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In a statement late Thursday, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said "the Ukrainians have their own intelligence capabilities to track and target Russian naval vessels, as they did in this case." "We did not provide Ukraine with specific targeting information for the Moskva," Kirby added, "We were not involved in the Ukrainians' decision to strike the ship or in the operation they carried out." A U.S. senior defense official also said "we do provide a range of intelligence to help the Ukrainians understand the threat posed by Russian ships in the Black Sea and to help them prepare to defend...

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry voiced confidence on Sunday the Iraqi government and tribes would be successful in their fight against al Qaeda, and said Washington was not considering sending troops back to Iraq. Sectarian and ethnic tensions have risen in Iraq since the U.S. withdrawal in December 2011, inflamed by the conflict in neighboring Syria, where mainly Sunni rebels are trying to oust President Bashar al-Assad, who is backed by Shi'ite Iran. The Iraqi army has joined forces with local tribesmen to battle al Qaeda, which has teamed up with groups of Syrian rebels to...

"Go f— yourself," Boehner repeated. Politico reports on the exchange: House Speaker John Boehner couldn’t hold back when he spotted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the White House lobby last Friday. It was only a few days before the nation would go over the fiscal cliff, no bipartisan agreement was in sight, and Reid had just publicly accused Boehner of running a “dictatorship” in the House and caring more about holding onto his gavel than striking a deal. “Go f— yourself,” Boehner sniped as he pointed his finger at Reid, according to multiple sources present. Reid, a bit startled,...

Daniel Klaidman of Newsweek has written a new book, Kill or Capture , about the Obama administration's anti-terror policies, containing much information that obviously came from insiders, some of which is now the subject of demands for a special prosecutor to investigate leaks. In a review of the book in the Wall Street Journal, Mark Moyar quotes a passage that is frighteningly illuminating about the management style of the man upon whom our national security depends: In one of his most telling passages, Mr. Klaidman depicts a passive commander in chief who often procrastinated in the hopes that problems would...

A fiery President Obama insisted Tuesday that if he and congressional leaders couldn’t reach a deal to avert a government shutdown, “I want a meeting again tomorrow here at the White House.”

WASHINGTON — A White House spokesman says the whole country benefits when President Barack Obama takes time to go golfing and "clear his mind." Obama spokesman Bill Burton on Monday defended Obama's leisure activities amid some Republican criticism that Obama should not be scheduling fun time during the Gulf oil spill crisis. The president went golfing on Saturday afternoon after attending a baseball game Friday night. Burton said the people of the country stand by the notion that "their president ought to have a little time to clear his mind." Burton said that having time to himself "probably does us...

Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and Howard Fineman react to President Obama's Oval Office Address on the oil spill. Here are the highlights of what the trio said: Olbermann: "It was a great speech if you were on another planet for the last 57 days." Matthews compared Obama to Carter. Olbermann: "Nothing specific at all was said." Matthews: "No direction." Howard Fineman: "He wasn't specific enough."

A high-level British offer of help to clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was rebuffed by America shortly after the accident, fuelling fresh fears of political tension between the two countries over the disaster. A few days after the BP-leased rig sank on April 22, the Cabinet Office made a direct offer to the US State Department to airlift half of Britain’s 1,200-tonne stockpile of chemical dispersants, The Times has learnt.

In the new movie "2012," whose video trailers were bombarding television airwaves last week, the world as we know it gives way three years hence under a siege of floods, eruptions, undulating continents and earthquakes. In other words, it's not much different from what is happening in California, fiscally speaking, except that the state will be lucky to hang on that long. To recap: the state's chief budget analyst reported last week that California faces a $21-billion deficit through the next fiscal year. For the two budget years after that, deficits will total $44 billion more, the analyst said. Those...

WASHINGTON — Democrats pledged to take Congress in a new direction when it won control in November 2006, but less than six months after taking the reins, Americans aren't pleased with the results, giving lawmakers an all-time low public confidence rating. In a Gallup poll released Thursday, only 14 percent of Americans have a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in Congress, a Gallup poll reports. The poll shows an all-time lowest confidence rating and one of the lowest ratings for any institution in 30 years. The lowest confidence rating for Congress was 18 percent during 1991 to...

The post-mortems are accumulating, but I think the obvious has to be stated: John McCain and his colleagues in the Gang of 14 cost the GOP its Senate majority while the conduct of a handful of corrupt House members gave that body's leadership the Democrats. The first two paragraphs of my book Painting the Map Red --published in March of this year, read: If you are a conservative Republican, as I am, you have a right to be worried. An overconfident and complacent Republican Party could be facing electoral disaster. Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, and a host of others could...

(Note: The following is a text of the prepared remarks of Senator Frist delivered on June 1, 2005 at the Harvard Medical School Health Care Policy Seidman Lecture)I am a physician and a surgeon who by accident of fate finds himself in the halls of power at a time of dangers for his country and the world, the most compelling of which are exactly those a physician is trained to recognize and fight. To me it seems no more natural to be a United States senator, and in my case the majority leader of the Senate, than it did to...