Hot Wheels

One of the tempests in the congressional teapot this month has been the uproar over Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (D-Dallas) calling Governor Greg Abbott “Hot Wheels”. Abbott, of course, is a wheelchair user after a tree fell on him. It’s not the first time he’s been mocked for his disability; back in the summer of 2020, two Empower Texans staffers were caught making fun of him on a podcast that was accidentally published before it was edited.

Crockett is one of the new breed of aggressive Democrats who go after Republicans hard. For folks under about 45, there has been no time in which most prominent GOP politicians haven’t been mustache-twirling villains trying openly to destroy their political opponents and the federal government. Young Democrats and leftists see no point in playing nice with people who, in their lived experience, never play nice with them. And a lot of Democrats and left-leaning voters, sometimes including me, eat that red meat up.

It’s not like Abbott would have avoided knifing Crockett (politically) before this incident. And it’s not like Abbott hasn’t swallowed his pride and sucked right back up to the Wilks and Dunn machine in the years since their flunkies said worse about him than Crockett did. And it’s not like Republicans, including President Trump, haven’t made meaner fun of disabled folks before.

I have mixed feelings about what Crockett said: I’m not in a wheelchair and I doubt I will be in the near term, but I’ve been aware I might need one since I was in high school. If it were me, I’d laugh it off, but I’m not a Republican politician. I also despise Abbott precisely because of his policies toward his fellow disabled people; he’s been throwing us under the bus for a long time. Also he hates DEI, which includes benefits for disabled folks like him.

But it’s disingenuous for Crockett to say she didn’t think of his disability and his wheelchair when calling him “Hot Wheels”. She’s not wrong that Abbott’s a hypocrite. The MAGAts slamming her are hypocrites too, but their freedom to do what the little people can’t is part of their worldview. And even though she’s a member of the House of Representatives, the fact that Crockett is a Black woman makes her a little person in the eyes of MAGA.

The apology, or whatever she might say about calling Abbott “Hot Wheels”, isn’t for them. It’s for people like me, who would like to think our Democratic politicians are both more honest and a little better people than the worst Republicans.

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News updates – 2025 03

Time to look back at some news stories I’ve talked about and see where they are now.

Closing my tabs – 2025 03 30

School District Sunday – 2025 03 30

Normally this is a Saturday event, but this week we’ve had to delay to Sunday evening.

Whiskeyleaks

I can barely keep up with the daily news from the White House right now. This week’s story is pretty awful, though, and worthy of analysis not because it’s special but because it’s a loud, overbright version of everything else the administration is up to.

In short words: a bunch of senior officials built a text chain on Signal, a private app for text communication that’s forbidden on secure phones, probably so they could avoid records retention. The group included cabinet secretaries, the vice president, and other senior administration folks, but not the acting chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the President. They also accidentally invited Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic magazine. My operating theory is that they meant to invite Jonah Goldberg, but whoever they meant to get, they added a journalist, and the journalist recorded the chat as they used it to plan an upcoming military operation.

After the operation, which turns out to have been bombing a civilian apartment building to get a military target, the journalist ratted them out by saying he was in the chat. The Director of National Intelligence, who was in front of Congress, was questioned about the chat. She lied like a rug, figuring the journalist wouldn’t publish. The Atlantic called her bluff, and the chat is all over social media. We know the DNI committed perjury, lawsuits are flying, and a few people are even noticing this “military operation” is a war crime.

Actually calling people out over war crimes is further than most of our political class will go, as we know from the example of Henry Kissinger. But maybe the people involved in this story like Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio and Tulsi Gabbard should stay close to home for a while in case they have to go to the Hague, as defendants.

Last, but not least, on the subject of operational security, the National Security Adviser, who was in this illegally unsafe Signal chat, had his Venmo information open to the public until the press revealed that he’d done so today. Once the horses were out, though, he closed the barn door.

(I cannot take credit for the title pun; I prefer it to Signalgate.)

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Book Review: Secrets of the Sprakkar by Eliza Reid.

Secrets of the Sprakkar: Iceland’s Extraordinary Women and How They Are Changing the World, by Eliza Reid. This book was a relatively light and easy read, in large part because it was hopeful about gender equality. Written in 2020 and released in 2022, the book covers a wide variety of topics around gender equality in Iceland, where the author was First Lady from 2016 to 2024.

Reid structures the book around “sprakkar” or extraordinary Icelandic women: mythical, historical, and women Reid knows from her time in Iceland. As an immigrant, she covers both good and bad points about Iceland’s small population (e.g., it turns like a speedboat, but everyone is related to everyone, which can lead to cronyism and nepotism and limited opportunities for immigrants and outsiders). It struck me that the modern women she interviewed were often ordinary but interesting: almost any woman in public life can be a sprakkar if you focus on her good works.

