There is a rule—known as the five-finger rule—that the librarians in the Cuyahoga County Library System use to help patrons evaluate whether or not a book is an appropriate reading level for the reader. The rule goes like this:

Every time you encounter a word in the text that you don’t know, stick out a finger. If, by the time you reach the end of the page, you’ve popped out all five fingers, close the book. It’s too hard for you to read independently on your own.”

For the first time, I think, I hit the five-finger rule this morning beginning to read Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum.

In the first chapter I paused at: (1) isochronal, (2) sublunar, (3) pentaculum, (4) Svalbards, (5) astigmatic, (6) panta rei, (7) Numinous, (8) ogive, (9) sapiential, (10) archons, (11) archeopterix and (12) chthonian.

Holy Ghost by John Sanford: Chapter 12—

Virgil woke early but lay in bed, thinking about Sherlock Holmes and what that whole Holmes thing—that once you’ve eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains is a vast universe of the possible, and sorting through all the possibilities is often impossible.

Whenever animals in the forest are wounded, they rest. They look for a very quiet place and just stay there without moving for many days. They know it’s the best way for their body to heal. During this time they may not even eat or drink. The wisdom of stopping and healing is still alive in animals, but we human beings have lost the capacity to rest —Resting from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: furlon, a unit of distance equal to 220 yards.

So, I’m back. I’m back and I’ve done a lot of thinking while I was gone thinking. There are changes to be made. Nothing is carved in stone, but, for now, I’m going to do my best to stick to this single blog post each day. Sometimes the post will be long, sometimes the post will be short, hell, there may be days when I say that I got nothin’.

Earlier today I caught up on my video subscriptions and two, both from Trevor Noah, stood out: his interviews with Senator Cory Anthony Booker (D-NJ) and Governor John Richard Kasich (R-OH), both clearly thinking about 2020.

I am so convinced that these two are focused on 3 November 2020 that I’ve made them the first two days under my Election 2020 category.

Holy Ghost by John Sanford: Chapter 11—

Larry Van Den Berg rolled in Wheatfield at midmorning, parked his truck beside his house, went inside, got a beer from the refrigerator, and checked his secret email account for messages from his brother.

You don’t need to set aside special time for resting and relaxing. You don’t need a special pillow or any fancy equipment. You don’t need a whole hour. In fact, now is a very good time to relax. You are probably breathing in and out right this moment. If you can close your eyes for a moment, do so. This will help you pay attention to your breath. Your body is doing so many things right now. Your heart is beating. Your lungs are inhaling and exhaling air. Blood is traveling through your veins. Without effort your body is both working and relaxed. —Notes on Relaxing from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

We think of our heart as our strongest muscle. It never takes a break. It never relaxes. Except when it does. Your heart takes a break, relaxes between beats. We can too.

Today’s word will be today’s words because I haven’t touched the list since last Monday when the word was Mordant. Here’s what we missed:

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: umbrage, a feeling of pique or resentment at some often fancied slight or insult; shady branches, foliage; shade, shadow; an indistinct indication, vague suggestion, hint; a reason for doubt, suspicion.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: derring-do, daring action, daring. (You know, I have problem when a dictionary uses the word being defined in the definition. That just feels like cheating. What, they couldn’t have said, oh, I don’t know: bold, dashing or audacious?)

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: palmary, outstanding, best.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: boustrophedon, the writing of alternate lines in opposite directions (as from left to right and from right to left)

Previously…

I’ve read (and own) a number of Thich Nhat Hanh’s books, but I’ve never listened to him. I’m correcting that error now.

Previously…

Friday, 9 November, is Have Coffee Will Write’s 14th blogiversary. Until then I’m taking a blogging hiatus and news fast. I’ll check email once a day and listen to the mountain stream…

Sigh…

Regardless of how tomorrow’s election goes, there is one number that I’ll be watching with great intensity: the turn-out percentage of the less-than-30 voters. Lois Beckett, writing in ‘Vote for our lives’: youth turnout could jump after Parkland shooting for The Guardian, takes a look:

Nine months after a school shooting in Florida sparked a series of nationwide protests, there are signs that Tuesday’s election could bring a substantial jump in youth voter participation, as the National Rifle Association’s election spending has dropped dramatically.

