Leave it to the Oscars to frustrate me even when they’re properly awarded. On Friday, I loudly declared my belief in inavataribility, arguing that, given the Academy's lifelong emphasis on movies' commercial success, there was no way it would give Best Picture to a $12.6 million-grossing indie (The Hurt Locker) over a well-reviewed juggernaut that made 50 times as much (Avatar). On Sunday, it gave Best Picture to a $12.6 million-grossing, etc., etc.

Harold Pollack is the Helen Ross Professor of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago and a Special Correspondent for The Treatment.

There's been more positive attention of-late to the idea of high-risk pools. Some concrete numbers underscore why the idea doesn't deserve it.

--Jonathan Cohn on where health care stands as of now

--Richard Thaler on the all-gain, no-pain plan to auction off the radio spectrum

--Tim Noah on America's insufficiently frightened ruling class

This post may not hold a lot of interest to readers who aren't Ross Douthat, but what the heck, it's only the internet:

Ross Douthat has a generally decent reply to something I wrote a few days ago, pointing out the ways that highbrow and lowbrow conservative attacks have effectively worked in tandem:

The Wall Street Journal today reports on a fallback health care plan that's been floating around the Obama administration for weeks, but seems to have been rejected by President Obama. The plan would expand Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Plan, and require insurers to let people stay on their parents' insurance plan through age 26. Ross Douthat enthuses:

David Brooks argued yesterday that President Obama's decision to postpone the excise tax means it will never go into effect:

If you read this blog, I assume you also read Jonathan Chait's. Just in case, though, you should read his response to David Brooks and Ross Douthat about the fate of the Cadillac tax and its implications for reform. These paragraphs, in particular, really capture the frustrating political dynamic we've seen for the last year:

Goes to Ross Douthat:

--A profile of Ross Douthat, "a young man who is still very much interested in the impossible."

--The Democratic Congress is incredibly productive...

--But, sadly, solving problems is bad politics

Yesterday I argued that it's irrational for Democrats to freak out about health care the day after Scott Brown's win, given that the fundamentals remain the same. (I compared the reaction to the days after Ted Kennedy's death, when commentators widely and baselessly speculated that it would cause an upsurge of support for reform.) Ross Douthat, in his now-familiar role as Chait gainsayer, gainsays:

I've been railing at the establishment's insistence on acting as if voters are driven purely by ideological preference -- as if 10% unemployment has nothing to do with the current voter mood. Offering his rebuttal is David Brooks:

Jim Manzi and his friends are trying to reframe the argument about Western European social democracy into something other than the one he originally made. To review: Manzi’s essay – which, again, isn’t all bad – hinges upon the premise that the United States must navigate between economic growth-destroying social democracy and social cohesion-destroying Reaganism.

Jim Manzi's conservative reform manifesto in National Affairs has attracted all sorts of praise on the right. And Manzi does have some interesting observations and decent proposals. His main premise is that there's an inherent tension between economic dynamism and social cohesion. Conservatives, he argues, must oppose the Democrats' growth-stifling social democratic agenda without going so in the other direction that they allow the the social fabric to rend.

Ross Douthat defends the filibuster:

TNR published a piece I did the other day examining the ideological underpinnings of the left/center split in the Democratic Party over the propriety of a universal health care system based on regulated and subsidized private health insurers. I suggested there was a burgeoning, if questionably workable, tactical alliance between “social-democratic” progressives and some conservatives to derail much of the Obama overall agenda. Then I made this observation:

[O]n a widening range of issues, Obama's critics to the right say he's engineering a government takeover of the private sector, while his critics to the left accuse him of promoting a corporate takeover of the public sector. They can't both be right, of course, and these critics would take the country in completely different directions if given a chance. But the tactical convergence is there if they choose to pursue it.

This statement has drawn considerable comment from people on both the Right and Left, mainly objecting to the argument that Obama’s critics can’t all be right.

Conservative theoretician Reihan Salam, writing for National Review, first argued that there’s not much substantive difference between the “New Democrat” deployment of private-sector entities in public initiatives and that favored by the privatizers of the Right. But then he pirouetted to make common cause with Obama’s critics on the Left:

It is entirely possible for both sets of critics to be correct. The concern from the right isn't that the Obama approach will literally nationalize for-profit    health insurers. Rather, it is that for-profit health insurers will continue evolving into heavily subsidized firms that function as public utilities, and that seek advantage by gaming the political process. Profits, including profits governed by medical loss ratios, can and will then be cycled into political action, which leads to the anxiety concerning a "corporate takeover of the public sector."

Salam’s friend Ross Douthat of The New York Times added an "amen" to this argument:

The point is that the more intertwined industry and government become, the harder it is to discern who’s “taking over” whom — and the less it matters, because the taxpayer is taking it on the chin either way.