While the book is encouraging about Icelandic and European gender equality, it’s depressing to consider it in light of gender disparity in the US. Icelanders consider gender equity a moral right, where here we’re fighting a rearguard action against people who consider patriarchal hierarchy desirable and correct. Gestures and actions that seem simple in the Icelandic context would be highly controversial here. Certainly no recent American First Lady could write a book on extraordinary American women. While she might have connections to powerful businesswomen, celebrities, and sports heroines, the approach she would take to interviewing them would necessarily be different.

At the same time, Reid is aware of her own privilege and the downsides of Iceland for immigrant women, particularly women of color. Reid’s interviews with fellow immigrants bring these problems into focus, including spousal abuse in her own circles. And her chapter discussing Iceland’s work toward supporting women refugees was distressing to read.

The book answers questions I didn’t know I had and raises questions I couldn’t expect it to answer. The differences in size and culture between the US and Iceland mean their answers can’t transfer here, but they suggest how American institutions could support women and gender equity if they wanted. It would be inspiring if we hadn’t seen in recent weeks that so many American institutions neither care about nor want diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Book Review: We Are Not Like Them by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza

We Are Not Like Them: A Novel, by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza. I usually avoid women’s book club fiction, but this book’s structure and topic interested me. The two authors, a Black woman and a white woman, wrote alternating first-person chapters about the friendship between an up-and-coming Black journalist and the wife of a white Philadelphia policeman who shoots and kills an unarmed Black teenager. The story is ripped from the headlines, but the approach is from an unusual angle.

The details of the friendship feel real as written but the backstory from which it emerged feel contorted (did the white girl’s mom have to be a drug addict?) to touch all the social issues the writers seemed to want. As events involving money, lawyers, journalistic ethics, deaths, births, etc., spiral, the two women circle each other, bound by history and affection but separated by the pain of racism as it affects their experiences and expectations.

I’m not in the socioeconomic class of the white woman in this story and while I come closer to the experience of the Black woman (good schools, good career, etc.) I don’t think I could tell her story. The writing was solid and portrayed the interior of each of the women well, along with their relationships with their families and supporting cast. But I felt that stuffing so many topical issues into the single story decreased the realism and credibility of the story overall.

I took particular issue with the ending, which I can’t describe as happy so much as less sad and more hopeful than I expected. I felt that some of the relationships that survived should have broken, and that at least one of the relationships that broke should have remained intact. It was obvious to me what the authors intended but one crucial decision a character made seemed out of character: not wrong for their heart but surprising given who they were and everything we knew about them.

My discomfort with the ending might have more do to with my unfamiliarity with women’s book club fiction, or with the need to tie up all the threads that I felt were awkwardly woven into the story. I’d read another similar book by these two authors again, but I’d go in with slightly lower expectations.

87 days to dismantle democracy

I’ve been wanting to write about the Mahmoud Khalil matter because it touches on both immigration law and the Trump push to force the judiciary to fall into line under him. Another case with the same features broke over the weekend; the crisis Trump wanted to provoke is here. The administration removed a group of Venezuelans (I’ve seen numbers between 170 and 270) to a private jail in El Salvador in apparent defiance of a judge’s order to turn the planes they were on around and bring them back.

On the immigration side, the administration is relying on the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, best known in the last century as the basis for Japanese internment. The Venezuelans are alleged to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang, which the administration says is invading the United States. None of the Venezuelans have been convicted of any crime, and while I’m describing them as Venezuelans, nobody knows who they are. Some of them might be American citizens.

On the constitutional crisis side, the administration just ignored an order from a federal judge. Usually when a party to a case disobeys a judge, they have plausible deniability: they interpret the order differently, they didn’t get it in time, etc. I know from working for an immigration lawyer that executive branch offices usually obey direct orders from a judge. If the executive branch says “We didn’t obey you! How are you going to enforce that?” we have a constitutional crisis.

Hitler dismantled German democracy in 53 days. We’re on day 87 of Trump II. Our democracy isn’t gone, but this is a big step toward disappearing it, along with those “Venezuelans”.

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Sources/Resources – The Dallas Observer

The Dallas Observer has been around since 1980 and is your pretty typical New Times/Voice Media Group free local alternative paper, with good cultural coverage of the Metroplex centered on Dallas. Cultural coverage for the Generation X/Xennial types these papers are aimed at includes politics as well as music and restaurant previews and reviews. While I read the Observer mostly for the the latter group of stories, I do enjoy the former as well.

The Dallas Observer (which I note to avoid people confusing it with the Texas Observer, a very different publication) is definitely your cynical Gen X with a heart of gold politically. They report details of stories you might miss otherwise, and do a fair amount of reader reaction, and not just reading what people said on Xitter. It’s generally not my first source for a big story, but I find it pretty reliable overall. Also, unlike the DMN and the Star-Telegram, it’s not paywalled, just nagwalled.

Closing my tabs – 2025 03 16