Student survivors of the February shooting in Parkland, Florida, which left 17 students and teachers dead, have spent months visiting districts across the country with a simple message: “Vote for our lives.”

The Parkland students and their high school allies across the country have attempted to make the midterm elections a referendum on Congress and its refusal to pass stricter gun control laws. By increasing youth participation, they argue, young people can vote out the Republican politicians who have blocked any additional gun control laws at the federal level for nearly a quarter century…

Previously…

In the Wow,-Just-Feckin’-Wow category Jonah Goldberg has written You Shouldn’t Vote Democrat, But You Don’t Have to Vote Republican for National Review. Goldberg begins:

After mulling it over for a bit, I feel like I should offer an addendum to my addendum to David’s essay. I agree with David that the claim that Trump skeptical Republicans must vote for Democrats who reject conservative values and principles just to send a message to Trump is not very persuasive.

But I also think that voters are free to vote — or not vote — for whatever strategic reasons they find sound. For instance, if I were voting someplace where my vote mattered, I’d be extremely inclined to vote for a Republican senator — even one I didn’t like — but I might be inclined to leave the House race blank or even write-in someone else.

That’s because, as a conservative, I want to see the Senate confirm more judges and justices. But I care far less about the House.

You know that Conservatives have gone off the rails when they adopt the progressive strategy of selective voting.

These other stories from National Review also caught my eye: Tomorrow the RINOs Will Take Their Revenge; How Close Is the Battle for the House? This Close; and, in an echo of Goldberg’s piece, The Democrats Have Not Earned Your Vote. French ledes:

Tens of millions of Americans have mailed in their ballots already. Tomorrow, tens of millions more will go to the polls. I’m not confident how they’ll vote, but I am absolutely certain of one thing: Not one of them will see the name “Donald Trump” on the ballot.

Instead, they will see different individuals with characters very different from Trump’s. They will see Republicans and Democrats with their own policy positions and their own rhetorical styles.

Yet now voices from the left, the center, and what can only be called the “former right” are calling on Republicans and conservatives to abandon any kind of individualized determination for the sake of opposing a man who isn’t on the ballot. They’re making that demand even as leading Democrats prove time and again that they will not moderate for the benefit of Republicans who change parties, will not compromise, and — crucially — will not even behave better than Trump himself.

When writers at National Review are this scared that their readers might bolt, you know that this will be a historical election (and one that still could go either way).

Tomorrow will be all about President Donald John Trump.

I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and I did so mostly because I believed, against all good advice and common sense, that a President Trump was better for progressives and the Domocratic Party than she was. I don’t think I was wrong. Ryan Grimryan, writing in How Donald Trump Saved the Democratic Party From Itself for The Intercept, agrees. He writes:

Back in Wichita, [Real Estate agent Brandi] Calvert drove home and called her mother. “I went through the emotions of crying and being angry and disbelief, and surely it was a mistake and will be corrected,” she recalled.

After processing her grief, a two-week-long endeavor, she said, Calvert, like millions of people across the country, became consumed by the need to “do something.” There was nothing to say, but there was something to do. Still, what was that something?

Most of those people had previously done little in the way of political activism, but many had been deeply involved in community events, the local school, or charities. They didn’t know it yet, but they were already political organizers. Convinced that there was no way that Trump could actually be their president, they took a kitchen-sink approach to dealing with the country’s impending doom. Upward of 160,000 people collectively donated $7 million to Green Party candidate Jill Stein to fund a recount, hoping that Clinton would come out with enough votes to be the actual victor. When that didn’t work, the newly minted activists turned their attention to the members of the Electoral College, lobbying them relentlessly to flip their votes and elect somebody—anybody—other than Trump. If the electors couldn’t do that, the activists urged, they could at least throw the election to the House of Representatives, right? Perhaps House Speaker Paul Ryan would do his statesman duty and save the union. Surely, Democratic leaders in Washington could stop it all from happening.

