President Obama, First Lady to Visit San Bernardino Victims’ Families

“It just felt like they were really present in their conversation with me”, she said.

President Barack Obama says the families of the California shooting victims are “representative of the strength and the unity and the love” of their community and the nation.

In an unusual twist, White House press secretary Josh Earnest then emerged with two people in Stormtrooper costumes and R2-D2, the famous “Star Wars” droid.

Obama called for Assad to leave power in 2011, but the Syrian leader has managed to hang on.

The president defied expectations over the last 12 months.

While Obama was sidelined by his party in the 2014 midterm elections, he made clear he plans to play a robust role in the 2016 campaign.

But the past month has been a rough stretch.

He told the columnists that he envisioned sending significant ground forces to the Middle East only in the case of a catastrophic terrorist attack that disrupted the normal functioning of the United States.

“I don’t think you should expect a huge, long list from the president of legislative to-dos, but I think he’s anxious to take kind of a big-picture approach to some of the challenges and opportunities that we face”, an official said.

Obama appeared to acknowledge, however, that his initial response to the strikes were off-key. We see how Guantanamo has been used to create this mythology that America is at war with Islam. “It’s not that different from us trying to detect the next mass shooter”, Obama said.

The president tried to demonstrate he’s learned from his mistakes, too.

U.S. President Barack Obama delivers remarks on the recent shootings in San Bernardino, after meetin … “President Assad, in our judgement – and not everybody shares this – but the majority of the people in the ISSG believe that President Assad has lost the ability, the credibility to be able to unite the country and to provide the moral credibility to be able to govern it into the future”.

The President is pressing for a rewrite of criminal justice laws to curb the steep penalties for nonviolent offences like drug crimes.

“I’m not going to automatically assume that Congress says no”, Obama said.

The session with columnists was off the record, but the President’s remarks were recounted on Thursday by several people who were in the room after one of the writers, Mr David Ignatius of The Washington Post, described some of the President’s thinking in a column without attributing it directly to Mr Obama.

He previewed an argument the White House likely will make as it pushes to close the prison, saying he hopes to continue shrinking its population below the current level of around 100 prisoners. He delivered a rare prime-time Oval Office address laying out his plans to battle ISIS, reaching a football-augmented audience of more than 45 million Americans.

Others, such as Robert Cuencas of The Way World Outreach church in San Bernardino, said they were there to show support for the families. “I don’t think they will”.

The President praised House Speaker Paul Ryan and his predecessor, John Boehner, for shepherding a massive budget deal through Congress.

That action, Obama said, signaled an end to the era of “last-minute crises and shutdown threats”.