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The White House is reportedly planning a shift in strategy in Iraq that would see hundreds of American military trainers deployed to help retake Ramadi and the delay of long-held plans to drive the Islamic State from Mosul. Six months after US forces began training Iraqi troops to take on the jihadist fighters, a string of defeats on the battlefield has prompted the Obama administration into a recalibration of its plans. The American military hopes to build up enough well-trained and well-equipped Iraqi forces to retake the city of Ramadi, which fell to Isil in mid-May. The plan would see...

resident Obama took heat Monday for admitting he doesn't yet have a "complete strategy" in hand for training Iraqis to fight the Islamic State -- months into the coordinated campaign to defeat the deadly terrorist network. "When a finalized plan is presented to me by the Pentagon, then I will share it with the American people," Obama said, adding, "We don't yet have a complete strategy." House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul said in a statement: "It is no surprise this administration does not have a 'complete strategy' for training Iraqis to fight ISIS. What is surprising is that...

WASHINGTON — Some of President Obama’s email correspondence was swept up by Russian hackers last year in a breach of the White House’s unclassified computer system that was far more intrusive and worrisome than has been publicly acknowledged, according to senior American officials briefed on the investigation.

Jim Miklaszewski kept it relatively diplomatic, declaring "there's something amiss here." But Joe Scarborough was blunt: "boy, that's damning," said the Morning Joe host. They were characterizing Miklaszewski's description of the Obama administration's "micromanagement" of the Department of Defense in which communication flows only in one direction: from the White House to the Pentagon. On today's Morning Joe, NBC's Pentagon correspondent reported that former SecDefs Robert Gates and Leon Panetta had recently "lambaste[d]" that micromanagement. View the video here.

(CNSNews.com) - Speaking in a video message to residents of West African countries currently experiencing outbreaks of Ebola, President Barack Obama dispensed advice on how residents can avoid the disease, including:"You cannot get it through casual contact like sitting next to someone on a bus." At the same time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is advising Americans who travel to the Ebola-stricken nations to "avoid public transportation."

....Obama wants to decide by the end of the week whether or not his war in Iraq against the Islamic State will expand to the group’s haven in eastern Syria. But nearly everything about the potential military campaign is still in flux, administration officials tell The Daily Beast—from the goals of the effort to the intelligence needed to carry it out.....

WASHINGTON — U.S. officials say military planners are weighing the possibility of sending more American forces to Iraq mainly to provide additional security around Baghdad. A senior U.S. official says the number of troops currently under discussion would be fewer than 300, but there has been no final decision yet by Pentagon leaders. The talks come as American fighter jets and drones conducted nearly a dozen airstrikes in Iraq since Tuesday when Islamic State militants threatened to kill a second American captive in retribution for any continued attacks.

WASHINGTON — Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon called the National Guard to Ferguson late Sunday without letting the White House know first. “Folks didn’t know,” an administration official told BuzzFeed Monday. “The White House did not know they were sending it in.” Nixon gave “no heads up,” the official said.

Russian leader Vladmir Putin sent in troops and tanks to invade neighboring Ukraine and the Obama administration is coming to the rescue with . . . selfies! State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki was mocked Thursday after posting a photo of herself on Twitter holding a sign that read #United­For­Ukraine @State­Dept­Spox.” Psaki, who has worked closely with President Obama since his 2008 campaign and is the chief communications adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry, is smiling and giving a thumbs-up in the photo. But the cheerleading for beleaguered Ukraine wasn’t trending or scaring off bully Putin, said critics in the blogosphere. “Presenting...

President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama sat down with Barbara Walters for a wide-ranging interview that aired Friday night, and the first issue Walters brought up was the president’s record low approval numbers. But Obama just shrugged them aside as the hazards of the job, joking, “The good thing about when you’re down is that usually, you’ve got nowhere to go but up.” Walters brought up Obama getting booed at a basketball game. The First Lady said, “It’s part of the job,” and said she’s gotten booed as well, though Walters did point out her numbers have always been...

After an internal debate, the Obama administration has decided to tell American commercial airlines to comply with China's demands to be notified of any flights through a broad swath of international airspace that it has claimed as an air defense zone, officials said Friday. Even as the United States continued to send military planes into the zone in defiance of China's declaration, officials said they expected civilian planes to go along with Beijing's new demands out of an abundance of caution. Officials said they were worried about an accident or unintended confrontation that could endanger civilian passengers. The administration’s decision...

PRESIDENT OBAMA: "The challenge has been just making sure that consumers are actually able to get on a website, see those choices, and shop. And I think that we probably underestimated the complexities of building out a website that needed to work the way it should. ....." (Wall Street Journal CEO Council, November 19, 2013)

President Barack Obama, who has portrayed himself as surprised by technical problems with the government's new health care website, was briefed last spring on a detailed consultant's report that warned of system failure, White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Tuesday.

Harvard professor David Cutler, a so-called architect of Obamacare, says we "could be" witnessing "the beginning of a death spiral" for the unpopular health care bill. Cutler made the comments last night on Fox News: "So when you were on last week I asked you, if they don't get enough people in the exchanges, then what happens?" said host Megyn Kelly. "And you said then the premiums go up very, very high. Now, was that ball put in motion today?" "We don't know yet," said Cutler. "So what the president is trying to do is to say the website is...

A Federal website tied to Obamacare has suffered from unexpected network outages and other hiccups, but at least one recurring problem will be intentional. A message on HealthCare.gov says the online application function for those seeking health coverage will not be available each night from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. EST, when officials conduct maintenance. “Additional down times may be possible as we work to make things better,” it said.

WASHINGTON -- President Obama was assured that the healthcare insurance website was ready to launch on Oct. 1, even as private contractors and some administration officials knew the site had failed in early testing, a senior White House advisor said Sunday. Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer said the president repeatedly asked about the healthcare.gov website, a key piece of his 2010 healthcare overhaul legislation, and was told it would meet his expectations. Along with the president, Pfeiffer hyped the website in the weeks before the troubled launch, promising it would “be a consumer experience unmatched by anything in government, but also...

Robert Laszewski is president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, a policy and marketplace consulting firm that has him working closely with many in the heath industry as they try to navigate the Affordable Care Act, as well as the author of the excellent Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review blog. As such, he has a unique view on how the rollout looks from the industry side. We spoke on Wednesday. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows. Ezra Klein: We last talked about 10 days ago. So in the interim, what are your insurance industry sources saying has...

House Republicans will receive a briefing from Health and Human Services officials about the glitch-filled Obamacare website after being excluded from a meeting in which Democrats were given details about the troubled launch. “It’s not clear why Republicans were excluded in the first place, but we look forward to getting answers to how the administration botched this enormous use of taxpayer dollars so badly,” said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. Gary Cohen, who handles insurance oversight for HHS, briefed House Democrats earlier Wednesday. Buck said he would announce details of the Republican meeting when they become...

Mike Hash, who directs the Office of Health reform at the Department of Health and Human Services, will brief House Democrats Wednesday about implementation of the Affordable Care Act. The closed-door session, which will start at 8:50 a.m., marks the first time the administration will have briefed members of Congress on the online enrollment system since its troubled rollout on Oct. 1.

Before it even launched, red flags went up about the Obamacare website. Health insurance companies complained about it, and the site crashed during a test run. But nobody told the President of any of it, the nation's health chief told CNN. Kathleen Sebelius said President Barack Obama didn't hear that there may be problems with the sign-up portal for his signature health care law until it went live on October 1. That's when the site nosedived into a technical abyss.