It soon became apparent that nobody was coming to their rescue, and that the people who wanted it done would have to do it for themselves.

That is how we got to today.

Holy Ghost by John Sanford: Chapter 10—

As Virgil was driving in to Wheatfield, Bea Sawyer called to say that she and Baldwin were on their way back to St. Paul with all the evidence collected at Andorra’s farmhouse.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: mordant, biting and caustic in thought, manner or style, incisive; acting as a mordant (as in dyeing); burning, pungent.

The etymology of mordant certainly has some bite to it. That word, which came to modern English through Middle French, ultimately derives from the Latin verb mord?re, which means “to bite.” In modern parlance, mordant usually suggests a wit that is used with deadly effectiveness. Mord?re puts the bite into other English terms, too. For instance, that root gave us the tasty morsel (“a tiny bite”). But nibble too many of those and you’ll likely be hit by another mord?re derivative: remorse (“guilt for past wrongs”), which comes from Latin remord?re, meaning “to bite again.”

Don’t you just love taking a bite out of words?

Yes, Breathing While Black is now a thing. So much so that Ashley Nkadi has actually compiled her own list of 100 Things Not To Do #WhileBlack.

In Rural Georgia, Rev. William Barber Excoriates Trump and His Supporters for Using Pseudo Christianity to Support Racism

My Self-Care Sunday Story: I Called The Cops On A White Guy

Rebel, Rebel: For White Women Who Block Black People on Twitter Because Apologizing Is Too Damn Much

An Armed Extremist Group in Georgia Is Threatening Violence If Stacey Abrams Wins

Brian Kemp Doesn’t Need to Rig Georgia’s Election … Because Anyone Can

PriceMatchPatty, Is That You? Pennsylvania Location of The Children’s Place Charged with Racial Profiling [Updated]

With Bigotry on the Ballot, the Midterms Feel Like a Potential Back to the Back of the Bus Moment

Brian Kemp Launches Investigation Into Georgia’s Democratic Party For Vote-Hacking and Everyone Knows Why

Iowa Teacher Who Wore Blackface Cries Whitest Tears Ever

Iowa Teacher Who Wore Blackface Cries Whitest Tears Ever

Elementary School Staff Dresses Up As Mexicans and MAGA Border Wall for Halloween

Grand Jury Indicts Virginia Cop For Shooting Unarmed Black Man … Again

NFL Cheerleader Takes Knee During National Anthem

Previously…

(For more on the film, read Tom McCarthy’s The Front Runner: the truth behind Hugh Jackman’s scandalous new film for The Guardian.)

My first election was the midterm of 1974. I was living in Fort Collins, Colorado, and had finished two quarters as a freshman at Colorado State University, a summer spent as the assistant waterfront director at the Ben Delatour Scout Ranch in northern Colorado and was working as a hardware clerk for Kmart.

I was also discovering what volunteering at the very bottom of a political campaign—making phone calls, stuffing envelopes and fetching coffee—was like. The fall of 1974 was an exciting time because a young man who had worked as the campaign director for Senator George McGovern’s presidential bid (I did support McGovern, but was never an official volunteer in 1972) wanted a seat in the United States Senate.

His name was Gary Hart and he crushed his Republican opponent.

Fast forward ten years to 1984 and—with a five-year hitch in the Navy in between—I was about to graduate from Ohio University and Hart was in his second term as senator and running for the Democratic party presidential nomination. I had hopes, but hometown hero John Glenn took Ohio and ultimately Walter Mondale got the nomination.

I got one more chance to work for Hart when he came back for another run at the Democratic Party nomination. He lost, again, this time to Michael Dukakis who himself would lose to George Herbert Walker Bush due, in no small part, to the dirty tricks of a political operative named Harvey LeRoy Atwater.

Now, James Fallows, writing in Was Gary Hart Set Up? for The Atlantic tells how before he engineered Dukakis and Horton, Lee Atwater masterminded Gary Hart and Donna Rice.

