QUOTE OF THE DAY....From Andrew Tobias, responding to Jon Stewart's characterization of George Bush as a moron:

"Bush is hardly a moron. He wanted the rich — in particular the oil guys — to do well and they have (phenomenally well). He promised to appoint more Justices like Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia and he did. He didn't want to work terribly hard and he hasn't. He wanted to show that government can't do things very well, and he has. Morons are not usually so successful in getting what they want."

Well, OK. I guess I'll have to think of something else to yell at the TV set then.

SAME SEX MARRIAGE IN THE GOLDEN STATE....Via Andrew Sullivan, the California Supreme Court will announce its decision on whether to legalize same-sex marriage on Thursday at 10 am:

No one knows for sure what the decision will be — but, given the length of time this has taken, it's perfectly possible the court will order civil marriage equality immediately without a stay. That would lead to thousands of irrevocable civil marriages and set up a ballot initiative this fall as a potential watershed for civil rights.

Those in favor of civil equality better get ready. The gay civil rights movement will never have waged a battle this big, this expensive or this important. We can win at the ballot box as well as in the courts and legislatures. And the good news is that the Republican governor has said he will oppose any initiative to take marriage rights away, if they are granted. Hold on tight.

I think it's widely expected that the court is going to legalize gay marriage, and the initiative to strike down their ruling has already gathered over a million signatures and is just waiting for verification from the Secretary of State before it goes on the November ballot. It's 14 words long, identical to the wording of Prop 22 back in 2000: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." This time, however, it's a constitutional initiative, not a statutory initiative, so if it passes it will be immune to court challenges.

Prop 22 passed overwhelmingly with 63% of the vote. Has 13% of the state decided to relax since then and allow gay couples to live in peace? We're about to find out.

THE AMAZING MONEY MACHINE....Josh Green has an interesting piece in the Atlantic this month about Barack Obama's online fundraising machine. It's focused mainly on the technology behind the machine and how it sprang from the venture-capital oriented worldview of Silicon Valley, but this little nugget caught my eye:

And as a newcomer to national politics, [Obama] needed to establish credibility by making inroads to major donors — most of whom, in California as elsewhere, had been locked down by the Clinton campaign.

Silicon Valley was a notable exception. The Internet was still in its infancy when Bill Clinton last ran for president, in 1996, and most of the immense fortunes had not yet come into being; the emerging tech class had not yet taken shape. So, unlike the magnates in California real estate (Walter Shorenstein), apparel (Esprit founder Susie Tompkins Buell), and entertainment (name your Hollywood celeb), who all had long-established loyalty to the Clintons, the tech community was up for grabs in 2007. In a colossal error of judgment, the Clinton campaign never made a serious approach, assuming that Obama would fade and that lack of money and cutting-edge technology couldn't possibly factor into what was expected to be an easy race. Some of her staff tried to arrange "prospect meetings" in Silicon Valley, but they were overruled. "There was massive frustration about not being able to go out there and recruit people," a Clinton consultant told me last year. As a result, the wealthiest region of the wealthiest state in the nation was left to Barack Obama.

Furthermore, in Silicon Valley's unique reckoning, what everyone else considered to be Obama's major shortcomings — his youth, his inexperience — here counted as prime assets.

In a close race, you can point to pretty much anything as "the difference." But if Green is right, Clinton's neglect of Silicon Valley ranks as one of the biggest mistakes of her campaign. Obama may have been uniquely situated to take financial and political advantage of the boom in social networking sites, but I sort of doubt it. I'll bet Hillary could have done it too. She just didn't.

UN-REGRESSING A CARBON TAX....The other day I mentioned that a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases would be a huge windfall for power companies if the permits are given away based on past history instead of being auctioned to the highest bidder. What's more, energy prices would rise substantially (that's the whole point) and the poor would be hit much harder by this than either the middle class or the affluent.

A cap-and-trade scheme that auctions off 100% of its emission permits would eliminate the windfall profits, but it would still act essentially as a regressive carbon tax, raising the price of energy and hitting the poor disproportionately. The nice thing about the auction, though, is that it provides government revenue that can be used to offset the regressivity of the original tax. But if we did that, would there be any revenue left over for anything else?

An analysis by CBPP says yes. They conclude that about 15% of the revenue would be needed to compensate companies for their losses and about 14% would be needed to hold low-income consumers harmless. That leaves more than 70% for other purposes, including funding of green R&D. Here's their basic recommendation for helping the poor: "We propose pairing a tax rebate with climate rebates issued through the electronic benefit transfer (EBT) systems that state human service agencies use to provide assistance to many poor people....Funds set aside for climate rebates should go to intended beneficiaries, not administrative costs or profits. Accordingly, policymakers should provide relief as much as possible through existing, proven delivery mechanisms — such as the EITC and state EBT systems — rather than new public or private bureaucracies, which entail very substantial administrative costs."

