(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . L.L. #5, April 23 [1] ['The Geogre', 'View Profile', 'Back Of Bourke', 'Greg Dworkin', 'Dan K'] Date: 2026-04-23 Preface: This is Laudable Links #5 — curated and recommended stories with discussion, quips, and wordplay. I don’t promise that they’re good, just as good as my wearing mind can manage of a Wednesday night in April. Pig wrestlin’! Three smart experts in international law beat up on “Ambassador” Mike Walz’s statements about American exceptionalism to war crimes in Iran. The K$ defamation is coming from inside his mouth. Make the Big Three patriotic again. . . or else Pete Hegseth will make them patriotic again. Idjits in High Places: Mike Walz Has a Legal Thought I won’t spend a great deal of time going through this, because it’s low comedy that is more useful as instruction than it is as engagement with a public official, but three international law experts — Michael Schmitt, Tess Bridgeman, and Ryan Goodman — open up a can on Presidential buddy Walz at Just Security in “On Ambassador Waltz’s Defense of Potential Law of War Violations in the Iran Conflict.” See, Donald made his threat of a very Russian spring again. On Sunday, he said that, if Iran did not take “our” offer, then “we” would knock out every single power plant in the country — attacking civilian targets, in other words, and one-upping the Russians in Ukraine. He had already threatened desalination plants, which would murder civilians — the people not in charge of closing the “Strait of Trump.” These are war crimes. If there is no state of war, they are violations of international law that get close to crimes against humanity. Walz did the Gingrich trifecta (appearing on all three of the Sunday network shows) to defend Donald’s destructive desires, |[Quote|In doing so, he offered the most detailed purported legal justifications for those threats to date. Indeed, he confirmed that he wanted to “get ahead of this other ridiculous and frankly irresponsible narrative that this would somehow constitute a, quote, ‘war crime,’ that we’ve heard from Democratic politicians, the media, and others in the international community.” On all three shows, he proactively raised the issue before the anchor did – an ominous sign that he may be laying the groundwork for the U.S. military to follow through on the President’s statements. Although a former Army Special Forces officer and former National Security Advisor, Waltz is neither a lawyer nor in the chain of command. |[End Quote] Because there is no declared war, the authors use the Law of Armed Combat (LOAC) |[Quote|In some cases, the operations in question will also qualify as war crimes or crimes against humanity by those involved, particularly when the attack is directed at civilian objects, is indiscriminate, or is clearly disproportionate. |[End Quote] I promised that I would not follow the trail on this one. It is detailed, and it proves its argument to arrive at its conclusion. While we would like the conclusion to be written in fire, it is a legal analysis, so it appears in letters of ice: |[Quote| We conclude that while there is a basis in law for some of Waltz’s claims, they are not only exaggerated but also fail to offer the full picture. Our analysis is limited to issues of targeting, although aspects of the interviews raised other legal questions, such as his statement that “it’s the U.S. Navy and President Trump that decide what comes in and out” of the Strait of Hormuz, a claim of authority exceeding what the law of naval warfare allows during blockades (see Mark Nevitt’s analysis of blockade law).|[End Quote] In other words, “Nice try, Donald. Better than a Truthy sent out at 2:30 AM, but still garbage.” Kash Patel Keeps Defaming Kash Patel Kathryn Rubino is keeping us abreast of drunken-hearted FBI director Kashyap Patel’s $250,000,000 defamation suit against The Atlantic for reporting that he is “freaking out” over being fired and for conspicuous bibbing. It seems that just Tuesday, he managed to have some setbacks. In “Kash Patel’s $250 Million Lawsuit Was Going Fine Until He Started Talking About It” at Above the Law, she reminds us that the performative $250 million defamation suit cites, as evidence of bad-thought-bad-speech, a prior suit against Frank Figliuzzi filed in Texas. The reasoning was, “That guy said Patel was always partying, and now the courts are going to get him for it; therefore, this lady at The Atlantic had to know she was lying and demonstrating malice when she said that Patel was dead drunk in his hotel room.” Keep that in mind, as the bit of logic suffered a major de-planking. |[Quote|a federal judge in the Southern District of Texas dismissed his other defamation lawsuit — the one against former FBI counterintelligence assistant director Frank Figliuzzi, who said on Morning Joe that Patel had “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building.” U.S. District Judge George Hanks Jr. was not impressed. The court found that Figliuzzi’s comment “when taken in context, cannot have been perceived by a person of ordinary intelligence as stating actual facts about Patel.” A reasonable person, the judge continued, “would not have taken his statement literally: that Dir. Patel has actually spent more hours physically in a nightclub than he has spent physically in his office building.” In other words: it was a joke. A sarcastic, hyperbolic quip. The kind of thing that is not defamation, but is, in fact, just someone clowning on a public official on cable television, something Americans are constitutionally permitted to do. |[End Quote] “Reasonable person?” Well, see, there’s your problem right there! We’re talking about a guy who thinks “K$” is a cool branding opportunity and who hires Jesse Binnall to represent him. The other bit of sad trombone music came from Director Patel’s decision to show his seriousness and job-doing duty by appearing publicly, and on camera with Todd “Blank” Blanche at a press conference. It was a theatrical performance where the SPLC could be made to do a perp walk and Blanche could try to heap shame on the SPLC for daring to investigate white supremacists. Seriously, y’all, what the Fudruckers was that about except to try to create an image in the uninformed public’s mind that unmasking the Klan and The Order is bad? What was the motivation other