Free Republic

Kamala Harris was all smiles when she arrived at Joe Biden's former Delaware campaign headquarters on Monday. She was there to lift the spirits of blindsided staffers, who after 15 months of toiling to re-elect the president, suddenly found themselves working for her. 'It is my great honor to have Joe's endorsement in this race,' she boasted to cheers from a crowd who were now on her payroll. But as the assembled readily applauded, some must have harbored private concerns. For, behind the recent public self-branding of Harris as a kindly, jovial 'Momala', she has earned a nasty reputation as...

State Department Deputy Spokesman Vedant Patel told reporters in a briefing on Tuesday that the U.S. shares the goal of “degrading” Hamas — avoiding the use of the word “defeating,” in an apparent shift of U.S. policy on the Gaza war. On Monday, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters that President Joe Biden shared Israel’s goal of “defeating” Hamas, but believed it was not necessary for Israel to attack Hamas in the last stronghold of Rafah to do so: The President told the Prime Minister again today that we share the goal of defeating Hamas, but we just believe...

If pandemic exhaustion, galloping inflation, and talk of World War III haven’t yet gotten you down, Rethinking Sex: A Provocation might do the trick. This is not the fault of author Christine Emba, whose prose in this short book is stylish, engaging, and, above all, earnest. No, what depresses is the fact that this manifesto should have to exist in the first place. But exist it must, for reasons that its pages make excruciatingly clear. Based upon a 2017 #MeToo piece published in the Washington Post, where Emba is a columnist, Rethinking Sex performs the public service of wondering aloud...

President Barack Obama has brought a more relaxed style to the White House, according to Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times, among other things going suit coat-less in the Oval Office and allowing others to do the same. Obama critics will probably hold this against him and mark him down as disrespecting the presidency. But the Oval Office is an office after all, even if it is the world's most famous one. At bottom, it is a work space albeit it holds an almost sacred place in the hearts of many Americans. Most Americans probably won't begrudge Obama...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Guantanamo Bay interrogators degraded and abused a key prisoner but did not torture him when they told him he was gay, forced him to dance with another man and made him wear a bra and perform dog tricks, military investigators said on Wednesday. The general who heads Southern Command, responsible for the jail for foreign terrorism suspects at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, also said he rejected his investigators' recommendation to punish a former commander of the prison. A military report presented before the Senate Armed Services Committee stated a Saudi man, described as...