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• The long and sadistic history of the CIA’s torture techniques
• Torture lover John Yoo bitches and moans about the harm done him
• Solomon vs. Bill Ayers
• It’s not Iowa or Vermont: The war on Iraq’s gays
• The war on America’s gays
• Video reveals G20 police assault on man who died
• GOP caller to Rush: “You’re a brainwashed Nazi!”
• Obama-Israel: A widening gap?
• Syria says it’s willing to talk peace with Israel
• The Bolivar Youth Orchestra: A force to be reckoned with
• Remembering lost Palestinian villages
• Russia’s depopulation bomb
• Ruth Franklin on Littell’s The Kindly Ones

So this is how Obama put it to Turkey: “At the end of World War I, Turkey could have succumbed to the foreign powers that were trying to claim its territory, or sought to restore an ancient empire. But Turkey chose a different future. You freed yourself from foreign control. And you founded a Republic that commands the respect of the United States and the wider world.There is a simple truth to this story: Turkey’s democracy is your own achievement. It was not forced upon you by any outside power, nor did it come without struggle and sacrifice. Like any democracy, Turkey draws strength from both the successes of the past, and from the efforts of each generation of Turks that makes new progress for your people.”

No mention of Turkey’s genocide of Armenians. No hint. No nod. Just a democracy emerging out of World War I. Great rewrite. Sure to make Turkish nationalists rake their pee with raki tonight.

• Class War 101
• Obama sweet-talks Islam in brutish Turkey
• Obama sidesteps Turkey’s genocide-denial
• Hitchens: Telling the truth about the Armenian genocide
• Egypt at war with democracy activists
• Obama’s double talk
• Michael Kinsley on life after newspapers
• In praise of the short story
• 2006 Lebanon-Israel war fires up US generals
• Big fat drunk sublime Handel
• Not just Slate, but economists, too, suck
• All you need to know about the Champions League Quarters

• Updikean couple in Egypt jailed
• What we’re fighting for in Afghanistan: spousal rape
• Michelle Obama’s organic garden calls down agribusiness wrath
• Photoshopping Michelle Obama
• Post-Christian America
• Newspapers have nothing to do with democracy 
• Footballer yellow-carded for farting

JimG reminds us of the importance of being fair to Beethoven. I couldn’t find the Pathetique, but Sundays are for odes to joy anyway.

• Right-wing worry-warts over Obama lynchings
• Why is Glenn Beck putting Obama in a nazi uniform?
• Unhinging at fox news
• Pfaff: America’s pointless, long war ahead
• Sex offenders’ Guantanamo
• The vanishing social security surplus
• Five things to do on your furlough
• So long, my boy
• Should Obama control the Internet?

The photograph has nothing to do with the musical bit, but I love them both, and one of them is my daughter at her latest concert, playing her latest trick. Speaking of which: does anyone remember this bit from the midpoint of the Reagan administration?

• Your Latest Trick

• The KKK is alive and burning crosses
• Why the border fence fails
• Piers Morgan’s Top-10 G-20 fantasies
• Is porn the new tobacco?
• Benny Morris on Palestine’s 1947-48 civil war

From the Labor Department: “Nonfarm payroll employment continued to decline sharply in March (-663,000), and the unemployment rate rose from 8.1 to 8.5 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Since the recession began in December 2007, 5.1 million jobs have been lost, with almost two-thirds (3.3 million) of the decrease occurring in the last 5 months. In March, job losses were large and widespread across the major industry sectors.”

Also: “The change in total nonfarm employment for January was revised from -655,000 to -741,000, while the change for February remained -651,000. [...] The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) rose to 3.2 million over the month and has increased by about 1.9 million since the start of the recession in December 2007.”

Good thing, too. From The Times: “A jury ruled Thursday that Ward L. Churchill, a former University of Colorado professor who drew national attention for an essay in which he called some victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks “little Eichmanns,” was wrongfully terminated. The jury found that his political views were a “substantial or motivating” factor in his dismissal, and that the university had not shown that he would have been dismissed anyway.”

No surprise there. What Churchill said was ridiculous, and sensationally so, but no more, and in so many cases far less, ridiculous than the incendiary gabfest that fueled-up post-9/11 America under the guise of patriotic retribution and, horror of horrors, honor. The result are the actual atrocities of Iraq and Afghanistan we’ve had to endure, as opposed to the rhetorical idiocies of an otherwise respectable professor.