than vengeance? You can guess who might have felt the tingle down his leg at the performance. But then the press had to show up! NBC’s Ryan Reiley, in particular, got a chance to ask questions, and somehow it became an episode of the Goes Wrong Show: |[Quote|Specifically, Reilly asked Patel whether on April 10, Patel “had a routine technical problem logging into a government system, which was quickly fixed.” The Atlantic had reported that this login issue triggered a “freak-out” in which Patel believed he’d been fired. REILLY: Can you explain the computer log in issue? Your lawsuit contends you were not able to log into the system PATEL: Let’s have a survey. How many of you people believe that’s true? REILLY: Did you communicate with anyone you thought you were fired? PATEL: It’s an absolute lie. It never happened. You are lying. REILLY: The lawsuit says the opposite! The lawsuit denies the freak-out characterization, but it does not deny the login problem. It admits it, right there on the page, in the document Binnall filed in federal court that Patel suffered a “routine technical problem logging into a government system.” |[End Quote] In other words, the court can now take as a matter of public testimony that the filing is not accurate? Or will Patel have to testify, as one Republican did in Trump 1, “I am under no obligation to tell reporters the truth.” Nor the public. Nor voters. Nor colleagues. “What is truth?” How to Solve Stupid Logistics: Say It’s WW2 I hawk Capitol Trades every so often. Not only does the site profile members of the House and Senate and their stock trades, but it does stories on extraordinary public-private activities. Turra Rasheed’s “Echoes of WWII as Pentagon Calls GM & Ford to Build Weapons” qualifies as just such a thing. Wayne Co., North Carolina You may have heard that the U.S. still features very expensive, very large, weapons systems and very complex defensive arrays. Our anti-ballistic missile systems are top notch, but they’re huge and expensive. Restocking them is time consuming and oh so expensive. Our anti-drone systems are either supremely high tech or highly computerized and, seemingly, behind the battlefield states. Oh, we know how, but we haven’t put swarms and clouds in the field yet, and we’re still using missiles from aircraft. The Iran flash war, therefore, is not only costing $2,000,000,000,000 a day, but it is burning up STUFF — stuff that takes a long time to make. Not to worry! |[Quote|Senior Pentagon officials recently sat down with GM CEO Mary Barra and Ford CEO Jim Farley to discuss shifting auto factory capacity toward munitions and military equipment. The timing is no coincidence. The recent Iran conflict exposed critical weaknesses in America’s defense industrial base. Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired at nine times the annual procurement rate. Every PrSM (Precision Strike Missile) in inventory was expended. Patriot interceptors were depleted across the region. Just six weeks of high-intensity war overwhelmed a system built for peacetime deterrence. |[End Quote] That’s right. After all, the American car factories already went from IC to EV to IC, so why not missiles? I’m sure we can pay for it. But this is Capitol Trades, so you know where this is going: |[Quote|As these massive opportunities emerge, lawmakers are typically quick to spot investment potential. Checking recent Capitol Trades data shows several members of Congress have already been positioning portfolios in companies tied to the defense surge. For example: Rep. Gilbert Cisneros has been one of the most active buyers, snapping up Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, L3Harris, RTX, Boeing, Honeywell, and Palantir in recent months. Rep. Michael McCaul (House Foreign Affairs Committee) added to GE Aerospace and Woodward Inc. positions in early 2025, with strong gains since. Sen. Ashley Brooke Moody made sizable early bets on Howmet Aerospace (key for aircraft and missile components). |[End Quote] Talk about your crisis capitalism. |[Quote|The push comes alongside the largest defense budget request in modern history, $1.5 trillion, with heavy emphasis on ramping up munitions and drone manufacturing. |[End Quote] No. Really, do talk about our crisis capitalism, and our capitalist crisis. Conclusion: I hope there was some entertainment to sprinkle on the darkness, but, honestly, there are trends from the 1980’s that were apparent by the 2010’s and are no longer even hiding. Our oligarchs no longer have to hide behind self-laudatory “histories” like The Men Who Built America (by Discovery LLC) because they no longer feel a desire to persuade. The collar is tight, and the chain is getting shorter. Post Scriptum (PS): Donald may be having a hard time keeping us changing the topic, but K$’s agency has more success. To wit, have you heard about the [sound of gasps] “Missing Scientist” issue/conspiracy/mystery? It is truly the stuff of TikTok. CNN, in its Zaslov mode, or its pre-Ellison prep, has decided to publish a whole thing on this “mystery,” except that it didn’t treat it as a mystery. Its headline says this is fact: “At least 10 people tied to sensitive US research have died or disappeared in recent years, sparking federal investigation.” A federal investigation, quotha! That would be the FBI. It has to take its manpower away from the mystery of the stack of liquor bottles in the parking lot and devote it to the “at least ten” dead scientists of “recent” years. The Atlantic has a long form needle puncturing this balloon. [Quote] “Which is all to say that another piece of flagrant nonsense has ascended to the highest levels of U.S. politics and media,” writes the Atlantic’s Daniel Engber. “To call it a conspiracy theory would be far too kind, because no comprehensive theory has been floated to explain the pattern of events. But then, even the phrase pattern of events is imprecise, because there is no pattern here at all. Given all the people who could have been roped into this narrative but weren’t, any hope of finding meaning falls away. Barring any dramatic new disclosures, the mystery of the missing scientists has the dubious honor of being a sham in every way at once.”|[End Quote]| You don’t have to go looking for this “mystery.” The mystery is how well it will find you. 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