More here if you want to read up on this stuff.

APPALACHIA....This map of voting patterns in the Democratic primary race has now shown up on a bunch of different blogs, but I'm reproducing it yet again because it really is kind of fascinating. It comes from DHinMI, and it shows all the counties where Hillary Clinton has won 65% or more of the vote. Her area of greatest strength, it turns out, isn't whites per se, or old people, or the working class. It's all those things, but it's all those things mainly in Appalachia.

(The gray areas are states that haven't voted yet. Last night, West Virginia filled in nearly of its counties with purple, and Kentucky is expected to do likewise next week.)

The working theory here, of course, isn't that Appalachians love Hillary so much, but that Appalachians are uniquely uncomfortable voting for a black guy. Josh Marshall chalks this up to history: "Each of these regions was fiercely anti-Slavery. And most ended up raising regiments that fought in the Union Army. But they were as anti-slave as they were anti-slavery, both of which they viewed as the linchpins of the aristocratic and inegalitarian society they loathed."

This stuff is way, way outside my wheelhouse, so there's nothing much I can add. But the concentration of those purple dots is really striking. It's not clear if this really means much for the general election, but it might. Feel free to speculate in comments.

SHOPPING CARTS....I'm fighting off a cold. Blecch. I blame unsanitary shopping carts.

What else could it be? For years I've been mocking those antibacterial wipes that supermarkets have started putting out by the shopping carts. Just more yuppie idiocy, I figured, part of the trend toward protecting ourselves from every remote possibility of harm no matter how dumb. I mean, how paranoid do you have to be to insist on wiping down your shopping cart before you head into the store?

Well, fine. I'm a believer now. Push a shopping cart around on Sunday and get sick on Monday. QED. Just like those telephone handset sanitizers from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You might call this the addled logic of a sick man, and you'd be right, but I don't care. No more shopping carts for me.

Anyway, if I write anything dumber than usual today, that's why. Blame the disease. Please.

REPUBLICAN LOSING STREAK CONTINUES....Mississippi's 1st congressional district may be a longtime Republican stronghold, but as usual this year, that didn't matter:

Travis Childers, a conservative Democrat who serves as Prentiss County chancery clerk, defeated Southaven Mayor Greg Davis by 54 percent to 46 percent in the race to represent Mississippi's 1st Congressional District, which both parties considered a potential bellwether for the fall elections.

....House Democrats now hold a 236 to 199 majority, up from 203 seats they controlled two years ago.

....Democrats begin the march into the fall elections with an enormous cash advantage: $44 million for the DCCC to $7 million for its GOP counterpart as of March 31. And 25 other Republican incumbents have decided against running for reelection, providing Democrats with more opportunities to make gains.

That's an 8-point victory in a solidly Republican district. The GOP even brought in Dick Cheney to campaign and tried to tar Childers as an Obama lover. But nothing worked. Even in Mississippi, they just don't want anything to do with Republicans anymore. It's going to be a ver-r-r-r-y long summer and fall for the GOP leadership.

BEST AND WORST GUESTS....ThinkProgress links today to this year's survey by TVWeek about which guests TV bookers like and which ones they don't. Here's one category:

THE HARDEST TO GET

Leading vote-getter: Vice President Dick Cheney. "He doesn't give a s***. He's checked out," said one respondent. "I don't know what he does all day," said another.

Also mentioned: Former vice president and 2000 Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore ("just unwilling to do a long, serious, substantive interview"); Michelle Obama; Sen. Reid ("never does Sunday shows"); Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. ("very hard to book"); Bill Clinton; Hillary Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams; Mr. Edwards; "someone who's actually in charge of the war."

After seeing Reid on the Daily Show last week I can understand why he doesn't do the Sunday talkathons. I've never seen a guest so reluctant to open his mouth and say something. Pelosi isn't as reticent, but apparently she's very high maintenance (typical comments: "won't come to the studio," "wants the grandeur of her Speaker's office," "the queen — spare me").

This is sort of unfortunate for the Democratic Party, isn't it? I don't suppose party leaders always have to be ones in front of the camera, but it would be nice to have ones who at least know how to play the game.

On the bright side, though, neither John Boehner nor Mitch McConnell even got mentioned in TVWeek's survey. That's even worse than being dissed, isn't it?

PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL SMACKDOWN....For some time Dan Drezner has been arguing that all the tears shed over the demise of the public intellectual in America are misplaced. Today's public intellectuals, he says, are every bit as good as the giants of the past, and blogs have served to give them an ever wider audience. Today he puts his money where his mouth is:

Among periodicals, The New Yorker has Malcolm Gladwell, James Surowiecki and Louis Menand on their payroll; Andrew Sullivan, James Fallows, and Virginia Postrel write for The Atlantic; Harper's contributing editors include Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, and Tom Wolfe; Vanity Fair has James Wolcott and Christopher Hitchens; Newsweek employs Fareed Zakaria, Daniel Gross and George F. Will. Despite the thinning of their ranks, unaffiliated public intellectuals like Paul Berman, Michael Beschloss, Debra Dickerson, Robert D. Kaplan, John Lukacs, Joshua Micah Marshall, Rick Perlstein and Robert Wright still remain. The explosion of think tanks in the past thirty years has contributed to a rise in partisanship — but it has also provided sinecures for the intellectual likes of Robert Kagan, Joel Kotkin, Michael Lind, Brink Lindsey, Jedediah Purdy, and David Rieff. Within the academy, there is no shortage of public intellectuals: Eric Alterman, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Michael Bérubé, Joshua Cohen, Jared Diamond, Jean Behke Elshtain, Amitai Etzioni, Niall Ferguson, Richard Florida, Francis Fukuyama, John Lewis Gaddis, Henry Louis Gates, Jacob Hacker, Samuel Huntington, Tony Judt, Paul Kennedy, Paul Krugman, Steven Leavitt, Lawrence Lessig, John Mearsheimer, Martha Nussbaum, Steven Pinker, Richard Posner, Samantha Power, Robert Putnam, Dani Rodrik, Jeffrey Sachs, Amartya Sen, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Joseph Stiglitz, Laurence Summers, Cass Sunstein, Michael Walzer, Sean Wilentz, E.O. Wilson, and Alan Wolfe. Their recent books [big slug o' books omitted –ed] are designed to be accessible to the informed lay public. It will be easy for the reader to quibble with one of the names or one of the books listed above. However, most cultural commentators would agree that most of the names and books belong on that list.

Sounds about right to me. Still, I think I might argue that even if the overall PI scene is still vibrant, 40 years ago there were a small number of what you might call mega-intellectuals — people like Buckley and Chomsky and Galbraith and Friedman — who had a bigger influence on public discourse than any single public intellectual does today. Nobody on Dan's list really seems to compete on quite the same plane as some of those 50s and 60s superstars. This might just be the hindsight bias that he talks about earlier in his piece, but if you had to nominate someone to be as influential today as Buckley and Galbraith were in their time, who would you choose? No one really comes to mind.

ENERGY PANDERING....Over at The Corner, Iain Murray argues that the Consumer First Energy Act, introduced a few days ago by congressional Democrats, is a "terrible piece of legislation." Oddly enough, he seems to be right. Rolling back tax breaks for oil companies and promoting renewable energy tax credits instead is a sound idea, but the rest of the bill is mostly just a bunch of cheap political pandering: a windfall profits tax, some SOP griping about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a bit of anti-OPEC grandstanding, and some almost certainly useless provisions aimed at speculators and "price gougers."

The Republican energy bill is even worse, but if this is the best Dems can do it's time to take a deep breath and start over. We can win in November without this kind of junk.

BLOGO-NEWS....I'm informed via email that Pajamas Media "shook the blogosphere" today by incorporating Instapundit onto its site. So it's goodbye instapundit.com, hello pajamasmedia.com/instapundit. Are you feeling shaken yet?

CATNAPPING....Note to Mary Kolesnikova: If you don't like leet/lol/textspeak, no problem. We pedants have to stick together on this kind of thing. But leave the cats out of it, OK?

DUMB OR MENDACIOUS? OR BOTH?....Democrats are taking unsurprising glee in rubbing GOP noses in the fact that the new campaign slogan chosen by House Republicans — "Change You Deserve" — turns out to also be the trademarked slogan of the antidepressant Effexor. That's prepackaged comedy gold for the late-night comic crowd. But I'm genuinely curious: how did this happen? Didn't Boehner & Co. even bother to Google the phrase to see if anyone else was using it? It shows up in a 10-second search, after all.

I dunno. Maybe they really are that dumb. And judging by this, they're just flat-out liars too. Nice week you're having so far, guys.

