ABC reports on a new initiative by MoveOn that offers Obama-lovers an opportunity to become famous for 15 seconds:

MoveOn.org, which has endorsed Barack Obama for president, is encouraging citizens to develop 30-second pro-Obama television ads which will be judged by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Oliver Stone, multiple Grammy-winner John Legend and others.

The ad contest, which organizers are calling “Obama in 30 Seconds,” provides the opportunity for Obama supporters to creatively show what inspires them about the Senator’s candidacy. Contestants will be allowed to submit their ads between March 27th and April 1st.

That’s the part that appeals to contestants self-interest. Here’s the part that solidifies the interests of the sponsors [e.a.]:

“After eight years of President Bush campaigning on fear and war, people are feeling hopeful again. They’re eager to talk about what inspires them about our country — and Senator Obama leading it,” said Eli Pariser, Executive Director of MoveOn.

Yes indeed. All ambitious young people will soon be very eager to prove their loyalty to the Liberal Guilt party.

In case you’re wondering, contest winners will be announced at a most convenient moment:

The winning ad, and ad-maker, will be announced on April 17th–just before Pennsylvania’s April 22nd primary.

MoveOn will then spend an undisclosed amount of money to air the ad on “national television.”

Everyone wants to get in on the action in the new arena of Political Entertainment.

This one had a Mr. Super- Clean image, and now he is “linked to a prostitution ring,” says the New York Times..

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer has informed his most senior administration officials that he had been involved in a prostitution ring, an administration official said this morning. …
Just last week, federal prosecutors arrested four people in connection with an expensive prostitution operation. Administration officials would not say that this was the ring with which the governor had become involved.

But a person with knowledge of the governor’s role said that the person believes the governor is one of the men identified as clients in court papers.

Previously, Spitzer was best-known for his anti-corruption campaigns.

This is painfully embarrassing:

Obama Promises a Forceful Stand Against Clinton

I really like Obama, but it’s pretty clear that he has been—will be—eating Hillary’s dust. And, much as it I hate to say it, deservedly so.

George Packer recently came to much the same conclusion, via another route (by reading Arthur Schlesinger’s recently published journals):

Two months ago, I wrote that Obama, with his veneer of idealism and his pragmatic core, reminded me a bit of J.F.K. That might have been wrong. Since then, it’s become clear that Obama is not “a devious and, if necessary, ruthless man,” as Schlesinger called Kennedy. Democrats drawn to Obama’s camp project onto him the sense of politics as a higher calling that Stevenson pioneered in the early nineteen-fifties (whether there’s much substance to it in Obama isn’t completely clear). In the American liberal tradition, this means almost certain defeat. Clinton, on the other hand, appeals to those liberals who want to sleep with power and its compromises and have made their peace with it.

The exercise of power is an art. The powerful don’t announce their intentions. They act, and attack, without warning. That unpredictability is one source of their power.

I love Milos Forman. His best movies are breathtaking. And even his worst movies are a hundred times more interesting and entertaining than most of what passes for highbrow mainstream entertainment. That said, Goya’s Ghosts is a mess—didactic where it should be satirical, melodramatic where it should be dramatic, stingy where it should be generous. As I said: a big mess.

That’s a damn shame, because, as Cinematical notes, it’s got some really stirring moments on a subject of hot contemporary debate—

Javier Bardem embodies one of Forman’s favorite fool-archetypes here: the true believer who is double-blind in thinking that the system he loves loves him back and that his earnestness in upholding it will produce rewards down the road. Bardem plays Brother Lorenzo, a Catholic priest who argues passionately for the grisly torture of the Inquisition in the opening scene, as the other priests sit quietly and imbibe his passionate commitment to the cause instead of daring to debate any of his points. It’s only later, when an unlikely turn of events sees him having dinner in the home of a man suspected of being a “Judiazier” that he’s asked to give any kind of thoughtful defense to his beliefs. ‘How could there be any value in a confession given under extreme physical torture?,’ Brother Lorenzo is asked, to which he replies that God grants the innocent the ability to withstand the torture and not utter false statements, but allows the guilty to perjure themselves. A few minutes later, he’s singing a completely different tune.

And Time magazine puts it in perspective:

[T]he entire film is less an exercise in historicism (though the portrait of the painter is accurate enough, as is the depiction of historical events, the story is pure fiction) than it is an elaborate analogy with our own times. This is quite understandable — Forman lost his parents to the Nazi concentration camps and came of age in Communist-ruled Czechoslovakia, and he has long needed to address the issues that shaped his life in a movie. Goya’s Ghosts is not entirely successful in doing so. …

[I]t has about it a kind of messy passion that is quite fascinating. It obviously means a great deal to its auteur, and that passion grants the film a felt and wayward life not usually granted historical epics.

