President Barack Obama is abandoning a Bush administration plan to build a big, fixed U.S. missile defense in Eastern Europe.

The president announced the decision Thursday amid reports from Poland and the Czech Republic overnight that officials there had been informed about the final decision.

Instead of a fixed missile shield, the administration plans a more mobile defense aimed at short- and medium-range rockets.

The missile shield plan had angered Moscow and caused a chill in U.S.-Russian relations despite Washington’s insistence the program was aimed at Iran.

The Bush administration, which had been working on the plan for some time, officially signed the deal with Poland last year in a slap at Moscow for its war with Georgia.

Obama’s Republican rival for the White House, Senator John McCain, criticized the decision, saying it called into question the “security and diplomatic commitments the United States has made to Poland and the Czech Republic.”

House Republican Leader John Boehner said the decision “does little more than empower Russia and Iran at the expense of our allies in Europe.”

U.S. officials portrayed the decision as a shift based on new intelligence showing Iran is more focused on short- and medium-term rockets rather than intercontinental ballistic weapons capable of striking at the United States with nuclear warheads.

The decision would abandon the idea for big fixed installations in Poland for interceptor missiles and in the Czech Republic for a radar system, officials said. They would be replaced by systems the officials described as more versatile.

The missile defense announcement may overshadow developments on the healthcare front. Obama is pushing healthcare reform — his top domestic agenda — at a rally in Maryland later.

The push comes a day after Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus unveiled a healthcare overhaul bill after months of negotiations with Democratic and Republican colleagues — the so-called Gang of Six.

The 10-year, $856 billion plan did not include a public insurance alternative favored by Obama and many other Democrats. It was unclear whether it would win much Republican or Democratic support.

But Baucus portrayed it as a measure that could pass the Senate and would meet Obama’s goal of not adding to the the federal deficit.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office put the cost of the bill even lower — at $774 billion — and said it would shave $49 billion from the deficit over 10 years and cut the number of uninsured people by about 29 million.

Baucus meets with the congressional Democratic caucus to pitch his plan Thursday.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Francois Lenoir (Protesters in Czech Republic demonstrate against U.S. missile defense shield plans in April)

Perhaps you've heard about the Russian submarines patrolling international waters off the U.S. East Coast (if you haven't, take a look at a Reuters story about it) in what feels like an echo of the old Cold War. The Pentagon's not worried about this particular venture, but there are concerns from the U.S. energy industry about another Russian foray -- this one in concert with Cuba. In rhetoric that may ring a bell with anyone who saw the 1964 satirical nuclear-fear movie "Dr. Strangelove,"
the Washington-based Institute for Energy Research is sounding the alarm about a Russian-Cuban deal to drill for offshore oil near Florida.

"Russia, Communist Cuba Advance Offshore Energy Production Miles Off Florida's Coast," is the title on the institute's news release. Below that is the prescription for action: "Efforts Should Send Strong Message to Interior Dept. to Open OCS in Five-Year Plan." OCS stands for outer continental shelf, an area that was closed to oil drilling until the Bush administration opened it last year in a largely symbolic move aimed at driving down the sky-high gasoline prices of the Summer of 2008.

Environmentalists hate the idea. So does Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who has made opposition to offshore drilling one of his signature issues. But as it turns out, it's unlikely that anybody -- from Russia, Cuba, the United States or anywhere else -- is going to get petroleum out of the OCS in the immediate future.

For a start, it takes time to set up a deep-water offshore drilling rig. And any Cuban effort would be further hampered by the need to use equipment with less than 10 percent American technology, to comply with the long standing U.S. embargo against Cuba. As my Reuters colleague Russell Blinch reported in June, there may be scope for possible U.S.-Cuban cooperation here but no Cuban drilling platform is likely to be in the area this year.

Reports of a Russian-Cuban deal to explore for oil in the Gulf of Mexico prompted a quick response from the Institute for Energy Research, self-described as a free-market energy think-tank.

"This agreement between Russia and Cuba should serve as a wake-up call to Congress and this administration, especially (Interior) Secretary (Ken) Salazar, who is slow-walking a new offshore energy blueprint for the nation," the institute's president, Thomas Pyle, said in a statement. "If we are to remain competitive in the global market, our government must take its foot off the brake, and expand domestic energy production of all forms, onshore and off.”

What's your take? Should the United States drill baby drill off Florida's coast, reasoning that if U.S. companies don't, Russia and Cuba will? Keep a congressional ban in place? Or wait and see?

Photo credit: Reuters staff photographer (Pensacola Beach, Florida, June 25, 2008); Reuters stringer/Russia (Russian nuclear submarine off Vladivostok, July 24, 2009)

Did President Barack Obama step on his own healthcare message last night?

Morning TV shows led with his comments about  black Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates who was arrested after trying to get into his own home.

Obama said police acted “stupidly,” a comment likely to lose him some friends in law enforcement, and that the incident was a reminder the race issue “still haunts us.”

It was a brand new comment from the president on a hot-button issue: race relations in America.

So how could the healthcare comments, which dominated the nearly hour-long news conference, compete? They ended up playing second fiddle because it was the same pitch heard over and over recently.

Next week will be crunchtime to see if Congress will give the new president a feather for his cap by voting on healthcare legislation before the August recess.

No foreign policy questions at the news conference. Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to Tbilisi, Georgia, was not overlooked by Russia which is doing some saber-rattling over it today.