See my previous pieces on the matter:

• The Firing of Ward Churchill (July 2007)
• Dissent’s Enemies, Freedom’s Cheats (Feb. 2005)

• Twitter Switch for Guardian, After 188 Years of Print
• Palestinian Terror in the West Bank
• When Even Bill Kristol Loves Obama’s Afghan Plan, Time to Worry
• The End of Christopher Dodd
• Alaska Senate Pukes on Palin Pick
• Eric Alterman Defends Pinch Sulzberger
• Is Samantha Power Overrated?
• On Thomas Carlyle
• Semi-World Cup Shocker: Bolivia 6, Argentina 1
• Trailer Trash: Hollywood Stars Unplugged

Quote of the day:  “We don’t issue instructions on not touching the queen.”–An unnamed Buckingham Palace official on what remains of the obnoxious idiocy known as monarchic protocol.

I was writing a couple of pieces on Peace Now, the beleaguered Israeli human rights group that got its start in the barf old days of the Begin years back when the Israeli military was on one of its periodic smashes over Lebanon (so the Netanyahu years shouldn’t be that different) when this mind-blowing piece by Bach came up on my shuffle (I tend to go heavy on Bach when I have to pound out a few thousand words in an evening). It’s just a prelude, nothing Genesis-worthy, and I’m not even sure what mind-blowing means other than something Quentin Tarrantino would go for (which I don’t), but i thought I’d share it with you all. It’s worth listening to a few times even if you’re not under the influence of arak, as I am.   There’s something insurgent here, defiantly assertive, as in: We may get stepped on, we may be treated like slaves, we may get fired, we may even lose our 401(k) matches (count me out: I was never suckered into that scam), but we’ll survive. Marie-Claire Alain is the organist.

• Bach’s Prelude in G Major, BWV 568 (Marie Claire Alain at the organ)

• How Pinch Sulzberger Demolished the New York Times
• How Vanity Fair Got it Wrong About Pinch
• Will Netanyahu Attack Iran?
• Taliban Says Talk Offer “Lunatic”
• Blowback: Taliban Threatens Attacks in US
• Krugman on Why Obama Is Wrong
• One More Boost for Sen. Franken
• Nicolas Sarkozy on How to Reinvent Capitalism
• I Feel Your Prostate
• 742,000 Jobs Lost in US in March (French)
• Ted Stevens Gets Away With It
• Why The Pope Is Stuck in the Middle Ages
• Iran & Syria Got Indirect US Nuclear Aid

Jad Aoun, who runs the best new blog to come out of Lebanon in at least three cedar rings (I should feature him at About soon), started a bit that could write itself most days of the week: the Pavlovian reach for the Beirut simile (”Looks like Beirut”) the moment anything anywhere burns, crumbles, washes out or explodes, whether it’s a terrorist bombing in whoknowsistan or a tornado’s wreckage in Oklahoma.

A couple of days ago Jad gave his award to an unimaginative hack in Britain, but illustrated his bit with a shot of downtown Beirut, the one above (literally and figuratively) which struck me as oddly Orlandoesque–not a compliment to Beirut, if you know Orlando, the Tripoli of Florida (the Libyan one, not the more acceptable Lebanese one). Orlandoesque, that is, when Orlando’s real estate industry was still on Viagra, erecting cranes every four hours and screwing every vista in sight. It’s all collapsed now, thank heavens (you can see the sky again), Orlando is humbled, its arrogance as flaccid as its economy. Which leaves us, me, with Beirut to long for.

