Gen. Stanley McChrystal recently gave an interview to Rolling Stone Magazine. McChrystal, who is the top commanding officer in Afghanistan, painted a less than flattering picture of the White House in the interview. McChrystal has been called to the White House to explain his interview.

Excerpts from a Rolling Stone magazine profile on Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, set to appear Friday:

“Even though he had voted for (President Barack) Obama, McChrystal and his new commander-in-chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked “uncomfortable and intimidated” by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn’t go much better. ‘It was a 10-minute photo-op,’ says an adviser to McChrystal. ‘Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his f-ing war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.’”

McChrystal has apologized for his Rolling Stone interview, saying that he used “poor judgment.” President Obama’s monthly meeting on Afghanistan and Pakistan with Gen. McChrystal is usually over secured video, but this time, he has been asked to attend in person.

“I extend my sincerest apology for this profile. It was a mistake reflecting poor judgment and should never have happened,” McChrystal said in a statement. “Throughout my career, I have lived by the principles of personal honor and professional integrity. What is reflected in this article falls far short of that standard.”

The Rolling Stone magazine story, entitled “The Runaway General,” characterizes McChrystal as an outsider who doesn’t get along with many in the Obama administration.

Obama has the power to fire McChrystal if he feels it to be necessary. McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan was let go when it was decided that the military needed a fresh approach on Afghanistan.

Obama on Sunday labeled the spill a “potentially unprecedented environmental disaster” as he stopped off in the fishing hub of Venice on to show solidarity with Louisiana’s threatened coastal communities.

Rain running down his forehead as he spoke, Obama stressed BP was the responsible party as he acknowledged the pain of Louisianans in a strong display designed to show he was side-by-side with the victims of the disaster.

“The oil that is still leaking from the well could seriously damage the economy and the environment of our Gulf states. And it could extend for a long time. It could jeopardize the livelihoods of thousands of Americans who call this place home.”

Louisiana’s 2.4-billion-dollar a year commercial and recreational fishing industry was dealt its first major blow from the oil spill during Obama’s visit when the US government banned activities in some areas for at least 10 days due to health concerns.

“Balancing economic and health concerns, this order closes just those areas that are affected by oil,” said US government weather agency administrator Jane Lubchenco. “There should be no health risk in seafood currently in the marketplace.”

In a round of appearances on morning television and radio news shows, BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward accepted responsibility for the cleanup and said the company would pay compensation for legitimate claims for property damage, personal injury and business losses.

“We are responsible, not for the accident, but we are responsible for the oil and for dealing with it and cleaning the situation up,” Hayward said.

The original accident took place April 20 on a deep-water rig operating about 130 miles southeast of New Orleans. The rig sank two days later, and 11 were believed dead.

Oil began leaking from the wellhead, pouring at least 5,000 barrels of oil into the gulf waters, though some estimates have place the flow from three leaks at much more. The leading edge of the oil has reached Louisiana wetlands and is expected to make landfall in the next days.

“We will await all the facts before drawing conclusions, and we will not speculate,” a spokesman for Transocean said.

Rahm Emanuel is officially a Washington caricature. He’s the town’s resident leviathan, a bullying, bruising White House chief of staff who is a prime target for the failings of the Obama administration.

But a contrarian narrative is emerging: Emanuel is a force of political reason within the White House and could have helped the administration avoid its current bind if the president had heeded his advice on some of the most sensitive subjects of the year: health-care reform, jobs and trying alleged terrorists in civilian courts.

A series of columns and in-depth press reports over the past few weeks have established a narrative that is bound to dog the White House–that Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel knows best, the rest of the administration is not listening, and he is at his wit’s end trying to convince President Obama and his Chicago buddies to dial back their ambitions for the sake of the president’s agenda and political harmony.

It’s Rahmbo vs. the Obamanator. At least that’s the chatter that’s getting louder by the minute in Washington.

A series of columns and in-depth press reports over the past few weeks has hinted at such a slugfest, and the talk is bound to dog the White House for quite a while, especially if there’s any truth to it.

On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was compelled for the first time to respond to the chatter. He said the president “absolutely” has confidence in his chief of staff, and he dismissed speculation of a rift between the two as part of the usual lineup of Washington “parlor games”–which he suggested were being played out of sheer boredom in the vacuum of the football off-season.

“Anybody that works in or around this building knows that there’s nobody working harder on passing the president’s agenda than the chief of staff,” Gibbs said.

