President Barack Obama is off to a great start. Some of these stories you may have heard about–others were quieter.
Began his foreign policy by calling several Middle East leaders (Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and Jordan’s King Abdullah–but not, unfortunately, any representative of Hamas) to talk about peace–and by appointing former Senator George Mitchell, a man who had much to do with the negotiated peace in Northern Ireland, his Middle East peace envoy
Also took the first steps toward drawing down forces in Iraq and closing Guantanamo
Overturned the secretive policies of the Bush administration in favor of much greater openness, including much better responses to Freedom Of Information Act requests:
The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears… All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.
Got his Blackberry back, after the National Security Administration made it supposedly unhackable
Discovered, along with many of his staff, that the White House computer systems are years obsolete
Had a substantive discussion with his economic advisors
Let’s keep the momentum up! There’s a whole lot of damage to undo, and even more, a whole lot ofnew progress to be made.
