Tag: Frederick Douglass

At a rally Sunday in her hometown of Oakland, she officially launched her presidential campaign by tapping those same populist themes. A crowd that rally organizers estimated at 20,000 people filled the streets around a flag-draped Frank Ogawa Plaza, where Harris made her opening 2020 pitch: She will be the candidate who is both “a fighter for the people” and someone who can unite a country severed into partisan corners by saying that “we must seek truth, speak truth and fight for the truth.” “People in power are trying to convince us that the villain in our American story is each other. “Our United States of America is not about us against them. I’m running to be a president by the people, of the people, for all people.” Sunday’s rally capped a weeklong White House campaign rollout for Harris, 54, the former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general, that highlighted her roots. The daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica announced her campaign on Martin Luther King Jr. Day on ABC’s “Good Morning America”; stopped by her alma mater, Howard University; then appeared at a fundraiser for Alpha Kappa Alpha, her college sorority, at a gala Friday in South Carolina, a key early primary state. Her speech Sunday offered a road map of where she will take her campaign — starting with a full embrace of the progressive agenda. She intends to pay for it by eliminating parts of President Trump’s tax law that benefited the wealthiest Americans and by placing a tax on financial institutions. She has also introduced legislation that would give a tax break to renters. Wicks was a top state organizer for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. “If I have the honor of being your president, I will tell you this: I am not perfect.

David Blight on Frederick Douglass: 'I call him beautifully human' Read more Harvard professor Jill Lepore chooses to begin her history of the United States with that quotation, and much of the worst of America, from lynching to brutality to Native Americans, is rightly here. Is it possible for the US – or any nation – to be ruled by reason and choice? This is, therefore, a history of political equality which necessarily becomes primarily a political history. The question nearly sundered the colonies from all government. Like so many Americans, Lepore asks that question and another: “By what right are we ruled?” Her aims are ambitious. Finally, “this book aims to be something else, too – an explanation of the nature of the past.” “History isn’t only a subject,” Lepore writes. Lepore offers an unabashedly liberal perspective, but seeks to be scrupulously fair to the modern conservative movement American politics has always been robust, but technology and better methods of analysis have magnified the impact. She offers an unabashedly liberal perspective, but seeks to be scrupulously fair to the modern conservative movement, devoting numerous pages to its intellectual origins as well as to its nativist and conspiratorial elements. This is a history for the 21st century, far more inclusive than the standard histories of the past. Lincoln did not say merely that we “can” save the country, but that we “shall”.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump’s crusade to revoke security clearances from perceived critics was on display again on Tuesday as he threatened to yank credentials from a man he had previously praised, Frederick Douglass. It was unclear why Trump had turned on Douglass, because, unlike other targets of Trump’s security-clearance rampage, Douglass had not made disparaging comments about him on cable news in recent weeks. Trump offered few clues as to the source of his unhappiness with Douglass, but he broadcast his disapproval of the abolitionist in a tweet that read, “HE IS NO LONGER DOING AN AMAZING JOB.” The threat to revoke Douglass’s credentials put the White House chief of staff, John Kelly, in a tough spot, because, presumably, Kelly would be the staff member tasked with carrying out such an order. “General Kelly could point out to Trump that Frederick Douglass never had security clearance, and, plus, he is dead,” an aide to Kelly said. “But neither of those things is likely to change Trump’s mind.”