JOHN McCAIN AND 100% AUCTIONS....On Monday, John McCain outlined his climate change policy, which includes a cap-and-trade program:

We will cap emissions according to specific goals, measuring progress by reference to past carbon emissions. By the year 2012, we will seek a return to 2005 levels of emission, by 2020, a return to 1990 levels, and so on until we have achieved at least a reduction of sixty percent below 1990 levels by the year 2050.

....As part of my cap-and-trade incentives, I will also propose to include the purchase of offsets from those outside the scope of the trading system....Through the sale of offsets — and with strict standards to assure that reductions are real — our agricultural sector alone can provide as much as forty percent of the overall reductions we will require in greenhouse gas emissions....Over time, an increasing fraction of permits for emissions could be supplied by auction, yielding federal revenues that can be put to good use.

It's great that McCain acknowledges the reality of climate change and great that he acknowledges that we need to do something about it. But his cap-and-trade proposal is pretty weak tea.

For starters, its goal of a 60% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 is less aggressive than Barack Obama's plan, which calls for a reduction of 80%. Since the plan will probably get watered down in Congress, that's a bad place to start.

Second, there are the offsets. It's not impossible to do offsets right, but in the reality we live in they're almost certain to end up as little more than fig leaves that give the appearance of doing something while delaying real action on GHG reductions. Promises of "strict standards" notwithstanding, this is an area where you definitely want to see the fine print before you sign up.

Third, McCain's cap-and-trade plan initially gives away emission permits instead of auctioning them. I mentioned a few days ago that that a 100% auction of emission permits is what distinguishes a real plan from a fake one, and later that day Mike O'Hare begged to differ: "The difference between a giveaway and an auction of the same total emissions is not a difference in environmental outcome or the economic cost of getting to it; it's only a matter of whose ox is gored." That's true, but it's worth unpacking that gored ox a bit.

Environmentally speaking, it doesn't matter whether you auction permits or give them away. What matters is the cap. If you cap total emissions at 90% of current levels (and enforce it), then that's what you'll get no matter which kind of system you use. And since both systems allow permits to be traded between companies, they each provide similar levels of economic efficiency. Our ox lurks elsewhere.

Here's the difference. If you auction permits, then power plants and other GHG emitters have to buy permits to operate, and this raises their cost of doing business. This will get passed along to consumers and energy prices will go up. The revenue from the permits will go to the government, just like a tax.

If you give away permits instead, common sense suggests that since there are no additional costs to emitters, they won't raise their prices. But it turns out this isn't true. Thanks to the opportunity cost of the permits, they'll raise their prices just as much as if they'd bought the permit in an auction. (This isn't just a theory, either. That's how the European cap-and-trade system worked initially, and prices really did go up. If you want the gritty detail on why it works this way, read this paper.) So: power plants end up raising their prices, but since the emission permits are free their costs don't change. Result: a huge windfall profit for GHG emitters. Some get more and some get less, but the overall net result is lots of extra profit, with the biggest polluters getting the biggest profit.

That sounds Republican bad enough already, but it gets worse. All cap-and-trade programs increase energy prices — it's like a carbon tax. But carbon taxes are heavily regressive, and a cap-and-trade program with a permit giveaway is even worse. Not only would the resulting higher energy prices hit the poor more heavily than rich, just as they would with a carbon tax, but in addition, thanks to the windfall profits, the rich would actually benefit from increased earnings in their investment portfolios. An auction system, by contrast, (a) doesn't provide windfall profits for corporations and (b) since the federal government collects the auction fees it can use them to ameliorate the disproportionate impact on the poor. It can spend some of the money on clean energy R&D; it can spend part of the money on mass transit; and it can spend part of the money by simply giving it back to taxpayers in a way that reduces the regressive nature of the original tax.

Finally, there's a political reality here. A system that gives away permits is highly vulnerable to legislative fiddling. Just as with tax policy, it's all too easy to favor certain industries over others by doling out different permit levels, and all too easy for the whole thing to turn into yet another form of corporate welfare. It's a lot harder to do that with an auction plan, which simply sets a nationwide permit level for GHGs and then makes companies buy them in a publicly traded system. It's not impossible for legislators to game the system — it's never impossible for legislators to game the system — but it's a lot harder.

So that's that. A cap-and-trade system with a 100% auction provides revenue for green research; it reduces the regressivity of the tax hit; and it helps keep lobbyists from gaming the system. The giveaway method, conversely, is highly regressive; provides windfall profits for big polluters; and would almost certainly end up as a congressional pork barrel that eviscerated the original emission targets bit by bit by bit. It just goes to show that policy details matter. Take your pick.

DOWNWARD SLOPING DEMAND CURVES....Megan McArdle:

The cable news shows this morning were full of wide-eyed anchor larvae reporting that with gas prices high, people were driving less, and instead using more public transit! Oh, for a land in which the downward-sloping demand curve was not such a constant source of surprise and wonder to the broadcast media.

