Dahlia Lithwick, who observed the oral arguments in Ashcroft v. Raich yesterday, is pretty skeptical about Raich et al.’s chances of winning. So are David Bernstein and Nina Tottenberg. Personally, I think it’s hard to weigh the chances. I’m inclined to think that they actually have a shot at a narrow 5-4 victory. Thomas is a dead lock, for sure. O’Connor’s sympathies are certainly with Federalism, and Ginsburg has become more inclined towards Federalism as of late. If they’re intellectually honest, Scalia and Rehnquist will side with Raich. Even Stevens and Breyer might conceivably side with Raich on the grounds of stare decicis, even though they both dissented from Morrison and Lopez. Kennedy, as always, is up in the air.

At any rate, I’m not overly pessimistic about the case. Barnett gave the court the opportunity to make a very narrow ruling, and I think that the Court may well seize on it.

According to a story in Reuters, ” Patients treated with radioactive material face an increased risk of triggering security alarms because more guards are being equipped with sensitive radiation detectors”:

“The nuclear medicine community has been aware that patients set off detectors, but now we expect it to become a more common occurrence with the increasing number of extremely sensitive portable Homeland Security radiation detectors deployed among security personnel,” said Lionel Zuckier, a doctor and radiology professor at the New Jersey Medical School.

[...] The Society of Nuclear Medicine and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission recommend that hospitals develop an official letter or card indicating what type of nuclear medicine procedure a patient received and whom to call at the hospital for verification, Zuckier said.

“Physicians need to make their patients aware of the need to carry proper documentation following a nuclear medicine procedure,” he said.

In 2002 there were 18.4 million nuclear medicine procedures performed in the United States, the report said.

I can just picture Bruce Banner being stopped for questioning by DHS officials…

The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals has prevented the Federal government from enforcing the “Solomon Amendment”, which allows the withholding of funds to schools who disallow military recruiters on their campuses.

In a 2-1 ruling, a three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, said a 10-year-old federal law that allows the government to block such funds violates the schools’ First Amendment right to prohibit on-campus recruiting in response to the Pentagon policy.

[...] In Washington, the Justice Department agreed and issued a statement saying officials were “examining the opinion and reviewing our options.”

“The United States continues to believe the Solomon Amendment is constitutional,” the statement said.

“As we argued in our brief, we believe Congress may deny federal funds to universities which discriminate, and may act to protect the men and women of our armed forces in their ability to recruit Americans who wish to join them in serving our country.”

[...] The majority based its ruling partly on a U.S. Supreme Court decision that allowed the Boy Scouts of America to prohibit gays from being troop leaders or scouts, the AP reported.

The judges argued that if the Boy Scouts could disallow homosexuals based on a core belief that their behavior is illegitimate, then other groups could enforce an opposite restriction if they believed it is wrong to discriminate because of sexual orientation, the AP reported.

It will be interesting to see how this one pans out, but I’m not feeling very optimistic about this. I think most law schools are going to have to do what mine does, and simply put posters and disclaimers all around the school trying to educate the students about the military’s discriminatory policies.

Supposedly, the International Red Cross has accused the Bush Administration of torturing prisoners at Gitmo.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has charged in confidential reports to the United States government that the American military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion “tantamount to torture” on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The finding that the handling of prisoners detained and interrogated at Guantánamo amounted to torture came after a visit by a Red Cross inspection team that spent most of last June in Guantánamo.

The team of humanitarian workers, which included experienced medical personnel, also asserted that some doctors and other medical workers at Guantánamo were participating in planning for interrogations, in what the report called “a flagrant violation of medical ethics.”

Doctors and medical personnel conveyed information about prisoners’ mental health and vulnerabilities to interrogators, the report said, sometimes directly, but usually through a group called the Behavioral Science Consultation Team, or B.S.C.T. The team, known informally as Biscuit, is composed of psychologists and psychological workers who advise the interrogators, the report said.