Jad, if you’re listening, more photographs of my old native city (Hopital Risk) at dusk, please. One request in particular: Beirut with Sannin in the background, preferably at dusk, when the snows of April look pink in the setting sun and the smell of sweet lemons and akke-dene is in the air. No similes. Just the real thing, because…

With newspapers getting thinner and broadcasters never anything worth stealing from, it’s getting damn hard to find worthy material to mix with morning coffee. No wonder readers are rebelling. Here we go anyway, starting with this Slate photo essay on the recession (click on the image):

• Ross Douthat NYT’s Next Conservative OpEd Guy
• How Israel Bombed That Sudan Convoy
• How Canada Banned George Galloway
• Why Is the US Taking Over for UK in Basra?
• Britain’s Peep and Chong Over Porn
• “Scubs,” the XXX Script
• “War on terror” Is (Bad) History
• (Why) do selfish people self-select in
  economics? (Warning: Long Read)
• The 20 Weirdest TV Interviews of All Time

Anybody surprised? There was little doubt that an internal investigation into the Israeli military’s abuses in Gaza was going to be a whitewash. It was predicted, though the gall of calling all the allegations “rumors,” when almost 1,500 Palestinians were killed in 22 days, is impressive.

B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, fires back: “The internal investigation ignored a significant amount of material that was collected and that coincides with soldiers’ testimonies recently publicized in Israel media. In addition, the Military Advocate General disregarded allegations that several of the commands given during the military operations were illegal. It is clear that in this case, the Military Police Criminal Investigations Department (MPCID) has decided to focus on the individual soldier, a measure which is neither effective nor reliable.”

It isn’t a question of whether atrocities took place. The mere casualty toll makes it plain that Operation Cast Lead, as it was obscenely called, was an atrocity in execution. The only question, and it’s less relevant to Palestinians than it is to Israelis, is how deep the mentality of brutalism as policy has sunk into the ranks of the Israeli military.

GM is going down, JimG’s favorite feature is (maybe) coming back. Here are the Readables for today, new and yet-to-be disproved. (And again: my apologies for links opening a new window, but it’s the only way to make this work in the context of the Notebooks’ front page):

• Dove’s Eye: 9/11, Oakland, Mieh-Mieh
• Glenn Beck, Mr. Apocalypse
• Back To Barbaric Basics in Iraq
• Huffington Post Has a $1.75 Million Investigative Fund
• Israeli Military Shrugs Off War Crimes Investigation
• GI Guilty of Murdering Bound Iraqi
• Qaddafi Hasn’t Lost His Honest-to-Mad-Dog Touch
• Obama and the Middle East: No We Can’t
• Netanyahu’s Empty Rhetoric
• When TS Eliot Rejected Animal Farm
• Freeman Dyson Says Screw It to Global Warming

Quote of the day: “Michelle Malkin, who, if she were a sex-selling whore (and, while the Rude Pundit cannot confirm anything, he’s pretty sure she’s swapping blow jobs for appearances on Glenn Beck’s nightly crazoidfest), she’d be the type of hooker who tells you all the crazy shit she could do to your dick if she hadn’t sprained her back, but if you double the price, she’ll work through the pain, stalked the family of a twelve year-old boy who almost died in a car wreck. even going to their home. Her point? That they owned things and thus didn’t need SCHIP.”–From The Rude Pundit, of course.

True beauty is rare. Stupidity is rampant. Last Wednesday, 13 young Palestinian string musicians and old Israeli Holocaust survivors created a rare moment of beauty free of boundaries as they found themselves face to face at the Holocaust Survivors Center in Holon, a suburb of Tel Aviv, performing, listening, and at times singing together. Neither group realized it would be facing the other until the moment happened. Neither group regretted it. Far from it. They reveled in the moment, learned more than a few heartbreaks one from the other, and posed for pictures together.

When the Strings of Freedom orchestra returned home to Jenin, the Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, their music director, Wafa Younis, was fired, her studio apartment in the camp shuttered, and the orchestra disbanded. The reason: Adnan Hindi, leader of the camp’s Popular Committee, which sounds like one of those proto-fascist guilds of grass-root thuggery, decreed that Younis had deceived her musicians and had exploited them, in The Times’ account, “for the purpose of ‘normalizing’ ties with Israel. The full story…

Like every newspaper battling the crumps, The Times is launching a new gimmick every other day. Two, today: a blog for parents on the brink of bankruptcy (it’s ominously called “The Choice”) and a new edition, called Global Times, designed for more spherically minded people (as opposed to homebound flat-earthers). Quick proof. The cover photo of the domestic web page this hour is of Michigan doing something in the NCAA basketball tournament. On Global Times? First it was to Arab sheikhs, now it’s news of a deadly stampede in Ivory Coast. So: If you’re American, stick with hoops. Anybody else: The planet spins on, and not to the tune of a court buzzer.