troops home, but the important part is to keep the troops there safe. when you reduce your numbers like 10,000 you have to make sure your mission is complete and coordinated with afghan authorities. molly: president obama seen here with hamid karzai says he will explain to the american people in coming months what the u.s. footprint in afghanistan after 2014. for now he says he is concentrating on bringing home most american troops, and this spring shifting those that remain to a training and advising role. here at home america needs to rebuild our own nation. we have to grow our economy and shrink our deficits. create new jobs and boost family incomes. we have to fix our infrastructure and immigration system. we have to protect our planet from the destructive effects of climate change and protect our
$10.4 billion, including hospitalization, doctor visit, medication. additionally, up to 111 million work days are lost because of the flu. that s an estimated $7 billion a year in sick days and lost productivity. as the nation grapples with this widespread flu outbreak, we ll take closer look at all the confusion around access to the vaccine which you need to do to stay healthy and ha you should do if you re already sick. that s coming up a bit later on in this newscast. jamie: president obama s moving forward with the transition in afghanistan. we ve been talking about that. but now he s had a meeting with afghan president karzai at the white house and the u.s. military mission in afghanistan, it will end in 2014. but president obama said it is time to hand over more responsibility to the afghan people. more than half a million americans, military and civilian, have served in afghanistan, thousands have been
jamie: conor powell, thank you so much. gregg: joe biden declaring there is no silver bullet to preventing gun tragedies. he made that remark as he sat down this week with members of the video game industry, nra and victims of gun violence. recommendations are expected on tuesday. at one point he suggested president obama could make changes without approval from congress by using an executive order. let s bring in christian whiten a former senior advisor and principal with d.c. advisory who wrote on this a column on this. good to see you. you argue in your column when lawmakers consider tinkering with gun rights, they really need to bear in mind it was the original intent of the founding fathers to confer a political right in the second amendment. explain what you mean. i hope in the kabuki theater
unquote that the debt limit goes up even if congress doesn t pass a law saying it could go up. the reason they are doing that is because president has been told by speaker boehner he won t allow the debt ceiling to go up unless there is a dollar for dollar tradeoff in cuts. the last deal went through without the spending cuts. the president does have some authority, doesn t he, to take care of the debt limit on his own. is there a compromise between that and getting bipartisan support for an agreement? right. any lawful steps. that is the big mystery, what are the lawful steps. two steps that people are talking about. one that is seemingly quite legal but sort of wacky sounding and one is questionably legal but mainstream. wacky one would be minting a trillion dollar coin.
clear answers on his part. gregg, on the issue you just identified, the reality is, i ll say it again barack obama is most controlling foreign policy president since richard nixon. a pentagon chief is not going to have to a say or in fact play on the issue of what american does or does not do with regard to hamas or hezbollah. i just don t buy it. i think in the end, come back to where i began. the fight against hagel, yeah, his statements some of which need to be scrutinized and provide answers but it s about obama. gregg: thanks so much. reach one customer at a time? or help doctors turn billions of bytes of shared information. into a fifth anniversary of remission?