I bow to no one in my general contempt for cable news talkers — Shakespeare would undoubtedly update Dick's famous line in Henry VI if he were writing it today — but for five years U.S. gasoline consumption has been famously impervious to sharply rising prices. The cost of a tank of unleaded has more than doubled since 2002, but consumption has merrily kept rising 1.5% a year anyway. It was only in 2007 that consumption even started to flatten out, and only this year that it's projected to decline — ever so slightly. So can we really blame the cable talkers for being a little surprised that consumer behavior is finally changing?

Besides, it might not even be the price of gas that's responsible. Gasoline consumption does fall during recessions, and that might have as much to do with the recent reduction in driving as prices at the pump.

More generally, though, sure, demand curves slope downward. But that's the starting point of any serious discussion, not a devastating comeback that ends it. If the slope is very mild, as it seems to be with gasoline consumption and minimum wage labor markets, for example, there might be other factors at play that introduce enough real-world noise to flatten out the curve over part of its range. It's an empirical question, not an ideological one, and there's no way of knowing for sure except by looking at the data.

SURVEILLANCE STATE UPDATE....After 9/11, unsurprisingly, there was a spike in the number of warrants issued to spy on Americans. Also unsurprisingly, there was a spike in the number of terrorism prosecutions taken to court.

So what happened next? I don't know whether this is surprising or not, but Richard Schmitt of the LA Times reports today that after the spike in 2002, those two trends diverged. There have been more and more surveillance warrants issued, but they've produced fewer and fewer actual prosecutions:

The emphasis on spy programs [] is starting to give pause to some members of Congress who fear the government is investing too much in anti-terrorism programs at the expense of traditional crime-fighting. Other lawmakers are raising questions about how well the FBI is performing its counter-terrorism mission.

....Even some former government officials concede many intelligence investigations fail to yield evidence of a serious threat to the U.S. "Most of these threats ultimately turn out to be wrong, or maybe just the investigating makes them go away," said Washington lawyer Michael Woods, former head of the FBI national security law unit. "A lot more information is going to pass through government hands, and most of that is going to be about people who turn out to be innocent or irrelevant."

If anything, the real situation is almost certainly even worse than this: "Warrants" understates the vast increase in surveillance, which also includes things like national security letters and the warrantless programs run by the NSA, while "prosecutions" overstates the number of genuine terrorists who have been taken to court. It would be nice if Congress actually took a serious look at this.

THE BOTTOM THIRD....Over at TPMCafe, Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels is talking about his new book, Unequal Democracy. Here's one of the results of his research:

Insofar as elected officials are responsive to the policy views of their constituents, only the views of affluent and middle-class people really matter. The preferences of millions of low-income citizens (in the bottom third of the income distribution) have no discernible effect on senators' roll call votes, whether we consider the whole range of issues that come before Congress or specific salient roll call votes focusing on the federal budget, the minimum wage, civil rights, and abortion. Aristotle wrote that "where the possession of political power is due to the possession of economic power or wealth ... that is oligarchy, and when the unpropertied class have power, that is democracy." By that standard, America is, at best, a very unequal democracy.

Discuss.

AN OIL BUBBLE?....I don't really have any good reason for posting this chart, but reader Jonathan C. sent it to me and I thought it was kind of amusing. Every month the Energy Information Agency releases a near-term energy forecast, and as oil prices have been skyrocketing it turns out that the EIA has been a model of consistency: every month they predict that oil prices have peaked and are about to start declining. In May the EIA analysts got a little frisky and predicted a plateau for the next few months instead of an immediate decline, but needless to say, the market failed to cooperate. Prices continued to rise.

So take the EIA forecasts with a grain of salt. The problem is that they, like many others, seem to believe that we're in the middle of an oil bubble that's being sustained by reckless speculators. My own hunch is that although speculation may be playing a role in the current runup, it's only a small one. Fundamentally, prices are going up because demand is growing and supply isn't. Paul Krugman agrees, and points out that artificially high prices can't be sustained for long, since eventually supply will go up and demand will go down, breaking the bubble:

The only way speculation can have a persistent effect on oil prices, then, is if it leads to physical hoarding — an increase in private inventories of black gunk. This actually happened in the late 1970s, when the effects of disrupted Iranian supply were amplified by widespread panic stockpiling.

