Unfortunately, over the last decade, we’ve not done what’s necessary to shore up the foundations of our own prosperity. We spent a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has short-changed investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits.

But there’s no getting away from the fact that these statements apply equally to the first two years of the Obama administration.

If it hurts the economy to finance these huge war expenditures by borrowing, then why has Obama made exactly zero efforts to do anything about it? I don’t see how it’s a defense to say “But Bush started it!” Maybe, but Obama cheerfully continued it. As if there was no choice but to do so. And, of course, the whole point of that quote from his speech is that there was always a choice. There was a choice for Bush. And there was a choice for Obama. And Obama made the same choice as Bush. Even though he’s been criticizing Bush’s choice for the last three years.

I really think that Obama should have proposed a “Bush’s Wars” tax increase early in 2009. Perhaps a temporary increase, to be phased out as the wars wound down.

Clearly, the wars needed to be paid for. And there was no reason for Obama to take the political heat for this necessity. But it really shouldn’t have been too difficult — even for the hapless Democrats — to hang this fairly and squarely around Bush’s neck.

I’m not saying the Republicans — together with the elements of the Democratic Party who have proven time and again that they are easily intimidated by Republican rhetoric — would have actually allowed the tax increase to go through. But doesn’t Obama’s consistent rhetoric on the irresponsibility of funding these two wars by borrowing require that he should at least have tried?

And wouldn’t he have won politically even by losing?

This is far from the first time that Obama has been in the spotlight for seamlessly continuing the Bush era philosophy that in The War Against Terror it’s perfectly okay to cheerfully trample all over the Constitution, and then come back and jump on it with hob-nailed boots for good measure.

As a 26-year-old Muslim American man who spent 18 months in Yemen before heading home to Virginia in early May, Yahya Wehelie caught the attention of the F.B.I. Agents stopped him while he was changing planes in Cairo, told him he was on the no-fly list and questioned him about his contacts with another American in Yemen, one accused of joining Al Qaeda and fatally shooting a hospital guard.

For six weeks, Mr. Wehelie has been in limbo in the Egyptian capital. He and his parents say he has no radical views, despises Al Qaeda and merely wants to get home to complete his education and get a job.

But after many hours of questioning by F.B.I. agents, he remains on the no-fly list. When he offered to fly home handcuffed and flanked by air marshals, Mr. Wehelie said, F.B.I. agents turned him down.
[...]
On Tuesday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based group that has been working with Mr. Wehelie’s family, wrote to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to protest what its executive director, Nihad Awad, called “apparently illegal pressure tactics” against Muslim American travelers.

“If the F.B.I. wishes to question American citizens, they should be allowed to return to the United States, where they will be able to maintain their constitutional rights free of threats or intimidation,” Mr. Awad wrote.

Mr. Awad noted that Yahya Wehelie’s younger brother, Yusuf, 19, who was stopped with him in Cairo, faced a shorter but even more harrowing time in Egypt. Questioned first by the F.B.I., Yusuf was later held for three days by Egyptian security officers, blindfolded, chained to a wall and roughed up before being allowed to travel home May 12, he said in an interview.

The American Civil Liberties Union says it has been contacted by a dozen people who say they have been improperly placed on the no-fly list since December, half of them Americans abroad.

“For many of these Americans, placement on the no-fly list effectively amounts to banishment from their country,” said Ben Wizner, a senior staff attorney with the A.C.L.U. He called such treatment “both unfair and unconstitutional.”
[...]
The no-fly list gives the American authorities greater leverage in assessing travelers who are under suspicion, because to reverse the flying ban many are willing to undergo hours of questioning.

But sometimes the questioning concludes neither with criminal charges nor with permission to fly. The Transportation Security Administration has a procedure allowing people to challenge their watch list status in cases of mistaken identity or name mix-up, but Mr. Wehelie does not fit those categories.
[...]
The American authorities in Cairo canceled his passport and issued a new one Sunday with the notation, “valid only for return to the United States before Sept. 12, 2010,” Mr. Wehelie said. That is his goal, he said, but he has no idea how to get home.

How beautiful is that? Without even the most perfunctory kind of legal proceeding, the Obama administration has taken away an American citizen’s passport, and given him a “passport” that is good only for one-way travel to the US, expiring in three months’ time, but refused him permission to actually use that “passport” to fly to the US, not even in handcuffs sandwiched between armed US marshals.

