Obama makes Bush's record public

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/ExecutiveOrderPresidentialRecords/

by sama • 18 years ago

75 28 18 years ago

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/ExecutiveOrderPresidentialRecords/

Obama may very well have entered this using FCKEditor himself. Evidence: The title:

    <strong>Executive Order -- Presidential Records</strong>

Empty paragraphs and all, this looks like most article content that gets spit out of a CMS. Of course, I have no reason to believe that it was Obama in particular, but you never know, it was his first executive order...

Also, a sign of things to come for lobbyists:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/ExecutiveOrder-Et...

unalone• 18 years ago

Wait, how does the title mean Obama did it directly? I'd suspect that he drafted the order, but there's no evidence of this being anything other than a copy.

The no-lobbyists order has been a long time coming. I'm thrilled.

vlad• 18 years ago

Obama read it word for word to his secretary, while jogging, over his blackberry phone. It's pretty cool news regardless.

gruseom5• 18 years ago

"Starting today," Mr. Obama said, "every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known."

I may never get over the astonishment of seeing a president who thinks like I do.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/us/politics/22obama.html

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

In style, anyway. We'll see what happens when people want to look into his affairs, or when they want a detailed accounting of the proposed $1 trillion Obama bailout.

edit: okay, those changes have some (mostly symbolic) substance to them. But there is not enough light in the world to illuminate all the caves in Mordor. I am not going to bet the house on the age of secrecy being over in Washington

edit edit: This is priceless. Rules without teeth, now that is change you can believe in!

"The Republican National Committee criticized that requirement and said the new administration was already violating it. Mr. Obama’s nominee for deputy secretary of defense, William Lynn, has been a lobbyist for the defense contractor Raytheon, and his nominee for deputy secretary of health and human services, William V. Corr, lobbied for stricter tobacco regulations as an official with the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

A senior White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, conceded the two nominees did not adhere to the new rules. But he said that Mr. Lynn had the support of Republicans and Democrats, and would receive a waiver under the policy, and that Mr.Corr did not need a waiver because he had agreed to recuse himself from tobacco issues.

“When you set very tough rules, you need to have a mechanism for the occasional exception,” this official said, adding, “We wanted to be really tough, but at the same time we didn’t want to hamstring the new administration or turn the town upside down.”"

gruseom5• 18 years ago

No. Not just in style. A day after inauguration he has already issued substantive decisions that are in keeping with his rhetoric (not to mention a total repudiation of the un-American nightmare the country can hopefully now move beyond).

Besides, Obama's style goes far beyond what politicians who are merely posing are capable of. It indicates a cast of mind and is not so easy to fake. Compare it to Clinton who was obviously faking, but who did it so well that people liked him.

I don't expect that Obama can or will fix everything. But I stand by what I said: he thinks like I do. On nearly every topic in his speech yesterday, he said what I hoped he would say. I never imagined such a thing could happen.

Edit: by the way, though your first proposed test is pretty vague, your second -- a detailed accounting of spending -- is one that I feel pretty confident about. I'd be very surprised if that didn't happen, and happen in a way that is clearly new. (Especially since Obama already championed it as a senator.)

Edit 2: people come up with all sorts of straw men. You'd have to be an idiot to think that Obama is going to usher in a kingdom of light, or do anything that goes against human nature. What we're talking about here is incremental improvement. That happens to matter. If you disagree, I give you the past 8 years.

Calamitous• 18 years ago

Awesome! So when/how can I view Obama's records as well...?

gojomo2• 18 years ago

And the hacker angle is...?

pg• 18 years ago

One is that there's going to be a lot of data in there. It will turn out to be possible to reconstruct a lot of concealed things by noticing patterns, and by connecting indirect evidence.

More generally it represents a dramatic shift toward hacker values.

gojomo2• 18 years ago

There's a lot of data and political-systems content related to just about every executive action. I'm not looking forward to a parade of Executive Order text submissions from Obama fans who can squint and find a hacker angle in anything.

On the face of it, there is one major change under the new order: a former president can no longer unilaterally request withholding of their records (until possibly reversed by a court order). Now, the Archivist acting with the approval of the current President can ignore a former President's wishes.

Whether that's really a dramatic shift in practice, we'll see. (There may not be a single record actually released by this change, if Obama and his Archivist agree with former Presidents on any requests.) An article actually arguing this is a dramatic pro-hacker shift would be welcome. In the meantime, the raw Order text with a spun headline is a bad precedent.

I fully expect tenuous submissions of this type will fade with time. But the sooner they are replaced with analytical takes -- even if on the same subjects -- the better.

Editted with correction: removed "for the 12-year period" and reference to only Bush-43 and Clinton-42 as being affected. The prior policy extended to any former President.

mynameishere• 18 years ago

On day one...

“When you set very tough rules, you need to have a mechanism for the occasional exception,”

...they're making exceptions. Specifically, "When the President does it, it isn't illegal.

gruseom5• 18 years ago

That is a non sequitur. We all know who stood for the latter idea, and there is no equivalence here.

ryanwaggoner• 18 years ago

There's a substantial difference between making an exception to your own self-imposed standard and violating the rule of law.

martythemaniak• 18 years ago

Except the Bush admin had the foresight to use a private email system whose archives magically got "lost".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_e-mail_controv...

But hey, maybe they accidentally used the official email system for something that might be of interest.

vaksel• 18 years ago

weren't those emails magically found a few days ago? Not sure if I read it in a story or someone talked about it in a comment

joe_adk• 18 years ago

Took a while for all the magical redaction.

tstegart• 18 years ago

No, a judge ordered records preserved before the administration left office. But many emails were apparently not recovered.

jonas_b• 18 years ago

I can't wait til the day a US Pres use "Don't be evil" as motto for his administration.

indiejade• 18 years ago

I sense that this is going to be just the beginning of an "astonishing" year regarding what went down during the Bush years. Watergate Part II

hendler• 18 years ago

Obama is my lobbyist. He just happens to also be president.

CTO in the cabinet, open government, search for all public archives, more online services and efficiency.

Once people taste clean water, will they drink dirty water again?

Day 2 and seems real so far.

ra• 18 years ago

I am overwhelmed by the potential of this man.

Forgive my ignorance, but does anyone know the substance of Executive Order 13233?

"Sec. 6. Revocation. Executive Order 13233 of November 1, 2001, is revoked."

edit: Oh forgive my trigger happiness. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13233

colinake• 18 years ago

I think it's great that he's making records public and all, but before we start judging his character and how he's going to govern, let's realize this is only Day 2.

You can't summarize a man by one (extremely highly scrutinized) day of action. In a few years we will be able to summarize the man. I for one hope it's a good summary.

jpwagner• 18 years ago

Can someone please clarify: What (of Bush's "record") can I read and where can I read it? Depending on the content (which I am not clear on) this could possibly be a problem for national security. Shouldn't it be something like former-president-records-go-public-after-XX-years?

Obama makes Bush's record public

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