But do conservatives really oppose this intertwining of industry and government? Rhetorically, yes, operationally—not so much.

In her review of Brothers, Slate's Dana Stevens discloses

Here I come up against what I'm fully willing to admit may be a personal limitation: I can't stand Natalie Portman. I've never believed her in a single role. She evokes no emotional response in me beyond, "Oh, there's Natalie Portman." She doesn't overact or underact; she just stands around with whatever the appropriate expression for the scene seems to be on her sweet, pretty, childlike face. If there's something going on behind that face, I neither know nor care what it is, which means that long stretches of Brothers involving her character's interiority struck me as dramatically inert. If you possess the gene that enables Portman-caring, you may find them brilliant.

Vulture's Mark Graham concurs, at least somewhat, suggesting the problem may be that Portman is simply too beautiful. Ross Douthat has a more interesting take:

I think Portman was wonderful as a teenage actress — in “The Professional,” of course (her breakout, and still her best role), but also in “Beautiful Girls” and “Heat” as well. But she’s had the same problem that Leonardo DiCaprio had (and still has, despite his permanent stubble, and Martin Scorsese’s best efforts) making the transition to grown-up parts. Like Leo, she looks younger than she is, and the qualities that made her appealing in teenage roles (a kind of luminous transparency, above all) make her hard to take seriously when she plays a stripper, or a terrorist, or a scheming Ann Boleyn — or, in this case, an army wife and mother of two....

Tellingly, just as DiCaprio’s best role in the last decade was as a charming man-child in “Catch Me If You Can,” Portman’s best turn was playing the manic pixie dream girl in Zach Braff’s “Garden State.” She was magnetic, albeit in a mediocre and pretentious movie — but it was a throwback to the kind of girlish part that made her famous, rather than a leap into the kind of adult work that she keeps trying, and failing to quite pull off.

With a meaningful caveat, I tend to agree. As I wrote in my review of Closer back in 2005

I don't agree with everything Ross Douthat writes in his column today. But I think he puts his finger on the way the deficit is playing politically, something a lot of politicians and commentators have missed lately:

Last week, I clicked over to the CNN home page and there, in a rundown of the day’s most important news, I saw a headline announcing that Nicole Richie had pneumonia. I immediately thought of Sarah Palin: I fully expect that, five or ten or 15 years from now, I’ll be reading a similar headline about her. 

Ross Douthat's column in today's New York Times makes the perfectly sensible point that Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee have decided to use their fame to become bigger celebrities, rather than more policy-oriented, serious public figures. Huckabee hosts a (perversely enjoyable) television show on Fox News, and Palin has a new book out (or so I've heard). Douthat writes:

Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and Special Correspondent for The Treatment.

Some weeks ago, I was standing out front of a traditional Italian grocery wearing a Knights of Columbus smock raising money for programs that serve the mentally disabled. I wish university fund raising were this easy. I waved my giant Tootsie Rolls, and watched cash flow into my tin can. At one point, a silver-haired man emerged from a Camero to hand me a dollar. In my mind’s eye, I saw my father-in-law, Gregory Perrone.

Like many of the people dropping money into my can, Greg was a Republican who enjoyed his Camero, pro football, and Rush Limbaugh. He and I disagreed about just about everything. Movie star handsome and a gifted photographer, Greg was struck down decades before his time by lung cancer. He was a wonderful man. He walked the walk on many things, not least being that he spent 35 years caring for his disabled son. In less challenging circumstances, I was sucking wind after one-tenth of that time.

Greg and I were wise enough never to discuss abortion. So I don’t precisely know what he believed. I know enough to know that we disagreed, and that I liked and respected him despite these differences.

The usually interesting Ross Douthat has an unusually terrible column today about the Democrats and income inequality. Douthat is one of the few conservatives who has ever acknowledged the empirical reality of growing inequality and treated it as a serious issue. His latest effort is a discouraging sign of where right-leaning thought on this topic stands.

Douthat’s thesis is, “In the short run, Barack Obama could preside over an America that’s more economically stagnant and more stratified.”

Where’s the evidence? Douthat begins by noting:

There’s only so much that politicians can do about broad socioeconomic trends of a more unequal America is a vexingly complicated issue, whose roots may wind too deep for public policy to reach.

Liberals, though, have spent decades telling a more simplistic story, in which conservatives bear all the blame for stagnating middle-class wages and skyrocketing upper-class wealth.

This is a strange statement.

Conor Friedersdorf again makes the point that, although conservatives outside of Washington are largely correct that their inside-the-Beltway brethren can be divided into hackish, careerist sellouts and people who write and say what they actually believe, their conception of which is which is almost exactly reversed--that is, the moderate heretics and iconoclasts tend to fall into the latter category, and the down-the-line partisan warriors into the former.

Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.