And the real beauty of the situation is that he has no way, none at all, to challenge any of this. (The FBI, incidentally, has proclaimed that it has carefully protected Yahya Wehelie’s civil rights, because “In conducting such investigations … the F.B.I. is always careful to protect the civil rights and privacy concerns of all Americans.” Indeed. And we have just finished eating the pudding that contained the proof of that statement, haven’t we?)

Because when President Obama’s homeland security apparatus intercepts you in Cairo, you ain’t got no damn rights at all. And that’s how President Obama likes it, apparently. And that prime defender of the laws of the land, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., too.

And why exactly has all of this happened to Yahya Wehelie? Well, God presumably knows. God, and some nameless bureaucrat, who in the time of Obama, is authorized to arbitrarily sentence American citizens to exile, no questions asked.

This, incidentally, is Yahya Wehelie’s family background:

At a news conference in Washington on Wednesday, Wehelie’s parents spoke of their patriotism and their disavowal of Islamic extremists; they noted that Yahya’s older brother served in Iraq with the U.S. Army and that members of their extended family work at the Department of Homeland Security.

Yahya Wehelie has been intensively interrogated : “he has spoken with the FBI 10 times and submitted to a polygraph test.” No charges of any kind have been brought. There is no evidence at all — or, at least, none has been adduced — that he is actually guilty of anything, or that there is a reasonable suspicion at this time that he might be involved in terrorist activities of any kind.

Will even the John Roberts Supreme Court be willing to sign off on something as blatantly outrageous as this?

If so, what happens to Yahya Wehelie on September 13, if his name has not yet been lifted from the no-fly list, and he is still stranded in Cairo? At that point, will he cease to be a citizen of the United States? Egypt will be free to clap him in jail, and do whatever they want with him, because he will literally be a man without a country?

Here’s a perfectly representative example of the hosannas that greeted every key appointment, from Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel:

If you needed any further proof that things are different–very different–today, there’s this: Balkinization blogger Marty Lederman will take John Yoo’s former position, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for OLC.

As of today, the commencement of the Obama Administration, he begins work as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel. There he will be joined by two of his former OLC colleagues, Dawn Johnsen, nominated to be head of the office; and David Barron, who will serve as the Principal Deputy (and as the Acting AAG while the Senate considers Dawn’s nomination).

We’ve replaced the guy who did Bush and Cheney’s evil bidding with a blogger-prof and Constitutional champion, Marty Lederman.

Welcome to a new day, America.

It wasn’t just bloggers, either. The Washington Post gushed thusly:

President Obama has made fine choices in tapping Dawn E. Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel and Martin S. Lederman and David Barron as her deputies. His selection of David S. Kris to head the department’s National Security Division is another excellent move. The appointments signal a return to the best traditions of the Justice Department …
[...]
Ms. Johnsen, Mr. Lederman and Mr. Barron, OLC lawyers during the Clinton administration and law professors since, have been leading and thoughtful critics of Bush administration policies on detention and national security.

And McClatchy brought us:

In filling four senior Justice Department positions Monday, President-elect Barack Obama signaled that he intends to roll back Bush administration counterterrorism policies authorizing harsh interrogation techniques, warrantless spying and indefinite detentions of terrorism suspects.

That was then.

After a long and disappointing succession of cases in which the Obama Justice Department Dream Team not only supported Bush-era positions but in several instances cheerfully outBushed the Bush Justice Department, this, sadly, is now:

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that three men who had been detained by the United States military for years without trial in Afghanistan had no recourse to American courts. The decision was a broad victory for the Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite periods without judicial oversight.

The detainees, two Yemenis and a Tunisian who say they were captured outside Afghanistan, contend that they are not terrorists and are being mistakenly imprisoned at the American military prison at Bagram Air Base.

But a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unanimously that the three had no right to habeas corpus hearings, in which judges would review evidence against them and could order their release. The court reasoned that Bagram was on the sovereign territory of another government and emphasized the “pragmatic obstacles” of giving hearings to detainees “in an active theater of war.”

The ruling dealt a severe blow to wider efforts by lawyers to extend a landmark 2008 Supreme Court ruling granting habeas corpus rights to prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A lower court judge had previously ruled that the three Bagram detainees were entitled to the same rights, although he had found that others captured in Afghanistan and held there were not.

