Open Illinois.org

In fewer than 24 hours in office, President Obama has made a small but significant step forward for government transparency at the federal level. I wholeheartedly approve.

My buddy jtlight sent me a link to a site depicts the robots.txt file of WhiteHouse.gov both before and immediately after Obama’s swearing-in.

Here’s the robots.txt file from whitehouse.gov yesterday:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /query.html
Disallow: /omb/search
Disallow: /omb/query.html
Disallow: /expectmore/search
Disallow: /expectmore/query.html
Disallow: /results/search
Disallow: /results/query.html
Disallow: /earmarks/search
Disallow: /earmarks/query.html
Disallow: /help
Disallow: /360pics/text
Disallow: /911/911day/text
Disallow: /911/heroes/text

And it goes on like that for almost 2400 lines! Here’s the new Obamafied robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/

(According to the page, the robots.txt file “tells search engines what to include and not include in their indexes.” That’s important when you scour the Google for info on the president’s statements on the economy, Iraq…anything.)

In other good news, it appears that our new president is at least taking his time and being thoughtful about new regulations in the wake of the financial collapse. All of these regulations (and then some) could still go through, but this is a good beginning. The Competitive Enterprise Institute is calling for a freeze on new regulations for one year (except those pertaining to health and safety)–now that’s some change I can believe in.