Sometime today, President Obama is going to issue an executive order eliminating the Mexico City policy (aka the Global Gag Rule) that prohibits the use of taxpayer money for foreign aid to organizations that provide abortions or information about abortion. So, let’s review:
Day One:
Issues executive orders restoring the Presidential Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act, freezing executive pay, and banning lobbying for incoming and outgoing members of his administration.
Files motions to suspend all Military Commission trials.
Also, meets with national security team and tasks them with implementing a withdrawal of all combat teams from Iraq within 16 months.
Day Two:
Issues executive order to close Gitmo (and all other secret prisons). Also issues executive order making the Army Field Manual the uniform standard for interrogations (effectively banning torture). Congress passes the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
Day Three:
Issues executive order eliminating the Mexico City policy.
So far, I can’t find anything to complain about.
As opposed to Bush’s first executive orders.
My, how times have changed.
Don’t worry. He’ll eventually do something we can all complain about.
Seriously, I’ve been very pleased with the first few days. He has exceeded my expectations.
As I recall (and my memory is sketchy at best), Clinton’s first 100 days were something to smile about as well. He tried to end the ban on gays in the military and repealed all the anti-abortion crap that Papa Bush installed. He also promised comprehensive health care reform. Of course, he was shot down almost immediately and the next 8 years were a let down.
Hopefully, with a Democratic congressional majority, Obama will fare better.
But, as a total far left winger, I have to say Obama is a breath of fresh air.
He’s doing what he said he’d do. That alone might be a historic first. These are fundamental changes from the conventional wisdom of only months ago, when the echo chamber agreed that such actions would amount to polical suicide and national peril. Yet Obama just made them happen without any, well, drama.
The funny thing is that now I’m hearing criticism that Obama just did the easy and obvious stuff, plucked the low-hanging fruit, and now is getting credit for nothing. And yet none of these things were seriously addressed in two years of a Dem-controlled Congress.
Looks to me like Obama is going to be a remarkable mix of pragmatic and principled president. So far he’s done more good for America in three days than Bush and Congress did in 8 long years. The hard economic stuff is coming soon, and will offer no obvious solutions. Some of us will be pissed at some of what Obama decides. But judging from these first days, Obama will deal with the no-win decisions as intelligently and beneficially as anybody could. I feel it’s possible to trust him to do the best that can be done — which I haven’t felt in so long that it scares me.
And the internet is watching him closely!
So refreshing, to have a savvy President.
Oh sure, but what’s he done in the last 10 minutes?
Guantanamo and the black sites, fabulous, though one year is much too long. Now let’s see what he does about the people who are still there, including the poor guy who was taken there seven years ago at age 14 because he supposedly was a member of Al Qa`eda……..when he was eleven years old. One third of his short life spent in that hell hole. But what about Bagram, and other American-run horror houses in Afghanistan and Iraq? If he doesn’t also close those places, then closing Guantanamo starts to look like a P.R. stunt.
Suspending the Military Commission kangaroo court – not bad, but not quite good enough. He ought to close it down altogether (yeah, I get that suspending it might be the first step toward that, and am willing to wait and see what he does at the end of the 120 days, but I am not going to get out the pom poms and brass band just yet).
Presidential Records Act, FOIA, lobbying ban – excellent.
Making the Army Field Manual the standard – yes, but there was some scary equivocation that went along with it. Are Rachel Maddow and I the only ones who picked up on it? I’m not giving him an A for that when he provided enough “wiggle room” to still fit a few torture techniques in there.
Iraq – not so hot. Now he has even dropped the word “withdrawal”, and is asking his military commanders to talk amongst themselves about the possibility of a “drawdown”, as he keeps moonwalking faster and faster.
On Palestine – simply disgusting. He spoke as if they were two equal parties battling it out, as if the suffering and death on the part of Israelis (14 dead, ten of them combatants, four or five by “friendly fire”) were equal to that of Palestinians (around 1400 dead so far, the vast majority civilians, more than 1/3 of them children, more Palestinian children than Hamas fighters killed). He sort of kind of acknowledged that the Palestinians have been having a bit of a hard time of it, but made not a hint of the horrific toll of killing an maiming, or the utter destruction of vital infrastructure (using mostly American-made weapons bought with American money), and he seemed to indicate that this was just one of those things that happens to people – not a word about Israel’s responsibility for it. He put all the onus on Hamas, and required nothing of Israel except to withdraw from Gaza, which they had already done by then. And he repeated the obvious lie that it was all about Hamas firing thousands of rockets, when it clearly was not. But what can we expect given the people he has surrounded himself with?
So far there is some great, some good, some better than nothing, and some not at all acceptable. Not wonderful, but considering past history, and the available alternative, not terrible.