A lawyer for the detainees, Tina Foster, said that if the precedent stood, Mr. Obama and future presidents would have a free hand to “kidnap people from other parts of the world and lock them away for the rest of their lives” without having to prove in court that their suspicions about such prisoners were accurate.

“The thing that is most disappointing for those of us who have been in the fight for this long is all of the people who used to be opposed to the idea of unlimited executive power during the Bush administration but now seem to have embraced it during this administration,” she said.

Here’s the crux of the matter:

The men’s case was originally heard by Judge John D. Bates of the Federal District Court, an appointee of former President George W. Bush. The Bush and Obama administrations had both urged Judge Bates not to extend habeas corpus rights beyond Guantánamo, arguing that courts should not interfere with military operations inside active combat zones.

But in April 2009, Judge Bates ruled that there was no difference between the three men who had filed suit and Guantánamo prisoners. His decision was limited to non-Afghans captured outside Afghanistan — a category that fits only about a dozen of the roughly 800 detainees at Bagram, officials have said.

In urging the appeals court to let Judge Bates’s decision stand, lawyers for the detainees argued that reversing it would mean that the government would be able “to evade judicial review of executive detention decisions by transferring detainees into active combat zones, thereby granting the executive the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will.”

Those who we once naively celebrated as champions of the Constitution are now fighting for the government’s right to switch the Constitution on or off at will. And winning.

Turnout among Dem voters dropped precipitously in 3 statewide primaries on Tuesday, giving the party more evidence that their voters lack enthusiasm ahead of midterm elections.

In primaries in NC, IN and OH, Dems turned out at far lower rates than they have in previous comparable elections.
[...]
The latest weekly Gallup tracking survey shows 43% of GOPers are “very enthusiastic” about voting, while just 33% of Dems feel the same way.

Watching Congressional Democrats act like moderate Republicans, and watching Obama act like a very slightly less imperial Bush is not a formula for winning elections. It’s going to be a bloodbath in November, a prediction I began making more than a year ago.

Here’s the case in a paragraph:

This is what happens when you trick people into voting for you based on the false idea that you’re a progressive. This is what happens when you promise change and then deliver more of the same on banking, state secrets, Guantanamo, perpetual wars, etc. This is what happens when you refuse to prosecute or even investigate people involved in the torture regime. This is what happens when you break all your promises to the GLBT community. This is what happens when you sell out labor on card check. This is what happens when you take single-payer off the table before the health care debate even begins, and then negotiate away the effectiveness of an already weak-ass public option. This is what happens when you surround yourself with people who value Wall Street over people who produce things. This is what happens when you rush to bail out the people who brought down the economy while skimping on the stimulus that should have been much bigger and more targeted. This is what happens when you sit on your hands as unemployment goes over 10% and underemployment heads towards 20%. This is what happens when you know how to campaign, but know nothing about governing and even less about practical politics. This is what happens when you try to appease the insane third of the country who will never vote for you and will never stop trying to push you out of office over enacting policies you promised to the people who actually voted for you. The story isn’t the 40% of Democrats who say they won’t vote, it’s the 56% who say they will! WTF do they think they are voting for?

The poster child for the Obama military tribunals is a mere child. Or, at least, that’s what he was when he was captured, before being bunged into Guantanamo Bay. He has now spent a third of his life in U.S. custody. Omar Khadr was 15 when we captured him, and started subjecting him to the full-fledged enemy combatant treatment (including, but not limited to, sleep deprivation, beatings, the use of stress positions and the threat of rape, ha ha!). He is now 23.

U.N. officials and human rights activists are appalled at our treatment of Omar Khadr, from the time he was captured right until now:

Khadr is the son of al-Qaeda supporters who took him to Pakistan and Afghanistan when he was 10. At one time, he lived in one of Osama bin Laden’s compounds. U.N. officials and human rights activists argue that he is an indoctrinated child soldier who should be rehabilitated and repatriated to Canada, not prosecuted. They have also expressed astonishment that the Obama administration would revive military tribunals with the prosecution of an alleged juvenile offender.

