Tonight in San Antonio at 9:30. Go Los Suns!

Presently, the Cavs are demolishing the Celtics.

Yanks are playing the Sox in Fenway this evening in the first of a 3 games series. Go Yanks.

Tomorrow the Giro d'Italia starts in Rotterdam (next year it starts in Washington, D.C.) Podium Cafe remains the best site for commentary on this first of the 3 big 3 week cycling races (the others are the Tour de France and the Vuelta de Espana.)

34 days till the World Cup in South Africa.

Open Thread.

Open Thread for non-citizenship stripping issues.

How is "assasination" different than citizenship stripping?

Citing with approval news reports that President Obama has signed a secret order authorizing the targeted killing of a radical Yemeni-American cleric, Anwar Al-Awlaki, Mr. Lieberman argued that if that policy was legal — and he said he believed it was — then stripping people of citizenship for joining terrorist organizations should also be acceptable.

This echoes Glenn Greenwald:

Outrage over Lieberman's citizen-stripping bill is odd in light of Obama's assassination program: which would you rather have done to you?

I think this argument features a strain of divergence I have with Greenwald (a good faith disagreement) and people like Joe Lieberman. You'll also see it in my discussions of preventive detention. The Laws of War are simply different from criminal law. Thus, killing an enemy combatant or detaining an enemy combatant is a different matter than incarcerating (or even executing) an individual for criminal actions. More . . .

Citizenship stripping proponents seem to have as their goal removing terror trials from the federal courts:

“It reflects the changing nature of war and recent events,” [Sen. Scott] Brown [R-MA] said Thursday. “War has moved into a new dimension. Individuals who pick up arms — this is what I believe — have effectively denounced their citizenship, and this legislation simply memorializes that effort. So somebody who wants to burn their passport, well, let’s help them along.”

Identical legislation is also being introduced in the House by two Pennsylvania congressmen, Jason Altmire, a Democrat, and Charlie Dent, a Republican. The lawmakers said at a news conference that revoking citizenship would block terrorism suspects from using American passports to re-enter the United States and make them eligible for prosecution before a military commission instead of a civilian court.

(Emphasis supplied.) This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the Sixth Amendment:

NYTimes:

Several major Democratic officials spoke positively about the proposal, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Noting that the State Department already had the authority to rescind the citizenship of people who declare allegiance to a foreign state, she said the administration would take “a hard look” at extending those powers to cover terrorism suspects.

“United States citizenship is a privilege,” she said. “It is not a right. People who are serving foreign powers — or in this case, foreign terrorists — are clearly in violation, in my personal opinion, of that oath which they swore when they became citizens.”

(Emphasis supplied.) This is incorrect as a legal matter in my view. The 14th Amendment states that:

NYTimes:

The American economy added an unexpectedly strong 290,000 jobs in April, while the unemployment rate rose to 9.9 percent, the government said Friday.

U6 is 17.1%. Hopefully, job growth will accelerate.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped a whopping 1,000 points at one pointtoday, it's biggest intra-day drop ever. It later rebounded somewhat so that the final drop was 347.80 points.

Algorhithms may be the culprit.

High-speed trading, which uses sophisticated computer algorithms based on specific scenarios to automate transactions at speeds in the millionths of a second, now accounts for about 60 percent of U.S. equity volume.

"The potential for giant high-speed computers to generate false trades and create market chaos reared its head again today," Senator Edward Kaufman said in a statement.

Or, it might have been circuit breakers. Bloomberg has more here.

Four reporters, including Michelle Shepphard of the Toronto Star, who has done ground-breaking reporting on Omar Khadr, have been banned from attending the hearings underway in his case.

Their violation: Publishing the name of one of his interrogators. The interrogator's name has previously been published in news articles, and he gave on on-the-record interview to Michelle Shepphard in 2008. The ACLU responds:

“That reporters are being punished for disclosing information that has been publicly available for years is nothing short of absurd – any gag order that covers this kind of information is not just overbroad but nonsensical. Plainly, no legitimate government interest is served by suppressing information that is already well known.

We strongly urge the Defense Department to reconsider its rash, draconian and unconstitutional decision to bar these four reporters from future tribunals. If allowed to stand, this decision will discourage legitimate reporting and add yet another entry to the long list of reasons why the military commissions ought to be shut down for good.”

Busy. More thread.

Open Thread.

This snippet from a NYTimes editorial caught my eye:

This is not Mr. Lieberman’s first foray into this dark territory. He is co-author with Mr. McCain of a bill that would require that anyone arrested on any terrorism-related charge, including American citizens, be declared an enemy combatant and tried in a military court.

As I discussed yesterday, the biggest obstacle to the NeoCon approach is the fact that the military tribunals can not be used to try federal crimes, only violations of the laws of war. If Lieberman and McCain are serious about their proposal, the need to move to repeal all federal laws that criminalize terrorism. All of the rest of this is showboating nonsense. Put your money where your mouth is NeoCons, repeal federal laws criminalizing terrorism.

Speaking for me only