Sonny predicted she would win, calling it a “kind of lifetime achievement award”. Yet looking over Bullock’s filmography, I find it somewhat hard to identify the achievements.

That said, Bullock was actually quite good as Leigh Ann Tuohy (TOO-ee) in The Blind Side, the role for which she won the Oscar. But it was an easy, feel-good role. Tuohy is a sassy steel magnolia who, out of the goodness of her heart, gives a home to an inner-city teenager — who later becomes a college football star. There’s just nothing complicated or challenging about the role. Tuohy doesn’t grow as a character. She’s a wonderful person to begin with and then she stays that way.

Blind Side is based on the story of Michael Oher, whose childhood was an inner city nightmare. His mother was a crack addict with twelve children. His father was an ex-con. Basically, Oher had to survive on his own. With some remarkable luck, he became a scholarship student at an expensive private school. He was then taken in by the real-life Leigh Ann Tuohy, who supported Oher as he struggled to get his grades up and qualify for a Division I football scholarship.

Although the film does get a bit syrupy, it works because it’s based on a true story. Charity is a lot harder to practice than it is to imagine. It’s good to have the occasional film that reminds us of the better angels of our nature.

I mean that literally, unlike Phil Collins’ song about the plight of the homeless. I spent the past few days in Anse Marcel (photo above) on the Caribbean island of St. Martin. The title of Collins’ song is a reminder of how hard it is to enjoy good fortune without reflecting on those who don’t have it.

I admit, I didn’t spend all that much time in St. Martin thinking about the suffering of others (although like many Caribbean islands, St. Martin is a collage of first-world luxury and third-world poverty). There is plenty of time to do that now that I’m home.

Kevin Drum responds that Democrats had some very good reasons to filibuster those judges. In his post, Kevin links to an op-ed he wrote for the WaPo a few years back, in which he explains how Orrin Hatch, then-chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had taken away many of the minority’s traditional means of blocking judicial appointments. But Kevin also had this to say about the Senate’s deference to the minority:

For better or worse, the Senate has long been dominated by rules that give minorities considerable power over the legislative and appointment process. The usual justification for this is that it forces compromise and curbs extremism.

When Democrats were in the majority, Republicans defended these traditional Senate rules and used them freely to block judges they had strong objections to. But when they became the majority party themselves, they gradually decided the rules should no longer be allowed to get in the way of unbridled majority power…

There are powerful arguments that these arcane Senate rules are fundamentally undemocratic — arguments to which I am sympathetic. But it’s harder to see any good argument for allowing the rules to be cynically changed based solely on who’s in power.

That was a good argument then and it’s a good argument now. Any takers?

Of the two arguments, I like neither, but think that blaming the Senate is at least plausible. If Jacob Weisberg and Joe Klein think Americans are ignorant, is that ignorance also responsible for putting Obama in the White House and installing large Democratic majorities in Congress? Yet according to

Jacob Weisberg in Newsweek, the “biggest culprit” behind “our political paralysis” is the “childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.” You simply do not know what’s good for you. “On many issues these days,” writes the Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein, “the American people are badly confused.” “The people may have spoken,” writes the New -Yorker’s James Surowiecki. “It’s just not clear that they’re making any sense.” In a blog post titled “Too Dumb to Thrive,” Time magazine’s Joe Klein cuts to the chase: “It is very difficult to thrive in an increasingly competitive world if you’re a nation of dodos.”

Of course, the people get lots of things wrong. We’re just human. But you can’t just blame the people when they disagree with you.

As recently as January 18, the day before Scott Brown’s election, there was no firm consensus that Washington was broken. Now it is a staple of high-minded conversation. Imagine for a moment, that instead of Scott Brown, Massachusetts voters had elected Sen. Martha Coakley.

The House and Senate would’ve worked out a compromise on healthcare and Obama would’ve signed the titanic bill into law. The conversation we’d be having now would be about the merits of that bill. No one would be saying that Washington was broken, except perhaps for Tea Partiers and embittered Republicans.

What is the point of all this speculation? To show how superficial today’s conventional wisdom now is. Washington isn’t broken. One major reform bill failed. Partisan feelings are intense. Each side blames the other. That’s how democracy works.

Strangely, the Times Magazine profile of Sen. Brown doesn’t go into any of this. For some reason, the magazine of the paper of record has run a cover story that focuses mainly on Senator Sexy’s modeling career. Admittedly, the profile is entertaining. It turns out that Brown, like George Costanza, was a hand model.

If I were Brown’s communications staff, this is exactly the profile I’d want to see. Lots of human interest material, no substantive criticism. But what I want to know about are Brown’s ideas and how his election changed the political climate. He arrived in town, and now everybody says the town is broken.

The irony here is that even if the success of Scott Brown and the GOP has been cast as a breakdown, the Democrats will pay the price. The party in power tends to suffer when everybody agrees that Washington is broken.

I think [the Democrats] — on the — on some of the big issues they’ve tried to go in the wrong direction. And we’re not going to sign on to efforts to turn America into a western European country, which I think is the net result of something like the energy tax cap and trade bill and the health care bill.

Is that what we want to say to our allies? That becoming like them is the worst thing we could do? I’m sure McConnell was mainly interesting in scoring a few points, but he did that with an appeal to narrow-minded nativism.

Not just narrow-minded, but unnecessary. There are substantive reasons to oppose the import of European social policies. All McConnell had to do was substitute the words “bloated welfare state” for “western European country” and I could’ve gone right along my merry way.

Attacking Friedman’s writing style is something of a bipartisan pastime. The gold standard of the genre is Matt Taibbi’s 2005 New York Press disembowelment, “Flathead.” Describing his mounting dread at the prospect of reading and reviewing The World Is Flat, Taibbi writes: “Thomas Friedman in possession of 500 pages of ruminations on the metaphorical theme of flatness would be a very dangerous thing indeed. It would be like letting a chimpanzee loose in the NORAD control room; even the best-case scenario is an image that could keep you awake well into your 50s.”