(First, however, I have to say that Hart was responsible for his decisions, not Atwater. The story here is about how political operatives scheme, not how politicians fail.)

Fallows begins:

In the spring of 1990, after he had helped the first George Bush reach the presidency, the political consultant Lee Atwater learned that he was dying. Atwater, who had just turned 39 and was the head of the Republican National Committee, had suffered a seizure while at a political fund-raising breakfast and had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. In a year he was dead.

Atwater put some of that year to use making amends. Throughout his meteoric political rise he had been known for both his effectiveness and his brutality. In South Carolina, where he grew up, he helped defeat a congressional candidate who had openly discussed his teenage struggles with depression by telling reporters that the man had once been “hooked up to jumper cables.” As the campaign manager for then–Vice President George H. W. Bush in 1988, when he defeated Michael Dukakis in the general election, Atwater leveraged the issue of race—a specialty for him—by means of the infamous “Willie Horton” TV ad. The explicit message of the commercial was that, as governor of Massachusetts, Dukakis had been soft on crime by offering furloughs to convicted murderers; Horton ran away while on furlough and then committed new felonies, including rape. The implicit message was the menace posed by hulking, scowling black men—like the Willie Horton who was shown in the commercial.

In the last year of his life, Atwater publicly apologized for tactics like these. He told Tom Turnipseed, the object of his “jumper cables” attack, that he viewed the episode as “one of the low points” of his career. He apologized to Dukakis for the “naked cruelty” of the Willie Horton ad.

And in a private act of repentance that has remained private for nearly three decades, he told Raymond Strother that he was sorry for how he had torpedoed Gary Hart’s chances of becoming president.

I’ll leave you to Fallows’ mastery of the details, but my main point here is that tomorrow, when you go to the polls (I voted early Richard Cordray, Sherrod Brown and Aziz Ahmad, among others) we have to know that we are not better in 2018.

Holy Ghost by John Sanford: Chapter 9—

The deputy was sitting in his patrol car reading a John Connolly novel, Every Dead Thing, when Virgil pulled in beside him.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: gridiron, a grate for broiling food; something consisting of or covered with a network; a football field.

I’m probably going to be worthless come Wednesday morning because I expect I’m going to be up way into the morning hours watching election returns. I haven’t done this since 2004. After that election I began writing this blog.

This election will be historic and history will judge how we handled going forward or going back.

Michael Harriot, writing in Judges Keep Ruling Against Brian Kemp’s Voter Suppression Tactics But He Won’t Stop Trying for The Root, explores one aspect:

On Friday, a federal judge ruled against Georgia Secretary of State and Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp’s attempt to stop people from voting. It was not the first time a judge had ruled against Kemp, nor was it the second. Or the third. Or fourth.

U.S. District Judge Eleanor L. Ross ruled that the Kemp’s requirements for voters to prove their identity raised “grave concerns for the Court about the differential treatment inflicted on a group of individuals who are predominantly minorities,” according to the Washington Post, becoming at least the sixth time that a court has told Kemp to slow his racist roll.

At issue was Kemp’s use of Georgia’s “exact match” rule. In Georgia, if a voter’s registration doesn’t exactly match his state records such as DMV data, the registration is flagged and the voter must provide proof of identity to a deputy registrar, who is not available at every polling location. Kemp’s office had flagged at least 3,100 voters using this made-up rule but Judge Ross ruled that the NAACP and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who filed the complaint, would likely win if the case continues, so she halted the practice, allowing anyone whose registration was flagged to simply present ID to a poll manager.

On the exact same day as Ross’s ruling, the American Civil Liberties Union announced that a separate court had ruled against Kemp’s attempt to throw out absentee ballots because workers with no handwriting analysis training whatsoever were tossing ballots whose signatures they didn’t think matched other state records.

Then there’s this story from National Review: Kavanaugh Accuser Admits She Fabricated Allegations as a ‘Ploy’ for ‘Attention’. Since additional reporting on this appears thin, at best, I have to ask if this is a hail mary from Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley?

Tuesday night will be a nail bitter.