Asked whether Emanuel was “burnishing his reputation” via the press at everybody else’s expense, Gibbs responded, “I don’t believe he is, no.”

Whether or not Gibbs could have been more forceful in his response, he was reluctantly addressing the possibility that both Obama and Emanuel are crossing paths with the one person in the world they don’t want to cross paths with. The two Chicagoans–one a former U.S. senator and the other a former U.S. representative–have larger-than-life personalities and egos, and each could make life very difficult for the other.

Gibbs addressed the chatter after The Washington Post published a lengthy piece Tuesday examining how the explosive, hard-nosed, profanity-dealing chief of staff could be the “voice of reason” in the White House, quoting anonymous sources who supported the hypothesis that Emanuel knows best.

“I don’t think the White House has listened to him enough,” an unnamed House Democrat told the Post, arguing that the White House seems “tone-deaf” to the kind of electoral concerns Emanuel is known to handle well. (Case in point, Obama suggested last week that Democrats should suck up their re-election concerns and vote for health care reform regardless of the upcoming midterm elections.)

Differences have emerged as President Barack Obama urged top Republicans and Democrats to focus on agreements at a six-hour televised healthcare summit.

He urged 40 congressional Democrats and Republicans in Washington DC to avoid political theatre, as part of a fresh bid to save his troubled reform plans.

For the first time, Mr Obama offered his own version of a healthcare plan on Monday.

But Republicans say the plan is not acceptable and a fresh start is needed.

Analysts say the contentious debate is likely to be beset by bipartisanship: even the shape of the table for the debate at Blair House, opposite the White House, has been the subject of dispute.

President Obama, Vice-President Joe Biden and other leading Democrats are facing senior Republicans such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Arizona Senator John McCain.

Mr Obama opened the debate by emphasising that everyone present understood the importance of the healthcare issue, adding that there were significant points of potential agreement between the two parties on healthcare reform.

“We all know this is urgent and unfortunately, despite all the negotiations that have taken place, it became a very ideological battle; it became a very partisan battle where politics ended up trumping common sense,” he said.

He added that he wanted to avoid the televised session becoming merely political theatre, hoping that those involved would work together to try to solve the problem.

“If we keep an open mind and are not trying to score political points then we may be able to make some progress,” he said.

Republican Senator Lamar Alexander responded by saying that in order for Mr Obama to succeed on healthcare, he should scrap the health care bill that Senate Democrats passed in December, and start afresh with a clean sheet of paper.

“If we can start over, we can write a healthcare bill,” he said. “It means working together… reducing healthcare costs… and going step-by-step to regain the trust of the American people.”

Republican Senator Jon Kyl went on to argue that Democratic efforts to overhaul the current system would give Washington too much control over healthcare.

“There are some fundamental differences between us here that we cannot paper over,” said Mr Kyl. “We do not agree about the fundamental question about who should be mostly in charge.

President Barack Obama and a bipartisan group of leaders from the Senate and the House will meet February 25 for specific talks aimed at a compromise on health care legislation, said a White House official.

Those same leaders already are scheduled to go to the White House
on Tuesday for broader bipartisan talks on health, the jobs bill and other topics. Tuesday’s meeting will now set the table for the February 25 health talks, and it also will be the first fulfillment of the president’s promise in his State of the Union address to start monthly meetings with congressional Republicans.

“If Congress decides we’re not going to do it, even after all the facts are laid out, after all the options are clear, then the American people can make a judgment as to whether this Congress has done the right thing for them or not,” Obama said Thursday. “That’s how democracy works.”

Obama says it’s time for Republicans who have attacked his health care proposals from the sidelines to step before the cameras and present their own ideas.

In the first major move to revive his health care agenda after his party’s loss of a filibuster-proof Senate majority, Obama on Sunday invited GOP and Democratic leaders to discuss possible compromises in a televised gathering later this month.

It comes amid widespread complaints that Democrats’ efforts so far have been too partisan and secretive.

The Feb. 25 meeting’s prospects for success are far from clear. GOP leaders demanded Sunday that Democrats start from scratch, and White House aides said Obama had no plans to do so.

“If we are to reach a bipartisan consensus, the White House can start by shelving the current health spending bill,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

But House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said his earlier efforts to reach out to Republicans “did not result in any serious follow through to work together in a bipartisan fashion.”

“If we can go step by step through a series of these issues and arrive at some agreements,” Obama said, “then procedurally, there’s no reason why we can’t do it a lot faster than the process took last year.”

Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress have differed sharply on most major questions in the long-running health care debate. Only one Republican voted for the health care bill that the House approved in December, and no Republicans voted for a similar Senate version.

A White House statement Sunday said Obama repeatedly has made it clear “that he’s adamant about passing comprehensive reform similar to the bills passed by the House and the Senate.”

The unemployment rate in the U.S. unexpectedly dropped to 9.7 percent in January, indicating the labor market may be poised to climb out of its deepest slump since World War II.

More than half a million Americans found work, a Labor Department report showed today in Washington, helping push the jobless rate to the lowest since August. A separate survey of employers showed payrolls declined by 20,000 as construction companies and state and local governments cut back.

Manufacturers hired more workers for the first time in three years, expanded hours and boosted pay, which may lift consumer spending and sustain growth. Revisions to previous data increased the number of jobs lost in the recession to 8.4 million, adding impetus to the Obama administration’s push for fresh government measures to boost employment.

Obama will today back a temporary increase in Small Business Administration Loans from $350,000 to $1 million to encourage small business hiring, an administration official said. The president has previously endorsed $33 billion in small business tax cuts and incentives for hiring as well as a plan to use $30 billion of bailout money paid back by Wall Street financial institutions to help community banks make loans to small businesses.

The figure for November was revised higher, however, to show a gain of 64,000 jobs. That was initially reported as a gain of 4,000.

White House adviser Christina Romer said the report was encouraging but also served as a “reminder of how far we still have to go to return the economy to robust health and full employment.”

“Today’s numbers showing continued decline in construction and state and local government employment emphasize the importance of two other of the President’s priorities – continued infrastructure investment and additional aid for strapped state and local governments,” Romer said.

Much of January’s report offers hope that employers are starting to reverse course and may start adding jobs soon. Aside from November’s gain, January’s job losses were the smallest since the recession began and are down from the huge loss of 779,000 jobs in January 2009.

The manufacturing sector added jobs for the first time since January 2007. Its gain of 11,000 jobs was the most since April 2006.

Retailers added 42,100 jobs, the most since November 2007, before the recession began. Temporary help services gained 52,000 jobs, its fourth month of gains. That could signal future hiring, as employers usually hire temp workers before permanent ones.

The average work week increased to 33.3 hours, from 33.2. That indicates employers are increasing hours for their current workers, a step that usually precedes new hiring.

The number of part-time workers who want full-time work, but can’t find it, fell by almost 1 million. That lowered the “underemployment” rate, which also includes discouraged workers, to 16.5 percent from 17.3 percent.

The federal government has begun hiring workers to perform the 2010 census, which added 9,000 jobs. That process could add as many as 1.2 million jobs this year, though they will all be temporary.

President Obama is scheduled to attend a Friday memorial service for seven CIA officers and contractors killed in Afghanistan in December.

The service is to be held Friday morning at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

The suicide bombing on a CIA base in Afghanistan last week was carried out by a Jordanian doctor who was an al-Qaeda double-agent, Western intelligence officials have said.

The bomber was within seconds of being searched by security contractors when he detonated his explosives, a former intelligence official with knowledge of the incident told CNN in January.

Initial reports said that the attack, which killed seven CIA officers, was carried out by a member of the Afghan National Army.

Two of those killed were contractors with private security firm Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, a former intelligence official told the Press. The CIA considers contractors to be officers.

U.S. and Jordanian officials say the bomber, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, had been recruited as a counterterrorism intelligence agent, despite concerns over his extremist views. He was being used in the hunt for a senior al Qaeda figure.

Al-Balawi was arrested by Jordanian intelligence more than a year ago. He had moderated the main al-Qaida chat forum before his arrest and was known online as Abu Dujanah al-Khurasani.

The Jordanians believed that al-Balawi had been successfully reformed and brought over to the American and Jordanian side. They set him up as an agent and sent him to Afghanistan and Pakistan to infiltrate al-Qaida.

Reva aida’s main chat Bhalla, director of analysis for the international intelligence company STRATFOR, said in January that the suicide bombing was “a huge blow, symbolically and tactically.” The bombing eliminated so many CIA officers, who can take years to become ingrained in the region.

In addition, the attack showed the ability of the Taliban to penetrate perhaps the most difficult of targets–a CIA base, she said.

Former CIA official Robert Richer called the bombing the greatest loss of life for the agency since the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, which killed eight agents.