Rhode Islanders are losing faith in President Barack Obama’s leadership after 18 months of double-digit unemployment, according to the new WPRI 12 poll being released on air right now.

The survey of 500 likely voters by Fleming & Associates was conducted Sept. 22-26. The margin of error is 4.38%. Here are some favorable/unfavorable numbers:

• Barack Obama: 45%/54%
• Sheldon Whitehouse: 41%/53%
• Jack Reed: 56%/40%
• James Langevin: 46%/41%

And that wraps up our poll results. Click here for all our poll coverage, and here for complete results with crosstabs.

Back in 2004, Rhode Island – along with seven other states, New York City and three land trusts – filed a lawsuit aimed at forcing the nation’s five biggest power companies to curb their greenhouse gas emissions. This past March, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that the suit could move forward, setting up a fight between the two sides in the U.S. Supreme Court.

On Thursday, the Obama administration sided with the power companies (which include the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal agency), and asked the Supreme Court to overturn the 2nd Circuit’s ruling. The White House’s top lawyer argued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is taking steps that make the suit unnecessary.

But environmentalists were angered by other parts of the administration’s brief, as The Washington Post reports:

Moreover, environmental groups said, the government’s brief went beyond that, employing arguments that threatened to undercut a basis for legal action that have been used for a century, since Georgia sued over damage a Tennessee copper smelter was inflicting on Georgia’s forests.

“We’re very angry and very disappointed that they would take this tack,” said David Doniger, policy director of the climate center at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

An administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, replied that the EPA has been taking “a series of regulatory actions indicating that it’s moving forward on greenhouse gases and really making it inappropriate for the courts to step in and take on this issue.”

Elizabeth Warren (via Harvard)

A hot topic in liberal circles these days is whether President Obama will appoint Elizabeth Warren, the crusading Harvard Law bankruptcy expert, to be the first head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created in the financial reform law signed last month.

The independent agency – which has its roots in an article Warren herself wrote back in 2007 – will be consumers’ watchdog when it comes to financial products like mortgages and credit cards. Here’s a description of it from The Wall Street Journal:

Once under way, the agency is likely to be the most visible manifestation to consumers from the extensive financial-regulatory legislation expected to clear Congress next week. It will write rules on checking accounts, credit cards and mortgages. It will field complaints from the public about lending practices. It will enforce its rules across the economy, from big banks to credit counselors—though not auto dealers, which won’t fall under the agency’s supervision, after much lobbying.

Warren’s potential nomination has become a cause célèbre in recent weeks among progressives disappointed in the president’s record on everything from the public option to Afghanistan.

This afternoon I spoke with Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., who helped craft the financial reform law from his perch on the Senate Banking Committee, and here’s what he had to say about Warren and the other names floated:

I think she’s terrific. I think she’s been very, very good with these issues. It’s up to the president. The names that I’ve heard – Gene Kimmelman, Warren and Michael Barr – are all first-rate. I know Michael and Elizabeth very well – I don’t know Kimmelman [but he's heard good things]. … Any one of those could be a very effective head of the CFPB.