Holy Ghost by John Sanford: Chapter 8—

The gun nut’s name was Clay Ford.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: Sinew, tendon; especially one dressed for use as a cord or thread; solid resilient strength, power; the chief supporting force, mainstay—usually used in plural.

So, I would be in favor of a constitutional amendment clarifying or modifying the 14th amendment to our Constitution which begins:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.

My favor would be based on comprehensive, bi-partisan legislation that completely reformed our entire federal system that deals with all immigrants to our country. If such legislative reform were to be considered, voted upon, passed in both houses of Congress and signed into law by our President, and if that legislation included a rewriting of the 14th amendment to redefine citizens as either “all persons born of at least one (two?) citizens or naturalized in the United States,” I wouldn’t object.

There has been a decades-long debate around immigration reform and we need to have that debate. Wishing that the opening line of the 14th Amendment could just be magicked away, as a mythical they has told our President, is ludicrous at best and criminal at worst.

Andrew McCarthy, writing in The 14th Amendment Does Not Mandate Birthright Citizenship for National Review, does his best to make the the 14th go poof:

In campaign mode, the president floated the idea of issuing an executive order that would purport to deny “birthright citizenship,” i.e., to end the policy of granting American citizenship to children born in the United States to alien parents who are not legally present here. I highlight “purport” and “policy” because the president’s opponents counter that these newborn children of illegal aliens are granted citizenship by the Constitution, specifically, by the 14th Amendment. Therefore, the argument goes, this grant of citizenship is not a mere policy but a command of the highest law of the land; it may not be reversed by an executive order, or even by a law of Congress, the branch empowered to set the terms of citizenship.

That is a lot of weight to put on an amendment that had nothing to do with regulating aliens—an amendment ratified in 1868, a time when there was no federal-law concept of illegal aliens.

That last, of course, has nothing to do with what the amendment says. There was no concept of semi-automatic and fully automatic weapons when the 1st Amendment was written, but that doesn’t slow down people who want to have a personal arsenal to protect them and theirs when the government people-not-like-them come for their women. McCarthy continues:

That is the main point: The 14th Amendment was meant to ensure that the necessary relief for former slaves could not be undone by subsequent Congresses or court decisions. As we shall come to, the Supreme Court later resorted to the 14th Amendment in order to address an injustice done to an adult child of immigrants under the noxious Chinese Exclusion Act. The Court, however, was wrong to do so — certainly, to the extent that its ruling can be read (and has been read) to usurp Congress’s constitutional power to prescribe citizenship qualifications for children born in the United States of aliens who are not legally here. The 14th Amendment was about black people enslaved in America for generations. It was not about aliens transiting America illegally.

And he’s right there. The 14th—sitting between the 13th and 15th amendments—was part of the package that sought to set right our country’s nearly 90-year history (and the preceding 157 years under British colonial rule) with slavery. When Congress wrote the 14th Amendment they weren’t thinking about immigrants, but they ought to have been.

That’s why I think full, comprehensive immigration reform should be a top priority for our next Congress.

Unless you’re in a supervisor/subordinate relationship priorities are always messy. If my boss wants a job completed in a certain manner I may be able to discuss the matter, but more often I have two choices: do the job the way my boss wants the job done or seek employment elsewhere.

In any partnership the division/sharing of labor is a negotiation that depends upon individual perceptions and desires. Tasks and responsibilities have to be talked through.

Messiness (better known as life) ensues.

Angelique Chrisafis, reviewing The Mental Load by Emma in Drawn from experience: meet the feminist author whose comic strips hit home for The Guardian, writes:

The key for Emma is that the mental load is not one individual problem – so-called lazy partners or obsessively organised women. It’s a structural problem in society. Part of the solution would be better paternity leave, and some men have campaigned for this after reading her work. She also thinks it’s about education–not just encouraging women into the workplace but encouraging men to invest more time and energy in the domestic sphere.

As I read Chrisafis’ piece I thought of David Allen’s video: The Mind Is For Having Ideas, Not Holding Them. Allen is not my favorite purveyor of productivity porn, but he’s better than most and I think that his explanation for Cognitive Distribution is spot on.