Here’s what I wrote about Khadr back in September 2007:

Omar Khadr is no innocent trapped in Guantanamo Bay because someone turned him in for the bounty. By all accounts, he is a genuine terrorist. But he was also just 15 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan (in a raid in which he killed Special Forces Sgt. Christopher Speer with a grenade), and he had apparently been brainwashed from childhood into fervently subscribing to jihadism.

We took him from the battlefield as it were, wounded so badly that it was unbelievable he was still alive, and we plunged him straight into our terrorist torture chambers, even before his wounds were healed. (Rolling Stone has a chilling account of his capture and the treatment we subsequently unleashed on this child, in gross violation of the Geneva conventions. Just charging an adolescent with war crimes violates the Geneva conventions. The torture and everything else was presumably thrown in just so that nobody could say we hadn’t thoroughly violated the namby-pamby Geneva conventions.)

At the time, I didn’t know that the accounts of him being a genuine terrorist were suspect:

A U.S. military commander altered a report on a firefight in Afghanistan to cast blame for the death of a Delta Force commando on a Canadian youth who was captured after the shooting stopped, a defence lawyer said today.

The attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, made the allegation at a pretrial hearing as he argued for access to the officer, identified only as Col. W., as well as details about interrogations that he said might help clear his client of war-crimes charges.

The U.S. military has charged Omar Khadr of Toronto with murder for allegedly throwing a grenade that killed Sgt. Christopher Speer during a U.S. military raid on July 27, 2002, on an Al Qaeda compound in eastern Afghanistan.
[...]
The military commander’s official report the day after the raid originally said the assailant who threw the grenade was killed, which would rule out Khadr as the suspect.

The report was revised months later, under the same date, to say a U.S. fighter had only “engaged” the assailant, according to Kuebler, who said the later version was presented to him by prosecutors as an “updated” document.

Kuebler told reporters after the hearing that it appears “the government manufactured evidence to make it look like Omar was guilty.”

The Obama administration presumably wouldn’t make this their first military tribunal trial if it wasn’t sure of securing a conviction. This would mean that the script calls for the tribunal judge to reject defense motions that “self-incriminating statements he made were the result of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and should be excluded as evidence.” And to ignore any and all inconvenient facts, such as evidence of ex-post doctoring of evidence.

Stay tuned to find out if the trial proceeds according to script.

It probably behooves us to ask: appropriate and necessary for what? Even he isn’t ready (yet) to argue that they are appropriate and necessary for the rule of law to triumph. They are appropriate and necessary “to convict and neutralize terrorists.”

I could have sworn that the oath this man swore was to uphold the constitution, not to “convict and neutralize terrorists”, but I must have somehow got it wrong.

Holder was speaking to members of the Constitution Project, “a group of devoted defenders of the Constitution — the kind of folks who ardently defend basic rights no matter how popular or unpopular, and regardless of politics.” So it was funny stuff to be pitching to them.

Holder also delivered himself of this little gem:

Let’s start with one stark fact: We are a nation at war. In this war, we face an intelligent, nimble and determined enemy.
[...]
Like every person sitting in this room, like the President and those who serve this administration, and like every Member serving in our Congress, I am determined to win this war. I know we can, and I am certain we will. But victory and security will not come easily. And they won’t come at all if we approach this work by adhering to a rigid ideology or narrow methodology.

You see, he’s a war AG. And, as Dan Froomkin drily points out, why should a war AG have to adhere to the rigid ideology of the Constitution?

It is, of course, perfectly ironic that Holder’s boss used to see pretty clearly that military commissions — quite apart from the issue of whether they besmirched the ideals of American justice — were simply counterproductive. This was candidate Obama in 2008:

By any measure, our system of trying detainees has been an enormous failure. Over the course of nearly seven years, there has not been a single conviction for a terrorist act at Guantanamo. There has been just one conviction for material support for terrorism. Meanwhile, this legal black hole (that would be the military commission system) has substantially set back America’s ability to lead the world against the threat of terrorism, and undermined our most basic values.

So there you have it. Fifteen months into Obama’s presidency, it is necessary to undermine our most basic values in order to convict and neutralize terrorists, and achieve victory and security in this war against an enemy who is too intelligent and nimble for our civilian justice system.

It’s just like they always told us. All’s fair.

