Former Bush Special Counsel Scott Bloch’s attempt to get out of his guilty plea has been denied and he will be sentenced to prison today.

Give the power to take away rights to the Secretary of Defense…you mean the name isn’t Orwellian enough?

Thanks to a decision by the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice in siding with drug manufacturers, price discounts for drugs provided to government supported hospitals and clinics are now in jeopardy.

Barack Obama’s Department of Justice today argued in a federal court that the “repeal” of Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell signed by the President (which provides a pathway via certification to the Congress by the military, the Secretary of Defense, and the President that the DoD is ready to end DADT) means that there’s no need for them to continue their appeal of the Log Cabin Republicans’ case in the Ninth Circuit.

The forces of wealth and power will stop at nothing to protect themselves. Lessons from the Spanish Civil War, sad reminders in today’s America, and a lesson from Hemingway: we will have to fight.

Today is the 154th birthday of SCOTUS Justice Louis Brandeis, one of the Court’s most forceful voices for freedom of speech and the right to privacy. Today, as AG Eric Holder deals with cases involving torture, wiretapping, state secrets, GQ paints a picture of an AG filled with angst, as Marcy Wheeler summed it up yesterday. But maybe it’s not angst, but that Holder is being haunted by SCOTUS Justices past, like Brandeis, Holmes, Robert Jackson, and Potter Stewart.

Happy birthday, Justice Brandeis, and keep up the good work.

As we have heard absolutely nothing from Eric Holder, John Durham, the DOJ or the Obama Administration in relation to indictments or other results of the investigation Mr. John Durham has been conducting since January 8, 2008, nearly three years, I thought a letter was in order asking just exactly what their status was. Here is that letter.

SCOTUS decided today to take John Ashcroft’s appeal of a 9th Circuit decision finding that he did not have immunity from suit in using the material witness statute to illegally hold someone without probable cause.

This is worrisome, not just because it’s another example of how Elena Kagan’s recusal on all these cases give the court an inherent conservative bias (even assuming Kagan will be better on executive power issues than I think she will be), but because by taking the case SCOTUS seems to suggest the 9th Circuit decision deserves more scrutiny.

Earlier, I noted that a federal judge had ordered an injunction against discharges of gay soldiers under the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. The government may choose to appeal the ruling and the injunction from Judge Virginia Phillips. And in a separate case regarding the Defense of Marriage Act, that’s just what DoJ is doing.

If the federal government is finally catching up to some of the ways in which the credit card companies prey on customers and muscle out competition, they’ll have to look at what the industry is doing on college campuses, which is one step ahead of them.