Ultimately this is all about the conversation.

*What’s a bloody waste of time…

Yes, Breathing While Black is now a thing. So much so that Ashley Nkadi has actually compiled her own list of 100 Things Not To Do #WhileBlack.

White Student at HBCU Law School Antagonizes Her Black Classmates With Racist Comments

Michael Cohen Is Still Snitching on His Boy Donald Trump, This Time Outing His Racist Rhetoric

Andrew Gillum Says Florida Is Not Safe for All While ‘Stand Your Ground’ Law Exists

Crooked Lines: Ahead of the Midterms, 3 Women of Color Highlight Racial Gerrymandering in North Carolina

S.C. Rep. Mark Sanford Says Haitians Shouldn’t Get Birthright Citizenship Because They’re Not ‘Former Slaves’

In-Flight Racism: Black Doctor Says She Was Racially Profiled on a Plane While Helping a Sick Passenger

White Men Convicted of Plotting to Bomb Somali Muslims Claim Trump and Russian Bots Made Them Do It

Definitive Proof That Republicans Don’t Want You to Vote

Previously…

So, I don’t like using the word terrorist for reasons I’ve stated before, but others do and I can discourage others’ use and that’s the word that Michael Harriot (and the FBI) use.

Harriot, in Are White Men America’s Biggest Terror Threat? We Checked for The Root, writes:

Despite the fact that the FBI and Homeland Security acknowledged that white supremacist groups had carried out more violent attacks than any other domestic extremist group over the past 16 years, the recent statement by Don Lemon has drawn much ire and contempt from people across the political spectrum.
Want The Root’s email newsletter?

“[White Supremacist Extremists] were responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks,” said a May 2017 joint brief from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. “[M]ore than any other domestic group.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray wrote in August, “But the primary terrorist threat to the homeland today, without question, is homegrown violent extremists. That’s what keeps us up at night—and no doubt many of you, too.”

While European-American males make up 31 percent of the population they are responsible for two-thirds, 65.6 percent, of domestic terrorist attacks between 2013 and last month.

We are the problem.

Does anyone know what the moral of the story is?
Listen to the scientists and not the Nazis?
Well done, Plutonia!

A Formal Request For Hillary Clinton to Go Sit Her Ass Down Somewhere by Stephen A. Crockett Jr.

Hillary Clinton needs to play musical chairs by herself and when the music stops, she can have her choice of seats. Hillary Clinton needs to look in the mirror and tell Hillary Clinton to stand down. If Hillary Clinton is on the Democratic ticket come 2020 there should a mandatory option that allows voters to choose a box that reads “not Hillary Clinton” which allows for a mystery candidate to take the nomination should they win. At this point, if Hillary Clinton is running against a push mower, I’m ready to start campaigning for the push mower because one of these candidates will at the very least keep your grass cut.

Please gawd, no!

Go home, divorce Bill, enjoy retirement and your grandchildren.

I have two words for Clinton: Adlai Stevenson.

Holy Ghost by John Sanford: Chapter 7—

Three people shot, one of them dead, all possibly tied to the Marian apparitions.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: Connive, to pretend ignorance of or fail to take action against something one ought to oppose; to be indulgent or in secret sympathy, wink; to cooperate secretly or have a secret understanding; conspire, intrigue.

Connive presents a lesson on how fluid the English language is.

Connive may not seem like a troublesome term, but it was to Wilson Follett, a usage critic who lamented that the word “was undone during the Second World War, when restless spirits felt the need of a new synonym for plotting, bribing, spying, conspiring, engineering a coup, preparing a secret attack.” Follett thought connive should only mean “to wink at” or “to pretend ignorance.” Those senses are closer to the Latin ancestor of the word: connive comes from the Latin conniv?re, which means “to close the eyes” and which is descended from -niv?re, a form akin to the Latin verb nictare, meaning “to wink.” But many English speakers disagreed, and the “conspire” sense is now the word’s most widely used meaning.

Latin is not a dead language.