UPDATE 2: The video below has been taken down, but you can still watch it here, and with better sound quality.

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Via Minipudit (another of the high school seniors who blog), comes this Saturday Night Live short featuring two of the hottest Jewish men in show business, Andy Samberg and Maroon 5′s Adam Levine, crooning a homoerotic love song to anti-gay, anti-Semitic Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

Soft power, at its finest, baby.

UPDATE: Lyrics here.

The New York Times finds the man who started the international poisoned Chinese toothpaste scare:

Eduardo Arias hardly fits the profile of someone capable of humbling one of the world’s most formidable economic powers.

A 51-year-old Kuna Indian, Mr. Arias grew up on a reservation paddling dugout canoes near his home on one of the San Blas islands off Panama’s Caribbean coast. He now lives in a small apartment above a food stand in Panama, the nation’s capital, also known as Panama City.

But one Saturday morning in May, Eduardo Arias did something that would reverberate across six continents. He read the label on a 59-cent tube of toothpaste. On it were two words that had been overlooked by government inspectors and health authorities in dozens of countries: diethylene glycol, the same sweet-tasting, poisonous ingredient in antifreeze that had been mixed into cold syrup here, killing or disabling at least 138 Panamanians last year.

Mr. Arias reported his discovery, setting off a worldwide hunt for tainted toothpaste that turned out to be manufactured in China. Health alerts have now been issued in 34 countries, from Vietnam to Kenya, from Tonga in the Pacific to Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean. Canada found 24 contaminated brands and New Zealand found 16. Japan had 20 million tubes. Officials in the United States unwittingly gave the toothpaste to prisoners, the mentally disabled and troubled youths. Hospitals gave it to the sick, while high-end hotels gave it to the wealthy.

People around the world had been putting an ingredient of antifreeze in their mouths and until Panama blew the whistle, no one seemed to know it….

Mr. Arias, who lives alone and does not own a car, went to buy blank CDs on May 5 at Vendela, a discount store where he had heard prices were so low that street vendors bought supplies there. Stepping into the store, a large display of toothpaste caught his eye.

“Without touching the tube, the letters were big enough for me to read: diethylene glycol,” Mr. Arias said.

A year ago, those words would have meant nothing to him. “Nobody had ever heard of this stuff,” Mr. Arias said. But a steady drumbeat of news about poison cough syrup had engraved the words in his mind.

“It was inconceivable to me that a known toxic substance that killed all these people could be openly on sale and that people would go on about their business calmly, selling and buying this stuff,” said Mr. Arias, who has a midlevel government job reviewing environmental reports.

Mr. Arias thought about alerting the store clerk but figured nothing would come of it. Instead, he bought a tube with the plan of turning it over to the health authorities.

And so he did.

Kit Seelye over at The NYT issues a bleg:

I’m writing a small column item for Monday’s Caucus blog about why more men seemed to be involved in politics online than women. I wondered if you 1) agreed with that and 2) why or why not.

This results in a comment thread that’s about as interesting as these things usually are, until we get to comment 41, where someone says something worth listening to, and which is worth reprinting in full:

Oh where to begin.

First let me say that I do not agree that more men than woman are involved on politics online – only that the men are louder, brasher and more apt to get attention from mainstream publications.

They are also more apt to support one and another, to link to each other repeatedly and build up an echo chamber that reinforces their dominance.

If you are talking about the political blogosphere, then indeed, you are likely talking about a cluster of well-known blogs that are dominated by men. Others will claim that this is not so – they will point to the fact that DailyKos has female contributors. I’d counter that we’ve not seen those women on “Meet the Press”. They’d point to the Huffington Post and Arianna’s success – I’d counter that Arianna is the face – an establishment figure who lent her name and commentary to a media venture created and funded by a man. Or they’ll point to FireDogLake and Jane Hamsher – whose blog has a cadre of diverse writers – which is the exception not the rule.

The truth is that when it comes to online politics many women have largely rejected the outfront role of blogging for the behind the scenes work of organizing – which brings with it infintely more satisfaction but sincerely less notoriety. For examples of this look to Gina Cooper, the founder and driving force behind the YearlyKos Convention, which was responsible in a large part for giving credibility to the men who are so often considered, “the blogosphere”. Or look to Speaker Pelosi’s office – where the internet operation has been run by a highly capable woman, Karina Newton for years. Other examples can be found in non-profits, campaigns and organizations where women have risen through the ranks of online organizing. Look at the New Organizing Institutes’s former executive director Roz LeMieux and current president Judith Freeman. Look at Zephyr Teachout from Dean 2004 and Amanda Michel now over at NewAssignment.net. These women are there – but they are often more powerful behind the scenes, building, organizing and actually making things happen.

