In what could be a truly hopeful sign of change, the Obama administration has reversed two policies — one proposed, one enacted — that have garnered considerable criticism of late.

First up, it has reversed the regulation forbidding the military from reselling used ammunition casings for reloading. The policy — selling them purely for scrap, and actually mangling them beyond re-use before reselling — was a transparent ploy to make ammunition scarcer and more expensive; the rule guaranteed an 80% drop in revenues from the resale to the government, not even counting the costs in mutilating the casings.

Next, the administration has announced that under no circumstances will it try to pass the costs of medical care for wounded veterans onto their private insurance. The initial proposal — to allow the VA to bill veterans’ private insurance companies for care for  service-related injuries and disabilities — would have shifted almost a billion dollars from the federal government to the insurers. This would have burned our veterans, whose “pre-existing conditions” could have caused them considerable hardship with their own insurance companies.

This is the kind of Change many of us have been Hoping for — signs that sanity will actually prevail, and the Obama administration will forgo some of its more radical (and stupid) ideas and reconcile with reality.

Here’s hoping it’s not an aberration, and that the Obama administration will start doing the right thing from the outset, and not after being pummeled by public outcries.