-killing) proposal will hit young workers particularly hard and is another demonstration that the big blue state on the West Coast hasn’t a clue how the economy actually works.

Other Big Winners:

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak backed Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s pushing back on Scotland’s new expanded hate speech laws. The laws make it a crime to “misgender” a man who insists he is a woman but has no protections for actual women. Rowling has shined a spotlight on transgender criminals who have raped and assaulted women when they insist on being detained in women’s prisons. Sunak said it was not a crime to state the “actual facts of biology” and that his Conservative Party supports free speech.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott gets a big thumbs up for his trip to the Big Apple to speak to the New York GOP Gala. Abbott continues to get accolades for busing illegal migrants to sanctuary cities—exposing them as simply “sanctimonious cities” —and showing the rest of the country what it is like to be overrun at our southern border.

Fort Worth is now the home of Texas’ newest TV station, Merit Street, a national outlet that is anchored by Dr. Phil. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and State Sen. Tan Parker, R-Flower Mound, were on hand for the ribbon cutting.

More DEI Losers: 

The NAACP is a big loser for urging black athletes to boycott the state of Florida because of Florida’s laws banning DEI. Florida also bans teaching gender and sexuality studies to young children. Early reports indicate most black athletes are ignoring the boycott. More than 35 African-American football stars have recently announced they are committed to Florida teams. If you recall, when the NAACP first issued its “travel warning” to African Americans for Florida last year, it was revealed that several of its executives actually lived in the Sunshine State. Here’s part of the NAACP’s statement:

“Please be advised that Florida is openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals. Before traveling to Florida, please understand that the State of Florida devalues and marginalizes the contributions of and the challenges faced by African Americans and other minorities.”

Another DEI loser is Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging which announced more segregated graduation ceremonies this week including a “Disability Celebration,” a “Global Indigenous Celebration,” an “Asian American, Pacific Islander, Desi-American (APIDA) Celebration,” a “First Generation-Low Income Celebration,” a “Jewish Celebration,” a “Latinx Celebration,” a “Lavender Celebration”—which refers to LGBT students—a “Black Celebration,” a “Veterans Celebration,” and an “Arab Celebration.” If diversity is the goal, why is everybody being segregated into homogeneous groups?

NCAA Final Four is the Final Big Winner of the Week – Both the men’s and women’s bracket have been full of really great games. There have been lots of busted brackets and no Texas teams made it to the final round, but this weekend’s lineup of men and women from both NC State and UConn, along with Alabama and South Carolina, will be big fun!

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

Sign up to receive this in your inbox every week at www.texaspolicy.com/9thandCongress.

Follow me on X @sylvester1630 and follow my podcast, the Sherry Sylvester Show on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.