But it hasn't happened this time: all through the period of the alleged bubble, inventories have remained at more or less normal levels. This tells us that the rise in oil prices isn't the result of runaway speculation; it's the result of fundamental factors, mainly the growing difficulty of finding oil and the rapid growth of emerging economies like China. The rise in oil prices these past few years had to happen to keep demand growth from exceeding supply growth.

The lesson of those EIA forecasts is twofold. First, trying to predict short-term price fluctuations is a mug's game. They might go up, they might go down, and nobody knows which. Second, the overall trend is nonetheless up. Eventually, high prices will reduce demand and prices should level out a bit, but this might take a while since energy consumption is famously inelastic in the short term. But that's what it's going to take: change in the real world. This isn't a bubble, it's Adam Smith in action.

GENETIC DISCRIMINATION....Congress voted nearly unanimously last week to outlaw genetic discrimination by health insurance companies. Michael Kinsley comments:

The very appealing notion that genetic discrimination is unfair looks especially odd in the context of insurance. The idea of insurance is to protect against the unexpected or unlikely. Forbidding insurers to take predictable risks into account when choosing whom to insure and how much to charge is asking them to behave irrationally and make bets they are sure to lose. Not insuring people who are likely to get cancer, or charging them more, isn't evil. It's rational behavior. Of course, we outlaw a lot of behavior that would be rational if it weren't against the law. But the skeptics who say this is a step on the way to universal health care actually understate the case.

This paragraph is preceded by some silliness about Yo-Yo Ma and followed by some further silliness about a possible descent into Stalinism. But that stuff aside, Kinsley is right about this. Insurance companies have to be allowed to assess risks when they set premiums. If they don't, then they aren't insurance companies.

So what's the eventual result of forbidding healthcare insurers to rationally assess risks when they write policies? They go out of business. Slowly, to be sure, but eventually they go kaput.

So think of this as a revealed preference. Conservatives all claim to believe that the private market is the best way to provide health insurance. And yet, given a close look at exactly what that means, they voted to outlaw the very thing that makes private insurance work: rational discrimination. The reality was just too ugly to support. If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, I guess that means a liberal is a conservative who's been denied insurance because of a congenital condition.

HOME COURT ADVANTAGE....Matt Yglesias comments on the home court advantage in basketball:

Here in Round 2 of the NBA playoffs we're seeing once again that home court advantage matters a lot — out of eight total games, seven have been won by the home team. Which makes me wonder — is anyone aware of any good research on what the home court advantage consists of? Why should it be so strong?

Oddly enough, I was going to post about this exact thing over the weekend, but decided not to bother because I don't know squat about basketball and I figured this was probably well trod territory. But maybe not.

So what is the deal? It's not just that basketball teams have a home court advantage, it's the fact they seem to have have more of a home court advantage than other team sports like football and baseball. But why? Basketball teams don't rely on calling audible signals, so noise shouldn't be that big a factor, and basketball courts, especially these days, are essentially identical. If anything, then, basketball ought to offer less of a home field advantage than either of those other sports. Does waving that junk around when visiting teams shoot free throws really make that big a difference?

Apparently not. Matt's comment thread produced two persuasive explanations. First, from a metastudy of scholarly research (!) on this very question, there's this:

A number of studies provide strong evidence that home advantage increases with crowd size, until the crowd reaches a certain size or consistency (a more balanced number of home and away supporters), after which a peak in home advantage is observed. Two possible mechanisms were proposed to explain these observations: either (i) the crowd is able to raise the performance of the home competitors relative to the away competitors; or (ii) the crowd is able to influence the officials to subconsciously favour the home team. The literature supports the latter to be the most important and dominant explanation. [Italics mine.]

Second, maybe basketball courts aren't as identical as I think:

Home court advantage is more pronounced in basketball for a variety of reasons, many mentioned here. First, familiarity with the court/arena cannot be underestimated. Every floor is different. Some are incredibly bouncy while others are totally dead. Some have ice below them, others don't. Some arenas are more intimate while others are cavernous (there's a reason the Final Four games are often poorly played in the early going. They're playing in a football stadium which has things like draft they're not accustomed to). The perspective of the basket is also quite different from one venue to the next. What's behind the basket affects shooting like nothing else....Basketball, as a game of streaks, is also more heavily dependent on momentum and the proximity of the crowd helps feed that. Crowd noise and excitement can rattle even the best players and influence referees, who have a more demonstrable impact on a game's outcome than in any other sport.

Further speculation welcome in comments.

BASRA UPDATE....So how are things going in Basra? According to the New York Times, not too badly:

In a rare success, forces loyal to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki have largely quieted the city, to the initial surprise and growing delight of many inhabitants who only a month ago shuddered under deadly clashes between Iraqi troops and Shiite militias.

