Kamala Harris isn't playing around.

[bigtree]

Vice President Kamala Harris spoke to the national conference for 6,000 women members of the historically Black Zeta Phi Beta sorority today:

“When I am President of the United States,” she started, the words sending 6,000 people to their feet in deafening applause, “and when Congress passes a law” to restore nationwide access to abortion, she said she would sign it. The loud clapping kept going.

“We are not playing around!” Harris continued. “We know when we mobilize, mountains move. When we mobilize, nations change. When we mobilize, we make history.”
https://time.com/7002871/kamala-harris-speech-black-sorority/

That bold and candid declaration is reflected all throughout VP Harris's new stump speech.

Her introductory address is an unapologetic and uncompromising declaration to not only protect and defend the gains Democrats have made in the past, but to push forward to enact the obstructed and stalled planks of our agenda which almost everyone in the country is in agreement with advancing except republicans.

(excerpt)

(It is) because of our collective vision for the future that we continue to fight for affordable childcare, affordable elder care, and paid family leave.

We here believe in a future where all women and all mothers are safe.

Across our nation, we are witnessing a full-on assault on hard-fought, hard-won freedoms and rights: the freedom to vote, the freedom to be safe from gun violence, the freedom to live without fear of bigotry and hate, the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride, the freedom to learn and acknowledge our true and full history, and the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not have her government telling her what to do.

And in the face of these attacks, we must continue to stand together in defense of freedom.

We who believe in the sacred freedom to vote will make sure, then, that every American has the ability to cast their ballot and have it counted.

We who believe that every person in our nation should be free from gun violence will finally pass universal background checks, red flag laws, and an assault weapons ban. (Applause.)

We who believe that every person in our nation should be free from bigotry, discrimination, and hate will continue to fight for equality and justice for all.

And we who believe in reproductive freedom will fight for a woman’s right to choose, because one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government should not be telling her what to do.

So let's continue to fight with optimism, with faith, and with hope. Because when we fight, we win.

Kamala Harris' appeal to Americans is decidedly forward looking, and her agenda is unbound by past diversions and deliberate distractions meant to muddle and stifle progress.

When President Biden remarked in his address tonight that he intends to 'pass the torch to a new generation,' I was drawn all the way back to that moment at American University where President John Kennedy stood and heralded the coming of a 'New Frontier'; a small memorial at the top of a field in the shade of a wide line of oaks, a place where I've stood several times and reflected on the promise and result of his vision of progress in his time.

My own perspective of what politics is good for goes all the way back to when I was seven years-old in an afterschool day care center in Washington, D.C. and heard a news report break in on the music quietly playing from a radio, and the announcer declared loudly that Johnson wouldn't run and Nixon would win.

For some reason I just started bawling, and wouldn't stop until I got directed to a corner to cool off (almost got my knuckles cracked with the caretaker's ruler). My father heard about the whole thing when he picked me up, and the next day he gave me a Humphrey button that was almost as big as my face.

It was the end of March in 1968. A few short days later Martin Luther King Lay dead on the balcony of a motel from an assassin's bullet. The entire city exploded around our quiet, working class neighborhood which was populated with mostly black families and the few Jewish families that had remained there after 'white flight' in the late 50's.

The riots afterward eviscerated what was left of the mostly Jewish businesses which had thrived for decades along Georgia and New Hampshire avenues; businesses which had served those communities for as long as most of the residents could remember were gone almost overnight and never returned.

Most of what I remember in the aftermath was smoldering brick and broken windows. It was impossible to scoop a handful of dirt on our playgrounds that didn't contain tiny bits of glass, and almost every window on the schools were broken out until they permanently boarded them.

When I think of President Johnson, I remember the promises he kept for John Kennedy, like the slain president's 'affirmative action' initiative which set quotas for businesses and contractors who were paid by the government; Kennedy's Civil Rights Act; and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act which employed my own father until he retired as Director of Civil Rights at the agency.

Right up until Reagan there was always a drive by our political leaders to provide something for the American people to prosper and succeed. That glib demagogue was the first modern president who sought to role back protections, take away benefits, and eliminate all vestiges of progress already established and producing results.

Something about that republican political era set the Democratic party on it's heels in a struggle to not only regain what we'd lost under Reagan, but find a way to regain the forward progress that had defined our nation, not just a political party.

It was not for lack of trying, but more from a lack of enough political power as the Bush's terms straddled the Clinton era's defensive crouch over 'crime,' health care, and other self-inflicted distractions.

There's a lot to be said for a pragmatic politics which intends to take what parties agree on and move those things forward. But that sentiment is positively Clintonian; a relic of the republican war on America as that party fought progress, and fought democracy itself to establish their own power.

Republican politics has been a mere facade, a political construction republicans unified on and pressed forward through every reality arrayed against them until they prevailed. It's no accident that the 'big lie' became their last refuge. It's a product of their commitment to ruthlessness and uncompromising determination to get what they want.