That judgment applies particularly to Bardem’s performance as the loathsome Lorenzo. In the beginning, as he volunteers to lead the newly revived Inquisition, he is all soft-voiced reason. He is polite to the point of obsequiousness, not only to his church superiors, but even to the people he torments. Creepy, well-met and utterly corrupt, and when the French invade he simply disappears — only to reappear later as, of all things, a Voltairian rationalist, married, with children, and growing rich as an enforcer for Spain’s occupiers. He is, in his way, also a perfect modernist, blowing blandly and prosperously with the winds of change. As long as there is power and status to be had, he does not care who he must serve to obtain those boons. By analogy, Goya’s Ghosts has much to say, largely through this character, about such current issues as torture, terror and the fact that some people can profit hugely by making up ideological justifications for the anarchy they loose upon the world.

The reviewier, Phil Bray, concludes his political takeaway thus:

If you find yourself thinking about, say, Abu Ghraib while you’re watching this movie, that’s OK with Forman and Carriere.

That’s true, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough, because the film isn’t about politics. It’s about human nature—about how even the apolitical among us (and most people are apoliticial) are ensnared, and potentially enslaved, by the pathologically political people who live among us: the seekers of power and privilege and those who serve and/or cozy up to them … regardless of their political persuasion. Right or left, it doesn’t matter. Potentially, power corrupts us all.

In the movie, “There shall be no liberty for the enemies of liberty!” is the cry of the secular republicans against those who would stand in the way of their revolution: monarchs, cardinals, clerks, lawyers, bankers, newspapermen, merchants—everyone with a stake in the system.

Goya’s Ghosts is a failed film, but its 75-year-old director has got something to say, if you’ve got the time and the curiosity to listen.

If you were feeling guilty about following the juicy story of the Los Angeles mayor’s “journalist” girlfriend who reported that the mayor was having an affair but failed to mention that she was his paramour, you can stop feeling guilty. Now.

In a post titled “More Hot Mayoral Sex,” Mickey Kaus explains why political gossip is good for America (emphases in the original):

The lid is off: L.A.’s mayor faces some N.Y. tabloid-style questioning at a news conference. The L.A. Times reporter who didn’t get the story doesn’t know quite what to make of this new state of affairs–I detect a mild sneering tone! Luke Ford sees a “beautiful synchronicity.” … I think Angelenos may be actually getting interested in local politics for once, which will give us better government in the long run. Special interests (e.g., unions, developers) have less power when people are actually paying attention. [What will happen if all the pols in power are no longer womanizers, etc.?--ed Not a serious possibility.] …

The powerful have less power when people are paying attention. And people pay attention when their interest is piqued. One of the things that piques people’s interest is gossipy, tabloid-style “journalism.” Even that is better than their paying no attention at all … which is the alternative.

Long live the people’s interest, and may we find many infotaining ways to pique it!

Via ETP, hard evidence that politics is just that—the greatest show on earth. And proof that at a certain level inside the Beltway, after dark, all of those harsh words rendered in print and harsher judgments barked into microphones are left behind. Because at that level they’re civilized people, you see. (Eric Alterman thinks otherwise—he thinks New York is more forgiving after dark than Washington—as he mentions in this fascinating episode of bloggingheads.tv, about which more another time.)

The photo below, featuring Paul Wolfowitz and Arianna Huffington, *** was taken this past Saturday night at a reception before the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. To read the press last week and over the weekend, you’d think that Paul Wolfowitz is fighting for his very life as the long knives at the World Bank slash him and his girlfriend.

[[ Indeed, he may not survive this attempted takedown. I don't feel particularly sorry for him. I am spitting mad on behalf of his girlfriend, however. And if any case ever cried out for attention from feminists, this is it: an accomplished woman is forced to leave her job, where she's up for a promotion, because her boyfriend, who has nothing at all to do with her work, is appointed the head of the institution she works for. But you would have to put aside other political considerations ("Are you now or have you ever been a Neocon?"---addresssed by Garance Franke-Ruta in that same episode of bloggingheads.tv) in order to come to that conclusion, and I don't see too many people other than sturdy Christopher Hitchens, that noted woman-hater, making this obvious case and standing up yet again for intellectual honesty and a measure of justice. ]]

But back to my point. Here Paul Wolfowitz is smiling warmly at Arianna Huffington, who wrote a blog post just last week titled “Are Gonzales and Wolfowitz the Next to Swim with the Fishes?”

Arianna with Paul Wolfowitz and AOL founder James Kinsey

Left or right, progressive or conservative, Republican or Democrat, hawk or dove—these folks are all the same. Moreover, they are (as is said about the rich) not like you and me. They’re insiders. Their game is about getting there and staying there.

Remember that the next time you feel their intimate presence and read their words via this great new democratic forum, the blogosphere. Not everyone here is created equal. They are not like you and me.
———-

*** She’s so tall! (Jane Fonda is no shrimp, but look at the height difference!)

HuffPo founder Arianna Huffington with actress, activist and radio host Jane Fonda