President Obama is really giving me and other libertarians reason to believe in change. He’s been president for two days and the man has already taken steps to clean up some of the expansion-of-power messes left by his predecessor. This is good stuff.

He rescinded one of Bush’s executive orders which allowed former Presidents to claim executive privilege when faced with releasing old records. On top of that, he’s now making it more difficult for himself to classify documents under executive privilege, by suddenly requiring the attorney general to sign off before he can do so.

On his first day, he ordered a stop to all military trials at Gitmo. This is big because it has long be known that those trials were a complete joke. For a good understanding of the previous administrations policies regarding detainees, watch the documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side. Obama will order order Gitmo closed very soon, bet on it.

He has ordered all executive agencies to come up with a plan to expedite the compliance with all FOIA requests. Bush’s administration, specifically John Ashcroft, pretty much did the opposite by ordering everyone to do everything in their power to refuse or bog down FOIA requests. Obama had this to say:

For a long time now there has been too much secrecy in this city. The old rules said that if there was a defensible argument for not disclosing something to the American people, then it should not be disclosed. That era is now over. Starting today, 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.

This Obama guy is pretty cool so far.

For years now, I’ve had a link in my sidebar to a study done by CATO entitled The Constitutional Record of George W Bush.  Obama should read that, and reverse the problems outlined in it one by on.

Another suggestion for Obama (by the way, these suggestions are being made on other blogs. I’m not original): END THE WAR ON DRUGS. I’m certainly not optimistic that this will happen, but here’s the argument. No set of laws and policies have done more to erode the people’s faith in their government than those known as the War on Drugs. It has ballooned the size of our prison system, created an unemployable underclass of nonviolent offenders, eroded our constitutional protections in a huge variety of ways, turned small town police forces across the nation into quasi-military operations with the equipment and gear that go along with it, and corrupted our justice system almost beyond repair by distorting the relationship between crime and apropriate punishment (mandatory minimums and three strike laws). But besides all that, (especially since nobody listens to common sense anymore when it comes to DRUGS) it could be a silver bullet for the recession. Consider this, alcohol prohibition was ended right at the end of the great depression, or at least right at the bottom of the deflationary cycle. Suddenly there was an entire new sector of economic growth. The legal trade of alchohol brought new tax revenue. It brought jobs in manufacturing, distribution, retail sales, bar and club revenue, etc.

UPDATE 1/23/09:

Since today’s news is right along the same lines as my post yesterday, I figure it belongs here.

Obama just ENDED THE WAR ON TERROR. That doesn’t mean that counterterroism measures are suspended. Quite the contrary, it free’s up intelligence to actually snoop out and fight terror, since that’s not what the War on Terror was about. It nothing more than symbolic bullshit meant to give wartime powers to the executive branch on any soil, including our own. Obama also just nullified every legal order made by any lawyer in the executive branch regarding interrogations since 9/11/2001.

This guy is turning out to be a libertarian’s dream. I’m sure I’ll have a lot of complaints about his fiscal policy, especially if/when it proves not to actually help the economy, but to hurt it instead through domestic inflation and the further weakening of the dollar as america’s credit rating plunges because of such a poor balance sheet. HOWEVER, I’ll be happy to take a strong civil libertarian executive with poor fiscal policy; especially since he’s replacing a tyrant with absolutely no incling of civil libertarianism AND absolutely shitty fiscal policy.