Democrats yielded by letting the debate get muddled with deliberate distractions and diversions; like arguing about hunters when we should have stuck to advocating for the children; getting diverted into absurd debates about fetal tissue and late-term abortions that are already outlawed; false choices between the environment and jobs; arguing for voter protections whild defending against bogus claims of widespread fraud.

It may be too much to expect that there won't be many of the same compromises made on fundamental issues from Harris administration because of political realities. But this impressive start of hers promises to determinately advance the interests and concerns which an established political class have treated like their personal property for decades as they traded the unfinished agendas back and forth, and to and fro like drug dealers coveting their stash.

We've seen the republican party descend into an absolute gutter of their worst instincts, and their supporting base has become a last bastion of division and hate. Republicans are now the only major dealers in town willing to manufacture and distribute this apathy and inaction to their followers and others out of their sordid and squalid sewer of a party.

It was refreshing to hear the unapologetic declarations Vice President Harris made in her addresses introducing her campaign to the American people.

An exchange in a recent Rolling Stone interview makes her unbending focus on what she wants to achieve clear:

RS: Trump has now come out saying that he’s not for a national abortion ban and he’s going to leave it to the states.

KH: I would recommend that you don’t believe him. When he was president, he supported a national abortion ban and said he would sign it. He claims now that he’s for the states making these decisions. Well, states like Texas provided prison for life for a doctor or nurse. There are states that are trying to revive laws from the 1800s — before they were even a state and before women could vote. States are passing bans at six weeks of pregnancy — before most women even know they’re pregnant. Those are Trump abortion bans. Had he not done what he did, these things would not be able to be in play.

RS: So you think the waffling is just political expediency?

KH: I think it’s gaslighting.

A Harris presidency promises to be unbound by the debates of the past, and focused firmly on a future of hope and progress. She is a transitional figure who can bridge the understandings of the not so distant past struggles of America, with the promise of our new generations of Americans ahead.

Kamala Harris isn't playing around.

[Skittles]

1. I donated as soon as I saw she immediately went into attack mode

she is kicking ass

[OAITW r.2.0]

2. Awesome post! Thank you.

[Bundbuster]

3. Thanks for this heartfelt recounting, bigtree

I too remember the loss of hope in 1968 when I was 21. The murders of MLK and RFK, then the election of Nixon, all felt like a knife not only in my heart but in the heart of American hope and decency. Through the further wounds of Reagan, Bush II, and of course TSF, maintaining hope has been my most difficult moral task, constantly dimmed by despair at how depraved and malicious the republican party has become - a sewer of a party indeed.

I rejoice that Kamala Harris isn't playing around, as this may be my last go-round. To be honest, should TSF and his Satanic minions like Bannon and Miller gain power, my will to survive in a country that would elect them will be endangered. The Democratic Party truly holds my future in its hands, and I suspect the future of many others.

[bigtree]

5. you and I survived the scam of the 'Gingrich revolution'

...when the world seemed like it had turned inside out.

This is cake. This is an adventure.

[Bundbuster]

9. Yup - the Gingrich, Buchanan, and Limbaugh toxicity and cruelty were the roots

Last edited Thu Jul 25, 2024, 01:34 AM - Edit history (1)

of the Tea Party, Birthers, and MAGA. tRump is really the spawn of Gingrich and his mendacity. Just thinking about that evolution of evil gives me the full-on creeps.

[Codifer]

8. I share yourbad memoris of 1968.

One of the very few good things that happened in 1968 was that I became a civilian again.

[Bundbuster]

12. That was quite the time, huh? I was getting ready for Vietnam, Army Infantry

when I blew up a knee, 4F. I hope you were spared that 'Nam horror, but in any case you're thankfully here with us now, unlike alot of my old friends. Nixon, Kissinger, and Westmoreland were throwing their lives away like so much trash.

[blm]

4. 🙌🏽

I’m excited, big.

[bigtree]

7. my wife says the same

...I want to help make it happen, very much.

I feel like we're in a group walking noisly through a wood known to be full of wolves.

Good thing we've got an experienced wolf hunter on point.

[Cha]

6. No she is Not... I like that about her. TY

[PortTack]

10. Wow! Sitting here with a smile and chills...very powerful

[PatrickforB]

11. This is a very nice post. It is. And even nicer is the electricity of hope and the desire to do good, to

return this republic to the light.

Yes. The passing of the torch.

[PufPuf23]

13. Awesome post. Kamala Harris isn't playing around.

POTUS Joe Biden passed the torch to the new generation of leadership.

Feel like the USA has turned to a new, more positive direction.

Thank you.

[betsuni]

14. K&R

[bigtree]

15. kicking with vid

...thanks for the great responses, y'all.

[Bundbuster]

16. Please take the time to read this thread of the day

[returnee]

17. That was vey exciting too watch.

I wish she would start making the point that without solid majorities in both houses everything will be harder. I suspect most of the people in the room know that, but this is being watched by some people who might need a little insight to vote Dem right down the line.