Balls and Strikes: The Week's Links

Um ... considering all the talk this baseball season about expanding the postseason to five teams, the bottom two having a one-game showdown for the Wild Card, thus reviving the Moribund Pennant Race, what does the final-day theatrics say about that?

Interesting piece by Dahlia Lithwick over at Slate about why the Administration might let the health-reform law go before the Supreme Court sooner rather than later.  She quotes Peter Suderman:

If the mandate is upheld, Obama will claim constitutional victory, and argue that Republicans pursued a frivolous challenge in service of political gain. If not, he'll presumably argue that the challenge itself represented a partisan attack by political foes who aren't interested in fixing the health care system and that America's court system has become hopelessly biased by an extremist conservative judiciary that's in the thrall of the Republican party.

And a wonky piece at The New Republic surprisingly makes me feel optimistic about the dwindling of the death penalty, in practice and in law.  Didn't know they'd dropped so precipitously, for a lot of reasons.  Of course, that DP still exists at all is to say that it persists as an idea, problematic in a country that stakes much of its global swashbuckling moral authority on ideas. 

Finally, I only buy electronics that make me bare my teeth and growl FIIIIRRRE.  As in this.  The name sort of beats you over the head, but at least you can't accuse them of mixed metaphors.  Appealingly low-cost.  And appealingly making me want to get one and walk down the street with it humming "ooh, ooh, ooh, I'm on ..." or "we didn't start the ..."