Dontcha Know It

 

Keystone Kash and His FBI Not Sure Who Shot Who at the Hilton

Three days after the White House Correspondents’ dinner, Keystone Kash's FBI is still unsure who shot a Secret Service officer during the assassination attempt outside the Hilton ballroom. The Secret Service officer was wearing a bulletproof vest, but sources say investigators haven’t found the fragment that pierced it — and can’t definitively say whether it came from the suspect.  Bottom line: investigators are still unable to say for certain whether the armed attacker shot the officer or how he was injured.

Law enforcement agents on the scene Saturday initially believed Cole Tomas Allen, the suspect who breached the dinner’s final checkpoint, fired his shotgun and struck the officer with buckshot from his weapon.  A check of Allen’s shotgun showed that he discharged one shell but did not reload, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters Monday. 

In its review, a Secret Service team estimated that Allen was running nine miles an hour and then stumbled somehow and fell a few yards past the checkpoint. That raises the question among law enforcement professionals of how a person moving that fast could have stopped, turned around, and fired his weapon at an officer behind him.

At a Monday news conference, Blanche said Allen had been charged with discharging a firearm during a crime of violence because the FBI determined he fired a single shell from the shotgun he was carrying.  But he said authorities were not prepared to say whether that was the shot that hit the Secret Service agent’s body armor.

Blanche said investigators also determined that the agent who was shot fired five rounds at Allen, none of which hit the suspect. He said they could not be sure those were the only rounds fired by law enforcement officers.  But this contradicts the Secret Service, who said its investigators collected the firearms of all Secret Service officers and agents on the scene and found no evidence that anyone else fired their weapons, a law enforcement official said.

Hopefully, the FBI will get its act together before tomorrow's hearing. 

 

Trump Pushes White Nationalist Fantasy in Front of Embarrassed King Charles

King Charles of the U.K. sat awkwardly yesterday as convicted felon Donald Trump delivered a racist, blood-and-soil speech to “welcome” him to the White House.  In a bizarre and deeply uncomfortable moment during the visit of King Charles III, Donald Trump delivered a rambling, race-tinged tribute that sounded more like 19th-century white supremacist rhetoric than a modern presidential address.  In the first few minutes of his remarks (which surely must have been written in part by white nationalist Stephen Miller), Trump unleashed the following: 

Long before Americans had a nation or a constitution, we first had a culture, a character, and a creed. Before we ever proclaimed our independence, Americans carried within us the rarest of gifts: moral courage, and it came from a small but mighty kingdom from across the sea. For nearly two centuries before the revolution, this land was settled and forged by men, women who bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British. Here on a wild and untamed continent, they set loose the ancient English love of liberty and Great Britain’s distinctive sense of glory, destiny, and pride, and that’s what it is: glory, destiny, and pride.

The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true.

In recent years, we’ve often heard it said that America is merely an idea, but the cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention of 1776. The American founding was the culmination of hundreds of years of thought, struggle, sweat, blood, and sacrifice on both sides of the Atlantic.

Let me first say that "moral courage" in the United States didn't come solely from a "small but mighty kingdom from across the sea."  It also came from America's indigenous peoples, African slaves and Mexican immigrants, whose descendants are an integral part of the American culture.  In his ignorant mind, Trump was arguing that "America" was the result of “hundreds of years of thought, struggle, sweat, blood and sacrifice on both sides of the Atlantic” –  implying that America’s greatness comes from white European bloodlines.

 

His attempt to shoehorn in a paraphrase of Churchill at the end fell completely flat and came off as awkward and forced in context. Trump, who often comically claims he’s the “least racist person” in the room, is nonetheless standing beside the King of England, pushing a vision of American identity rooted in racial and ethnic purity rather than the ideals of liberty, equality, and democracy that actually define this country.

 

It was embarrassing, ahistorical, and revealing.  Trump isn’t celebrating America’s founding values. He’s pushing a white nationalist fantasy that has no place in 2026.

 

Hypocrisy of the The Slovenian Sphynx

Melania Trump's criticism of Jimmy Kimmel has been met with calls of hypocrisy – and social media users have the receipts that show it.  In a post on social media, the first lady tried to criticized Kimmel’s “hateful and violent rhetoric”, labeling him a “coward” and called for the TV network to “take a stand.”

Last week, late-night TV host made a joke about the first lady, suggesting she had “a glow like an expectant widow”.  On his Monday night show, Kimmel explained the joke was in relation to Melania and Donald Trump’s age difference (56 and 79, respectively), and was “not, by any stretch of the definition, a call to assassination.”  As if anybody with half a brain needed an explanation of the obvious!

It didn’t take long for people to point out that the rhetoric coming from none other than her own husband is pretty violent itself. 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, back at the office . . .

Madonna - I Feel So Free

As If You Needed Another Reason to Avoid Tesla

When Tom LoSavio bought hisTesla Model S in 2017, he thought he was buying a car that would one day drive itself.  LoSavio paid more than $100,000 for the luxury sedan, including $8,000 for lifetime access to its most advanced driver-assistance features. Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk said that the hardware in the company’s cars would eventually allow all of its cars to drive themselves.  “My wife and I talked about what a great thing it would be if we could just get in a car and have it drive us places,” LoSavio told The Wall Street Journal.

In the nine years since, LoSavio said it has become clear that Tesla took him for a ride. He is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit that alleges that Tesla charged customers thousands of dollars in pricey upgrades for a product that didn’t, and still doesn’t, exist.  LoSavio alleges that Musk and Tesla have made repeated claims that were false about the self-driving capabilities of these vehicles and misled consumers who paid extra because they believed the company’s marketing. His lawsuit is one of several ongoing efforts by Tesla owners looking to hold the company accountable for overpromising and under-delivering on its Full Self-Driving (FSD) product.

Tesla is facing mounting legal issues in Netherland and Australia, over charges that the company misled customers about the cars’ capabilities. The matter calls into question Musk’s decade-long marketing pitch that Tesla’s autonomous vehicles were just around the corner. That promise kept Tesla’s stock near all-time highs—and with a market cap that exceeds most other automakers combined—even as its share of the electric-vehicle market has eroded.

The lawsuits and European campaign represent just thousands of Tesla customers. Wall Street analysts, however, estimate that there are millions of Teslas on the road with the outdated hardware no longer capable of running the most sophisticated version of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software.  LoSavio won class-action status for his lawsuit in September. The class represents approximately 3,000 people in California, a figure that excludes the many Tesla owners who have signed arbitration agreements with the company that prevent them from suing. 

Tesla started including early versions of its self-driving tech in its vehicles in 2014. By 2015, Musk was publicly claiming that Tesla vehicles could drive themselves entirely within two years. Then in 2016, Tesla announced that all new cars built from then on had the hardware required for full self-driving. Musk told the press that a Tesla would drive itself from Los Angeles to New York City by the end of 2017.

But it was all bullshit.  Eventually Tesla’s plans required a more sophisticated computer and cameras than were installed in LoSavio’s car. In 2020 and 2021, it started offering customers upgrades to the third edition of its computer and camera set. Some customers like LoSavio, who paid upfront for lifetime access, got complimentary upgrades from Tesla. Others who wanted to use the FSD/self-driving technology but paid monthly could pay $1,000 for the upgrade.

Then in 2023, Tesla upgraded its hardware for the fourth time and started selling new cars with its latest chip. That meant that customers like LoSavio, who got updated to the third-edition computer a few years prior, once again had outdated equipment. The company hasn’t made any moves since January 2025, when Musk told investors that the company would have to do yet another computer upgrade for customers who bought the lifetime FSD (Full Self-Driving) package.