This behind the scenes role can also be attributed to the large amount of sexism prevalent online that female bloggers deal with day in and day out, especially when they have the nerve to venture forward with a strong informed opinion.

However, to really find the women en mass you have to look beyond the incestuous political blogosphere (see Garance for more on that: http://thegarance.com/archives/768) to the larger blogosphere. There you will find the feminist bloggers, largely disconnected from the political blogosphere, despite their liberal leanings. These women have been blogging for years, yet are rarely linked to by the male-dominated political blogosphere – though there are a few exceptions, the occasional rant of Amanda Marcotte, more famous post-Edwards, when the “bloggers” could claim her as one of their own, Feministing.com’s brash Jessica Valenti, author of a new book, who has achieved a good deal of cross-blogosphere pollination in the past year and the odd crosspost over on HuffPo.

You could also look toward the Mommy Bloggers – a sphere where Silicon Valley Mom Blog and affiliates meet with Elizabeth Edwards and no one in the political sphere notices, or where BlogHer brings over a thousand woman to Chicago the same week as the YearlyKos convention but the political campaigns scarcely notice, despite an entire track devoted to politics.

The truth is woman are out there and they are frustrated that the media constantly cites the same loud men as representatives of the blogosphere. These men have done some good things, that is true – but they have not done everything and it’s time someone recognized that.

The women are there, if you care to notice them.

— Posted by a woman on the inside

Whoever you are, we should have lunch.

In the latest issue of Gourmet. It’s not online, unfortunately, but the subhed to “Kabul Nights” is “Most of the restaurants in Afghanistan’s capital, where there are few named streets and no addresses, are tough to find. One clue: Look for the guards.” I love when the upscale glossies do spreads on such places.

One smart Washington technologist recently pointed out an interesting divide between the staffs of the Barack Obama and John Edwards campaigns, which both employ a fair number of former Howard Dean staffers. There was a split at the end of the Dean campaign between those loyal to Dean, he explained, and those loyal to Joe Trippi, who memorably departed the Dean headquarters in Burlington on the heels of Dean’s spectacular Iowa collapse and second-place New Hampshire finish.

Obama got the Dean loyalists, some of whom had followed the former Vermont governor to the DNC when he took over as chair, while Edwards took on the Trippi people, including eventually Joe Trippi himself.

Should Edwards win the Democratic nomination, the observer pointed out, the historic bad blood between Trippi and Dean would lead to some interesting interpersonal dynamics, as Dean’s DNC would have to work hand in hand with Trippi to elect Edwards.

That potential dynamic just got a whole lot more important thanks to the Edwards campaign’s decision to accept public matching funds for the primary election. As Edwards campaign manager David Bonior pointed out in a memo explaining the decision:

What happens between February 5th and the convention?

…part of this campaign is about restoring the power of the Democratic Party. Since the party can spend money independently of its Presidential nominee, a stronger Democratic Party will be in a position to meet the challenge of waging an effective campaign on behalf of John Edwards and every other Democratic candidate.

The Edwards campaign now promises to rely on the Dean DNC to defend the Trippi-advised candidate, should he win the nomination. Everyone involved is a professional and I’m sure the DNC would do everything it could, but this just seems, well, complicated.

A blog like this is perhaps the last place you’d expect to find kind words for the recently-departed head of the conservative National Taxpayers Union, but there it is. I don’t quite recall how I met John Berthoud — I’m pretty sure it was while reporting on a dinner that Washington’s movement conservatives were holding to honor then House Majority Leader Tom DeLay — but we stayed in touch through a series of lunches and e-mails, and he was just teasing me two weeks ago about the number of members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy I count among my Facebook friends (three, including him). I did not know him well, but John was a genuine, straightforward person, and I always appreciated his insights into the conservative movement, and into how the fiscal conservatives differ from the social ones. The death of any person at the age of 47 feels shocking, and so I find myself this morning in shock to learn — via a Facebook e-mail, no less — that he has passed away.