At first blush, it may seem that Judge Walker held the NSA warrantless wiretapping program to be illegal. Especially when The New York Times‘ lede reads:

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration’s effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W. Bush.

and The Washington Post matches that with:

In the strongest legal repudiation yet of the George W. Bush administration’s program of warrantless wiretapping, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency acted illegally by eavesdropping on the phone conversations of two American lawyers and an Islamic charity.

Wrong both times, though.

Thanks to the way the Bush and Obama administrations chose to defend the lawsuit, Judge Walker’s judgment really doesn’t apply to the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program as a whole, but only to this one isolated instance.

The plaintiffs had contended that the NSA wiretapped them without warrants, and that this was a clear violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which forbids the monitoring of Americans’ e-mails or phone calls without warrants.

While the Bush administration had consistently claimed “that the president’s wartime powers enabled him to override the FISA statute”, they were apparently not willing to put this argument to a legal test.

So in defending the lawsuit, the Justice Department did not argue that the warrantless wiretapping in question — and the NSA’s entire program, by implication — was legal because the president’s wartime powers trump the FISA statute. In fact, they didn’t really defend the lawsuit at all, in the conventional sense. They neither presented proof that they had a secret warrant, and nor did they present any argument that the wiretapping was legal even without a warrant.

They only sought to have the lawsuit summarily dismissed by invoking the state secrets privilege.

In effect, the government was arguing that Judge Walker — or any other federal judge — should agree not to even try to determine whether President Bush broke the law because just the attempt to make that determination would compromise state secrets and national security. In effect, the government was arguing that the ability to hide behind the wide skirts of the state secrets privilege gives the President expansive rights to ignore whatever laws he chooses without ever being held accountable.

It was only this argument that Judge Walker rejected in finding for the plaintiffs:

The ruling by Judge Walker, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, rejected the Justice Department’s claim — first asserted by the Bush administration and continued under President Obama — that the charity’s lawsuit should be dismissed without a ruling on the merits because allowing it to go forward could reveal state secrets.

The judge characterized that expansive use of the so-called state-secrets privilege as amounting to “unfettered executive-branch discretion” that had “obvious potential for governmental abuse and overreaching.”

That position, he said, would enable government officials to flout the warrant law, even though Congress had enacted it “specifically to rein in and create a judicial check for executive-branch abuses of surveillance authority.”

Because the government merely sought to block the suit under the state-secrets privilege, it never mounted a direct legal defense of the N.S.A. program in the Haramain case.

Judge Walker did not directly address the legal arguments made by the Bush administration in defense of the N.S.A. program after The New York Times disclosed its existence in December 2005: that the president’s wartime powers enabled him to override the FISA statute.

Once Judge Walker rejected the state secrets privilege defense, the judgment hinged entirely on whether the plaintiffs could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they had, in fact, been wiretapped. Since the government neither produced a warrant nor offered an argument that a warrant wasn’t necessary, the wiretapping would then be deemed to be illegal.

By contrast, the Haramain case was closely watched because the government inadvertently disclosed a classified document that made clear that the charity had been subjected to surveillance without warrants.

Although the plaintiffs in the Haramain case were not allowed to use the document to prove that they had standing, Mr. Eisenberg and six other lawyers working on the case were able to use public information — including a 2007 speech by an F.B.I. official who acknowledged that Al Haramain had been placed under surveillance — to prove it had been wiretapped.

Judge Walker’s opinion cataloged other such evidence and declared that the plaintiffs had shown they were wiretapped in a manner that required a warrant. He said the government had failed to produce a warrant, so he granted summary judgment in favor of the plaintiffs.

So that’s all the judgment represents. Judge Walker found that the plaintiffs were wiretapped in a manner that requires a warrant under FISA. Everything else was successfully pushed under the carpet by the Bush-Obama strategy of deliberately not allowing the NSA program of warrantless wiretapping to be put on trial.

And it looks very much like we may never get to see a court rule on whether it was legal for President Bush to order the NSA to ignore FISA and engage in the warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

Previous posts about the Al Haramain case:
13 February, 2009 — Because Once Is Not Enough
3 March, 2009 — Out-Bushing Bush’s Department Of Justice
25 March 2009 — How Awesome Can the Obama Administration Get?

The Obama administration will approve significant oil and gas exploration off America’s coasts, including a possible sale two years from now of leases off Virginia’s coast, administration officials said Wednesday.