FYI, this blog is no fan of Matt Taibbi. Which, actually, is the point I’m trying to make. No matter where you are on the political spectrum (even in the exact center), something Tom Friedman has written will strike you as so laughably ignorant that you feel compelled to mock him.

Of course, since I favor obstructing a consensus of any kind, let me put in a few good words for Friedman regardless of what everyone else thinks. When I was in grad school in the UK, I was at a dinner for around 30 or so students where Friedman was the guest of honor. During the after dinner Q&A, some of the guests demanded an explanation for the relentless abuse of the Palestinians at the hands of Israel and its American patrons. Unfazed, Friedman made the case for why real threats to Israeli security necessitated many of the policies that its critics consider inexcusable.

If you want to be popular with the global elite, defending Israel is probably the worst thing you can do. So good for Tom Friedman.

Meanwhile, here’s the NY Times’ take on the story, from Relieve the Chairman of his Gavel:

Congressman Charles Rangel was far from humbled after the ethics committee admonished him for taking corporate-paid Caribbean junkets in violation of the House ethics code. Rather, the New York Democrat berated the panel’s leaders on the House floor.

The moment was characteristic of Mr. Rangel’s arrogance throughout the investigation, which continues into more serious allegations about his official behavior. It is one more reason why Speaker Nancy Pelosi — who championed ethics reform — should stop protecting him and relieve him of his crucial role as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee…

This should galvanize the committee to conclude its snail-paced inquiry into Mr. Rangel’s behavior, including: his acceptance of rent-subsidized apartments from a Manhattan real estate developer; his failure to pay taxes on rental income from a villa in the Dominican Republic; and his soliciting of a $1 million donation — to a university center named after him — from a corporation with business before Congress. Mr. Rangel, the House’s designated master of fiscal accountability, already deserves to be stripped of his gavel.

Impressively, Pelosi followed up her unusual defense of Chairman Rangel’s special interests by responding this way to a question about the Tea Partiers:

We [Democrats] share some of the views of the Tea Partiers in terms of the role of special interest in Washington, D.C., as — it just has to stop. And that’s why I’ve fought the special interest[s], whether it’s on energy, whether it’s on health insurance, whether it’s on pharmaceuticals and the rest.

Fight, Nancy, fight!

Well, I was pretty sure I saw a good discussion of this in the NY Times, so I went over to their website and did a search for “health insurance across state lines”. One of this first things that pop up is this analysis from last week on the NYT’s Prescriptions Blog.

[UPDATE: This analysis actually ran in the print edition. Page 20 of the national edition from last Sunday, February 13. Which explains why I read it, since I only get the print edition on Sundays. However, no amount of searching on the NYT website has turned up any indication that this analysis ran in the print edition, and not just on the blog.]

In the NYT analysis, Kevin and Bob’s view seems pretty well represented:

Healthier adults would buy cheaper policies out of state, the budget office said, while less-healthy adults would stick to in-state insurance because it covers the services they need. Premiums would rise for the latter group as the risk pool became less healthy and more costly.

“From a consumer protection point of view, the result of allowing sales across state lines would be that the state with the least restrictive regulatory scheme would have an advantage and could undercut all the others, and you would have a race to the bottom,” said John Rother, executive vice president of policy and strategy for AARP, the lobby for older Americans, which supports the Democrats’ legislation and markets insurance itself.

Although I’m obviously tweaking Kevin here, I do think the issue was given minimal attention for a long time. But I think that’s because it was always a second- or third-tier issue in the healthcare debate, not because the MSM likes to give the GOP a pass on criticism of its talking points.

In fact, those competing story lines may not add up to an blatant contradiction. How so? Just like sports, when you train hard, you start getting more lucky breaks. The WaPo reports,

A new level of cooperation includes Pakistani permission late last month for U.S. intelligence officials to station personnel and technology in this pulsating megacity [of Karachi], officials said. Intercepted real-time communications handed over to Pakistani intelligence officials have led to the arrests in recent days of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Afghan Taliban’s No. 2 commander, and two of the group’s “shadow” governors for northern Afghanistan.

Or to be more precise, this new level of cooperation resulted in the raid that caught Baradar, although he wasn’t the intended target. According to the NYT,

American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications saying militants with a possible link to the Afghan Taliban’s top military commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, were meeting. Tipped off by the Americans, Pakistani counterterrorist officers took several men into custody, meeting no resistance.

Only after a careful process of identification did Pakistani and American officials realize they had captured Mullah Baradar himself, the man who had long overseen the Taliban insurgency against American, NATO and Afghan troops in Afghanistan.

I still find it frustrating that the the Times, the Post, and other top papers report everything with a tone of detached omniscience, as if they know the whole story and are condescending to share it with you. Of course, I’m part of Generation Blog, so I take it for granted that I have to read multiple sources to get closer to the truth. But my father, for example, never likes hearing that he can’t just read the one newspaper that he’s had delivered to our doorstep for 35 years. Even if it’s the best paper and the least biased, you can’t assume that it really provides “All the news that’s fit to print.”

Anyhow, I’m sure this isn’t the end of the Baradar saga. If the one’s clear takeaway from the story, it’s that major elements of the Taliban are operating deep inside of Pakistan. Everyone “knew” that before, but Pakistani officials still denied it, because our raids hadn’t netted a big enough fish. In my mind, the question now is whether the Pakistanis will put a higher priority on covering up the depth of Taliban penetration, or whether they will decide that if they can’t hide it, they better fight it — that is, if they can get past the idea that the real threat to peace is India.