It’s time to rally for Lt. Dan Choi.

Jane was with Dan in June when Assistant U.S. Attorney Angela George announced that on August 29, the government will put him on trial for protesting Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell last November in front of the White House. To date, Dan has refused to accept the government’s plea deal.

One of the tradeoffs made by the US administrations to gain support for entering into Free Trade Agreements is that these agreements impose certain standards on the parties – to protect the environment, human rights and union rights.

So what will the Obama administration do when the terms of one of those agreements are blatantly violated?

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.

While Petraeus is merely saying to the American Taliban (see what I did there) that riling up their parishioners by deliberately antagonizing the entire Muslim world will put American lives at risk, his daring to suggest such a thing has conservatives up in arms. . . .

When America’s founders crafted the Constitution, they knew more was needed to ensure the survival of democracy. So they created the Bill of Rights. They made sure that at the top of the list, the First Amendment included such rights as the freedom of assembly. That is, the freedom of all of us to gather together in groups of our choosing. Like, say, unions.