The United States government, which received the report in July, sharply rejected its charges, administration and military officials said.

It is, of course, impossible to validate or invalidate this report because the International Red Cross’s findings are confidential. It’s entirely possible that the reports say no such thing at all. Also, there’s no indication as to whether there was systematic torture or isolated incidents. Still, after the release of the torture memos and the facts of Abu Gharib, the article has at least a prima facie credibility. This is one to keep an eye on.

This is interesting.

Now a team of researchers has found that severe emotional distress - like that caused by divorce, the loss of a job, or caring for an ill child or parent - may speed up the aging of the body’s cells at the genetic level.

The findings, being reported today, are the first to link psychological stress so directly to biological age.

The researchers found that blood cells from women who had spent many years caring for a disabled child were, genetically, about a decade older than those from peers who had much less caretaking experience. The study, which appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also suggests that the perception of being stressed can add years to a person’s biological age.

Though doctors have linked chronic psychological stress to weakened immune function and an increased risk of catching colds, among other things, they are still trying to understand how tension damages or weakens tissue.

The new research suggests a new way that such damage may occur and opens the possibility that the process can be reversed.

That stress causes aging is something intuitively obvious, as before and after photos of Presidents and generals during wartime can illustrate. But that this actually shows up on the genetic level is fascinating. I’m interested to see what further work is done in this area.

“Nor do we fix Christmas in the Victorian era – as much as I love the Gospel of St. Scrooge and its filmic manifestations, I can’t quite buy the little houses and lamps and shops and Merrie Olde England stuff without thinking of Whitechapel, the horrid sanitary and social conditions, the tanneries spilling offal and toxins into the gutters, urchins threading their way through gin shops to find the syphilitic heap they call mother, etc. ”
– James Lileks

As a law student and a gay rights’ activist, people who make these arguments really get my blood boiling:

[Liberty Counsel] attorney Mathew Staver said in a Supreme Court filing that the Constitution should “protect the citizens of Massachusetts from their own state supreme court’s usurpation of power.”

Federal courts, he said, should defend people’s right “to live in a republican form of government free from tyranny, whether that comes at the barrel of a gun or by the decree of a court.”

If people are going to argue against gay marriage because they’re against gays marrying, stick to why you’re against gays marrying. Don’t dabble in areas you don’t understand. People need to learn what judicial activism is before they start levelling these sorts of accusations. Massachusetts had law on the books that said that no public benefit may be denied to a person on the basis of gender. A marriage license is a public benefit. Denying its issuance to a gay couple was using gender to deny said benefit to people. There really was no other reasonable interpretation of the law on the books, and the dissenters in the Mass. decision say so. There is such a thing as judicial activism, but this isn’t an example of it. So please, call a spade a spade.

In one corner, Andrew Sullivan:

The sheer frenzy, the entire mania of consumerism, the notion that meaning is to be found in buying things and giving these things to other people or to yourself - it all leaves me cold. That’s one reason I’m such a Christmas-phobe. Each year, we have a communal campaign to persuade ourselves that we never have enough, the new things will assuage our real needs, that buying is the same as living. Yes, of course, some of this is fine, generous or even important. I really did need a new sleeper-sofa. And my boyfriend loves his new, mini-iPod. But the hysteria is a form of cultural disorder. And “Christmas” merely feeds it.

In the other, Orson Scott Card:

Don’t complain to me about the commercialization of Christmas. I think it speaks well of America that so many of our retail stores depend on sales during the Christmas season for their very survival.

A nation that sustains its retail life by giving gifts has a good heart, even if our motives in gift-giving are sometimes complicated and even if the buying season begins before the trick-or-treating is over.

Which makes more sense to you? Discuss.

“We are accustomed to see men deride what they do not understand, and snarl at the good and beautiful because it lies beyond their sympathies.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Who dares speak out against evil done in the name of happiness and peace?”
- Terry Pratchett