Just as in Baghdad, Iraqi and Western officials emphasize that the gains here are "fragile," like the newly planted roadside saplings that fail to conceal mounds of garbage and pools of foul-smelling water in the historic port city's slums.

....Government forces have now taken over Islamic militants' headquarters and halted the death squads and "vice 'enforcers' " who attacked women, Christians, musicians, alcohol sellers and anyone suspected of collaborating with Westerners.

I don't have anything special to say about this, but it's tentative good news and I wanted to pass it along. We'll have to wait and see whether this is a temporary lull or a permanent change.

OUR FAVORITE NEWS SOURCES....A couple of days ago I asked my readers what news outlet they'd choose if they could only have one. Assuming I counted the answers correctly and successfuly ignored all the double posts, here are the results:

1. New York Times (34 votes)
   

2. BBC (30 votes)
   

3. NPR (25 votes)
   

4. Economist (12 votes)
   

5. Financial Times (9 votes)
   

6. Washington Post (8 votes)
   

There was also a smattering of votes for the Guardian, "my local newspaper," the New Yorker, and various news aggregators.

QUOTE OF THE DAY....From Hilzoy, commenting on which foreign regimes John McCain thinks it's respectable to lobby for and which ones he doesn't:

"So Ukraine is too much, but Burma is OK?"

Come on. Everyone has fond memories of those old Burma Shave signs, don't they?

BEGONE!....Are wizards infiltrating Florida schools? Maybe. Luckily, the Pasco County School District is on the case.

JINGLE MAIL....Has there been a sea change in the way Americans view the responsibility of paying off their mortgages? Has it become common to simply toss the keys to your house in the mailbox and walk away if you don't feel like making your payments any more? Even if you can afford to? This has recently acquired the status of conventional wisdom, but Michael Hiltzik of the LA Times says there's a problem with this story:

When pressed for the number of borrowers who could afford their mortgage payments, major banks and lender groups could not produce numbers figures.

Nor could the Mortgage Bankers Assn., the leading trade group for housing lenders....Wachovia's [Don] Truslow acknowledged during the bank's conference call April 14 that walkaways were "hard to quantify."....Bank of America spokesman Terry Francisco said the bank had seen indications that some homeowners were taking pains to keep their credit card accounts current at the expense of their mortgage balances....But he said the bank did not have "firm figures" on how many homeowners were unnecessarily defaulting on their mortgages.

....At Fannie Mae, the government-chartered company that owns or guarantees billions of dollars in home mortgages, Senior Vice President Marianne Sullivan conceded that there was growing "folklore" about residential walkaways but said that the phenomenon was more likely connected to investors than people who live in their homes, or "owner-occupants."

"The vast majority of borrowers we find have been acting in good faith," she said. "If they get behind, they are interested in working with their lender."

If this is right, there's been no sea change at all. What there's been is a huge increase in houses purchased by speculators and a huge increase in lenders willing to provide them with mortgages. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that speculators are willing to walk away from mortgages if they no longer look like a profitable investment, but this says nothing about the attitudes of ordinary homeowners. What it says is that banks should be careful about loaning money to speculators.

But they weren't, so now they're trying to construct an urban legend about feckless home buyers who are defaulting not because their loans are resetting and they can't afford them, but merely because they feel like it. Hardworking bankers are just the latest victims of a liberal culture that no longer values personal responsibility, you see.

Maybe. But like most self-serving narratives coming from the moneyed class, you might want to ask for evidence beyond a few anecdotes before you believe it. Who knows? Maybe this one is no more real than that mythical family farmer tossed off his land by a cruel and unjust estate tax. We never did get his name either.

MODERN WARFARE....Both sides in Iraq's Shiite civil war have accepted a truce in Sadr City. The Sadrists agreed to stop displaying arms in public and to allow the government to arrest specific individuals suspected of attacks, though only if they get a warrant first. The government ended its offensive and gave up on its demand that the Mahdi Army disband. It also apparently agreed that only government forces could stage raids in Sadr City, not the U.S. military. The Iranians were said to have been instrumental in brokering the deal.

So who won? As near as I can tell, opinion ranges from "murky" to "seems like the Maliki government backed down," but really, nobody knows. Welcome to modern warfare.

Meanwhile, in Lebanon last week, Hezbollah managed to shock everyone by taking control of a big chunk of West Beirut with practically no resistance. Then, just as suddenly, they pulled out yesterday, turning control back over to government forces. But things are still tense and sporadic fighting has broken out elsewhere.

So who won? Hezbollah, probably, though it's not clear whether they backed off because they got what they wanted or because they couldn't have consolidated their control even if they'd wanted to. It's murky. Welcome to modern warfare.