The move, which President Obama will announce Wednesday morning with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar at Andrews Air Force Base, ends a long-standing moratorium on oil and gas drilling along much of the East Coast, from Delaware to central Florida.

The new strategy, an administration official said, calls for also developing oil and gas exploration in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, more than 125 miles from Florida’s coast; and in large areas in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas in the Arctic Ocean, north of Alaska, after the government conducts detailed studies.
[...]
The drilling policy represents the White House’s latest attempt to straddle a middle ground on climate and energy policy…

So who was against it when Bush did it? Not just us, President Summer’s Eve was too:

“If offshore drilling would provide short-term relief at the pump or a long-term strategy for energy independence, it would be worthy of our consideration, regardless of the risks,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement. “But most experts, even within the Bush administration, concede it would do neither. It would merely prolong the failed energy policies we have seen from Washington for thirty years.”

***Update, by Sarabeth, 6:30 a.m. ***

The NYT is pleased to describe the proposal as “a compromise”. They didn’t feel it necessary to explain to their readers who the President is supposed to have compromised with. Or what the President got in return.

They did helpfully add:

The proposal is intended to reduce dependence on oil imports, generate revenue from the sale of offshore leases and help win political support for comprehensive energy and climate legislation.

Intended to win political support for comprehensive energy and climate legislation indeed. So what’s the script?
Step One: unilaterally give the Republicans what they want (first nuclear power plants, now offshore drilling)?
Step Two: be very surprised when Republicans no longer feel any need to offer any concessions in return?

“I think that there is a real shot we are going to get slaughtered in elections this fall if we aren’t leading the efforts to reform Washington. We campaigned in ’06 and ’08, and if voters don’t see that change, we haven’t lived up to that promise.”

– Steve Hildebrand, deputy campaign manager for Barack Obama‘s presidential campaign, in an interview on CNN.

Welcome aboard, chief!

“The energized base which transformed the nation and elected our first black president (is) now disengaged,” Democratic political strategist Donna Brazile says. “If this was September, I would hit the panic button.”
[...]
Still, signs of trouble for the Democratic majority in Congress are springing up in:

Virginia, where a host of liberal groups are rallying supporters and students to protest the upcoming University of Virginia appearance of former Bush administration top Justice Department official John Yoo.

Yoo, who wrote the legal memos authorizing the use of controversial interrogation techniques against terror suspects, is scheduled to speak at the school in Charlottesville on March 19. He will be greeted by protesters, from groups such as Veterans for Peace and the National Accountability Network, who are angry that the Obama administration has declined to prosecute him for the so-called “torture memos.”

Organizer David Swanson calls the administration’s positions on protecting state secrets and war crimes “a disaster.”

The American Civil Liberties Union concurs. The group recently warned the White House not to reverse its decision to try terror suspects in civilian courts.

If Obama has suspects tried before military commissions “he will betray his campaign promise to restore the rule of law, demonstrate that his principles are up for grabs and lose all credibility with Americans who care about justice and the rule of law,” ACLU Director Anthony Romero says.

• Georgia and South Carolina, where the environmental group Friends of the Earth (FOE) this month ran TV ads denouncing the Obama administration’s decision to approve $55 billion in private industry loan guarantees for what would be the first nuclear reactors built in the United States in three decades.

The group also was alarmed when Obama talked in his State of the Union Address about investing in “clean coal” and opening new offshore oil drilling, spokesman Nick Berning says.

FOE’s political arm endorsed candidate Obama but “we’ve been disappointed so far with President Obama,” Berning says.

• Arkansas, where liberal groups are backing Lt. Gov. Bill Halter in a primary challenge to two-term incumbent Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln, who is backed by Obama.

In three days earlier this month, the liberal group MoveOn.org raised $1 million for Halter, in average donations of $30. He also nabbed the endorsement of the Arkansas AFL-CIO. “This overwhelming response to Bill Halter’s candidacy shows the depth of voters’ anger towards corporate politicians,” MoveOn Director Justin Ruben says.

A chief complaint against Lincoln: She opposed including a government-run health care program, known as the public option, in legislation that passed the Senate in December.

She’s unapologetic. “I don’t answer to my party,” she says in TV ads now airing in the state. “I answer to Arkansas.”