There is a legal process for these cases and it was followed.

He is far from the terrorist kingpin that the West has made him out to be. In fact, he isn’t even the head of his own organization, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. That would be Nasir al-Wuhayshi, who was Osama bin Laden’s personal secretary for four years in Afghanistan.

Nor is Mr. Awlaki the deputy commander, a position held by Said Ali al-Shihri, a former detainee at Guantánamo Bay who was repatriated to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and put in a “terrorist rehabilitation” program. (The treatment, clearly, did not take.)

Mr. Awlaki isn’t the group’s top religious scholar (Adil al-Abab), its chief of military operations (Qassim al-Raymi), its bomb maker (Ibrahim Hassan Asiri) or even its leading ideologue (Ibrahim Suleiman al-Rubaysh).

Rather, he is a midlevel religious functionary who happens to have American citizenship and speak English. This makes him a propaganda threat, but not one whose elimination would do anything to limit the reach of the Qaeda branch........Now, however, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is taking advantage of this free advertising. No propaganda from the group had ever mentioned his name before it was reported in January that the United States had decided he could be legally assassinated. Shortly after, an article in the official Qaeda journal trumpeted that Mr. Awlaki had not been killed in December, as had been reported, in an air attack on a gathering in Shabwa Province.

So now that it has given Mr. Awlaki such a high profile, the administration is in a bind: if it ignores him, it will look powerless; if it succeeds in killing him, it will have manufactured a martyr. ....

If you put that same moral into Obama's bailout of the Auto Industry, there would be many thousands more unemployed long term right now. You lose sometimes but some things have to be done for the greater good

re: Solyndra
Congress and the FBI are investigating. Draw your conclusions when the facts are known. What did Solyndra do to mislead their VC's, who lost about $2billion, and the DOE? What due diligence did DOE do? Why didn't the VC's have a clue? Usually they're all over the books and management of companies they're starting.
Funny, you don't hear much about the billions of $$ the US spends on defense programs that don't work out. Would you like a list? Have you got all day to read it?
Any good capitalist will tell you that R&D funding is a crap shoot. If we don't play the game for alternative energy funding, the Euros and Chinese will eat our lunch in yet another industry segment that is critical to our long term prosperity.

How do you guys feel about 36 billion dollars in Loan Guarantees the Nuclear Industry is requesting?

I think if we are going to give loan guarantees to anyone, Nuclear is one of our best practical bets.

An important example of this is related to nuclear power. In the late 1980s, about two dozen partially complete nuclear power plants dotted the USA's landscape. Some had already absorbed billions of dollars of investment but were not yet ready to operate.
One particularly difficult case was the Shoreham plant on Long Island Sound, New York. By 1987 the owner had spent $5.5 billion on bricks, mortar, fuel rods, and interest, but the operating license had not been granted. From an economic point of view, the $5.5 billion of past investments should not be weighed in decision-making processes.

and he wasn't the super terrorist kingpin the adminstration would have us believe anyway. From an NY Times piece

He could be Karl Rove posing as a climber
He has zero evidence of being who he says he is

Given the human cost in trying to take him alive for trial, I still think it was a good call.