CYCLONE NARGIS....Wingers sure are weird. The Wonk Room documents how one of Brent Bozell's media watchdog groups spliced together an NPR interview with Al Gore to make it sound like he was blaming the recent devastating cyclone in Burma on global warming. In the audio splice, they play the end of the interview followed by the start of the interview without any indication that they're taking his words out of order.

But what makes this weird, as opposed to just mendacious in a garden variety way, is that they didn't need to do it. Gore was careful to acknowledge that no individual storm can be blamed on global warming, but he followed that up by saying that global warming is responsible for a trend toward more powerful storms and that the Burma cyclone is an example of that. So why bother splicing the tape dishonestly?

Beats me. Maybe it's just in their blood. In any case, what surprises me is that more people haven't been making the connection between the Burma cyclone and global warming. That kind of talk was all over the place after Hurricane Katrina even though it made little sense in that case. In the end, Katrina made landfall as a strong Cat 3 hurricane, hardly a superstorm, and the bulk of the damage to New Orleans was done not by Katrina itself but by the breaching of poorly built levees. That had nothing to do with global warming.

By contrast, the Burma cyclone really is a good example of the kind of thing we're likely to see more of in coming decades. It's not just that it was a very severe cyclone early in the season, but that it's also highly typical of the damage that global warming is likely to do in the future. It isn't North America that's going to bear the brunt of the damage from climate change, it's poor, low-lying area like Burma and Bangladesh. We'll respond (or try to respond) with aid whenever something like this happens, but all the aid in the world won't make up for the fact that we're the ones warming the globe but it's poor developing countries that are going to pay most of the price.

LOYALTY CARDS....I really loathe retail loyalty card programs. Really really really. Just wanted to get that off my chest.

Maybe I should write this up as an op-ed and see if anyone wants to print it. Perhaps I'm not the only one.

FRIDAY CATBLOGGING....This week was all about the evil eye. On the left, Inkblot is pretty plainly saying, "Dude, don't even think about blogging unless you find some other chair to do it in." Luckily I keep a spare chair around for just these circumstances.

On the right, Domino has taken possession of a box full of peanuts. She was so thrilled with it that she wouldn't even come out for dinner. I had to haul her out and plop her down in front of the dish. Inkblot looked on enviously as long as Domino was in the box, but after she left he just sniffed around a bit and then decided that the whole setup looked a little too scary to try. He's not a very courageous cat, our Inkblot.

PRIORITIES....Last month I linked briefly to a report by Daniel Kimmage of RFE/RL analyzing al-Qaeda's media and internet strategy. Marc Lynch has this to say about Kimmage: "There are very few people inside or outside the government who have worked harder or thought more deeply about how jihadists use online media, drawing on the original Arabic sources rather than from second and third-hand conjecture. It is clear that everyone working on the issue has learned a tremendous amount from those reports, even when we don't agree on how to interpret his findings."

You can guess the end to this story, can't you? He's been fired. Budget cutbacks. Apparently analyzing al-Qaeda didn't make the cut for FY08, priority-wise.

THE IRAQ ALBATROSS....Scott Lemieux on Hillary Clinton:

Admittedly, this is the kind of counterfactual that's impossible to prove, but my guess is that if she had voted against the war Clinton would be the Democratic candidate. Given the closeness of the race, her inherent advantages going in, and that the war had to be a liability it's hard to imagine that she wouldn't have prevailed without the Iraq albatross. Whether or not Clinton's support was sincere — I don't think it really matters — sometimes getting big policies wrong really is politically damaging.

I agree. Barack Obama is highly likely to be the next president of the United States because he opposed a dumb war. Democrats should take notice.

DEBT RELIEF....The latest rumor making the rounds is that maybe Barack Obama will pay off Hillary's $11 million loan to her campaign if she quits the race. I suppose that makes some kind of sense — and it would be a gracious and unifying gesture from Obama — but I'm not sure why Hillary would really be moved by this. She and Bill have earned over $100 million in the past few years and Bill obviously has tremendous earning capacity in the future. $11 million just isn't a big deal to them.

Or shouldn't be, anyway. But I suppose that kind of casual attitude toward money is one of the reasons I'm not rich.

Oh, and while we're on the subject, I want go on the record as being pretty unenthusiastic about an Obama/Clinton "dream ticket." It reminds me of the fabled Reagan/Ford dream ticket of 1980, and I'd say Reagan (and Ford) were smart to kill that idea. A strong vice president is one thing, but if you choose Hillary as a running mate you get the whole Clinton fam