Closer to home, Obama keeps pressing on healthcare today with a trip to Cleveland. His popularity has taken a bit of a drubbing in Ohio, so watch for the reception.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Larry Downing (Obama gestures at news conference)

With President Barack Obama off in Italy during a weeklong diplomatic foray, Vice President Joseph Biden has the stage on Wednesday for an announcement of the administration’s agreement with the hospital industry for $155 billion in savings over a decade to help pay for a planned healthcare overhaul.

For Biden, it is a rare chance to gain the administration spotlight by design, rather than because of his famously loose lips and periodic departures from the Team Obama script.

He strayed again over the weekend when he told ABC News the administration misread the economy upon entering office. Obama, in a round of interviews with U.S. television networks on Tuesday, was forced to backtrack and explain those comments.

Biden’s expertise is in foreign policy, not domestic issues such as healthcare, and Obama has acknowledged as much by giving him the lead in dealing with Iraq and a prominent role on issues like Russian relations. Biden kicked off his role in Iraq with a surprise visit there over the July 4th holiday weekend.

The announcement on the hospital deal, which follows a deal with drug makers, comes as the administration hunts for ways to cover the cost of a healthcare overhaul with an expected price tage of at least $1 trillion.

After catching the national media off guard with Friday’s pre-holiday weekend bombshell that she was resigning as Alaska governor, Sarah Palin gave the television networks a chance to catch up with a round of stage-managed interviews for the morning news shows.

Television correspondents lined up to land a few minutes with Palin, decked out in overalls and wading in the surf at husband Todd’s family fishing operation. With children in tow on the fishing trip/photo op, she explained her decision to bail out of office more than a year early.

It had nothing to do with running for president in 2012, she said. She’s just unconventional. Once she had decided she was not running for re-election, she knew she could not “play the political game that most politicians do,” she told NBC.

“That is who we are as Alaskans and it’s certainly who I am,” she told CNN. “I’m not going to take that comfortable path. I’m going to take the right path for the state.”

To ABC: “I’m extremely happy. Politically speaking, if I die, I die. So be it.”

But in all the interviews, which included plenty of footage of Palin looking like the fisherwoman next door, she refused to close the door on a presidential run.

“I can’t predict what the next fish run is going to look like, much less the next few years,” she told NBC. To CNN: “All options are going to keep on being on the table.”

But she sounded like she had read some of the critical stories about her vice presidential run last year. Using a word critics sometimes use to describe her, she told NBC that having the kids work at the fishing operation “teaches these kids to work extremely hard and to not be divas.”

Palin’s round of interviews managed to top the round done by President Barack Obama, who has been talking non-stop during his visit to Moscow. In several interviews, Obama took pains to correct Vice President Joe Biden’s comment that the administration “misread” the economy.

 ”I would actually, rather than say misread — we had incomplete information,” Obama said on NBC. “In some ways you’re seeing the economic engine turn, but what we always knew was that a) this recession was going to be deep and b) it was going to last a while.”

 ”There’s nothing that we would have done differently,” he told ABC.

Obama even commented on Palin, saying he respected her comment the decision was a family matter. “She has a fairly loyal constituency in the Republican Party and the conservative movement,” he said on NBC.

As for the topic that dominated the morning news shows, singer Michael Jackson’s funeral, Obama had this to say about Jackson: “What I do believe is that black sports figures and black entertainers helped to create a comfort level with African-Americans that had an impact historically.”

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Photo credits: REUTERS/Tami Chappell (Palin waves to crowd at rally in Georgia in December); REUTERS/Jim Young (Obama delivers remarks at Moscow)

After a week of holiday barbecue, hometown parades and constituent fence-mending, members of the U.S. Congress begin to drift back to Washington on Monday for what promises to be its most severe test of the year — finding common ground on a mammoth overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system.

The Senate is back in session on Monday afternoon and the House of Representatives returns on Tuesday to begin work on melding two different Senate bills and three House versions into legislation that can earn initial approval from each chamber before lawmakers adjourn for the month of August.

There are plenty of obstacles for the proposals, President Barack Obama’s top legislative priority this year, from trimming the potential $1 trillion cost to determining how to pay and whether to include a government-run public insurance option for approximately 46 million uninsured Americans.

Obama, meanwhile, arrived in Moscow on Monday as the United States and Russia try to break a stalemate on nuclear arms control talks. It is the opening of a weeklong Obama trip that also will include the summit of G8 wealthy industrialized nations in Italy and his first visit as president to Africa with a stop in Ghana.

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Photo credits: REUTERS/Hyungwon Kang (Fireworks over U.S. Capitol); REUTERS/Anatoly Maltsev/Pool (Obama and Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev at Kremlin)

LYNCHBURG, Virginia - Democrat Barack Obama scolded Russia again on Wednesday for invading another country’s sovereign territory while adding a new twist: the United States, he said, should set a better example on that front, too.

The Illinois senator’s opposition to the Iraq war, which his comment clearly referenced, is well known. But this was the first time the Democratic presidential candidate has made a comparison between the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Russia’s recent military activity in Georgia.

“We’ve got to send a clear message to Russia and unify our allies,” Obama told a crowd of supporters in Virginia. “They can’t charge into other countries. Of course it helps if we are leading by example on that point.”

Foreign policy has become a dividing line in the race for the White House.

Obama favors a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq over 16 months, while John McCain, his Republican rival for president, opposes a timeline and says U.S. forces must stay to finish and win the war.

McCain, an Arizona senator, sought to highlight his foreign policy credentials during the Russia-Georgia crisis last week, giving a series of harsh statements directed at Moscow soon after the conflict began.

Obama, who was on vacation in Hawaii, followed suit with statements that became sharper over time.

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