Cass

[Acyn @Acyn]

Trump: I could say the stupidest things and you'd clap

[Mike Pence @Mike_Pence]

President Trump’s decision to lift sanctions on Russian fuel amidst Putin’s ongoing and brutal attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine makes no sense and is a betrayal of the legacy and leadership of the late Senator Lindsey Graham.

While Ukraine fights for its survival, Putin’s war machine continues to prosecute his terrorist war on civilian populations and innocent Ukrainians are dying every day.

Now, Instead of implementing the tough sanctions Lindsey Graham fought to his last breath to enact, President Trump has announced the United States is lifting sanctions on Russian energy, fueling the Putin’s war machine.

As I saw firsthand in Ukraine last month, Putin is losing this war. Ukraine has fought the Russian military to a standstill and reinvented warfare with drones taking the fight into the heart of Russia.

America should not be throwing a lifeline to Putin’s war machine. Now is the time to stand strong against Russian aggression as we did during the first Trump administration.

Putin doesn’t want peace. Putin wants Ukraine. I have no doubt that if Putin overruns Ukraine, it will only be a matter of time until Russia’s military crosses a border that our troops will have to deal with him.

America is the Leader of the Free World. For our National Security, for the security of our Allies in Europe including Ukraine, President Trump should rescind this deal immediately and return to the strong policies of our four years in the White House; impose harsh sanctions on any nation purchasing Russian energy and work with our allies to ensure Ukraine has the military support it needs to repel and defeat this Russian invasion once and for all. Slava Ukraini🇺🇸🇺🇦

[Brad @BraddrofliT]

“If you don’t like public executions, just don’t watch it” Says the crowd trying to ban drag shows.

[Canada Hates Trump @AntiTrumpCanada]

What kind of dystopian shithole government authorizes the televised execution of a human being but blocks the broadcast of a James Talarico interview with Jimmy Kimmel?

[MP Arizona☀️🏳️‍🌈💙🌵🐕🐕‍🦺🫂💦🏜🐟🌴🎙🌎🌻♍️🌊 @AzPetrich]

It really has been a short walk from "you're overreacting" to public executions.

[Senator Dick Durbin @SenatorDurbin]

Public executions have no place in a democracy.

We as a nation cannot stoop to the level of the people we seek to punish.

[Amanda Carpenter @amandacarpenter]

Trump & Hegseth aren't just proposing to livestream an execution for people who want to watch.

They're proposing to broadcast a man being shot to death, even if deserved by our system, and even if you agree with this version of the death penalty, knowing that the footage will be clipped, shared, and pushed into social media feeds.

Including those of our children. The gruesome image will be everywhere.

Parents will have virtually no control over whether their kids see it. Once those images are released, there is no taking them back.

Hope all the parents in the Trump Admin are cool with that.

[Rev. Benjamin Cremer @Brcremer]

Live streaming an execution isn’t about punishing the man for the blood he spilled, it’s about stoking the blood lust of those who watch.

[Fred Wellman @FPWellman]

Disgusting. This is what our enemies have done. My interpreter was beheaded on camera by AQI and the video was distributed on CD's across Mosul. Death is not spectacle in a decent country. Hegseth is a psychopath and must be removed.

[The Space Coast Rocket @CoastRocket]

WE COUNT THE ENEMIES WE KILL. WE RARELY COUNT THE ONES WE CREATE.

Nidal Hasan was a patient on my floor in the surgical trauma ICU at Brooke Army Medical Center.

I wasn't there when he arrived. I had just left for my deployment to Mosul, Iraq. But the nurses and doctors who cared for him were my peers and my friends, and I know exactly what that required of them, because every one of us had done some version of it before. Before anyone tells me what strength looks like, understand what that work demands.

I have cared for a drunk driver who wiped out an entire family and landed in our ICU himself. I have cared for gang members who shot up a block while children were stepping off a school bus, then ended up on our unit with bullets of their own. I have kept alive people who murdered their own families and failed at taking their own lives. And in Iraq, I saved the lives of the very enemy fighters who had just tried to kill us and miraculously survived our response.

Every one of those patients got our best. Not because we felt anything for them, but because of who we were. You set aside anger, grief, prejudice and every personal feeling you have, because a life in front of you is a life in front of you. That's the oath. That's the duty.

So when Hasan came through those doors, my colleagues did what we had always done. They preserved the life of a man who murdered thirteen people and would have killed them too, given the chance. He killed those men and women in one of the very same buildings many Soldier's like myself have been in when I was stationed at Fort Hood.
He is alive today because they did their jobs. That was not sentiment. It was a hard, tangible expression of the values this country claims to stand for. Our principles had to mean something even when the person benefiting from them had violated everything we believed in.

Now the Pentagon plans to livestream his execution by firing squad on Dec. 3, and our leaders apparently believe turning his death into a public spectacle will demonstrate American strength. I think it demonstrates how little they understand the enemy they claim to be fighting. We kept Nidal Hasan alive, now our leaders want to make him a martyr.

Hasan walked into Fort Hood expecting to die. He believed his death would be rewarded. At his trial, he called no witnesses and offered no defense, and his own court-appointed lawyers worried he was seeking execution. He failed at martyrdom once. Now we're about to hand it to him, in high definition, for every extremist with an internet connection to replay, manipulate and celebrate.
We supply the footage. They supply the meaning.
Long after the politicians finish congratulating themselves, that video will still exist. Their moment of bravado becomes somebody else's recruiting material for decades. And this failure to think past the immediate display of power reaches far beyond one execution. We count the enemies we kill. We rarely count the enemies we create.

Look at the school in Minab, Iran, where multiple investigations attributed the strike that killed more than 100 children and their teachers to us. You cannot bury people's children beneath the rubble of their classrooms and expect a speech about American intentions to decide how they remember you. No denial brings those children home. No claim of good intentions makes their parents forget whose weapons killed them.
If those were our children, we would remember for the rest of our lives. We would demand accountability. Many of us would want vengeance. We would tell their stories to the next generation. We know this because we did exactly that after September 11.

Why do we imagine other people love their children less, grieve less deeply, or remember less clearly?

We have developed a horrifying talent for creating more terrorists than we will ever stop. We inflict suffering, evade responsibility, and then act as though the anger that follows came out of nowhere.

Think back to the first time you saw one of those al Qaeda videos of an American being beheaded. Remember the sickness in your stomach. Remember the rage. Remember thinking that only savages would film a killing and send it out for the world to watch. Now ask yourself what the rest of the world will see when the camera is ours.
Terrorist organizations stage executions for the cameras. Authoritarian regimes make death a public spectacle to feed fear and rage. Watching our own leaders reach for those same tools should force us to confront how much of ourselves we are surrendering in the name of defeating them.

The line separating us from the people we condemn has to live in our conduct. A flag cannot hold it for us. Neither can a uniform, a title, or a declaration that we are the good guys.
On that ICU floor, on a bloody street in Mosul, and in trauma bays across this country, people like my colleagues hold that line every day under circumstances most will never face. They keep monsters alive because their duty and their humanity are bigger than their hatred of what those monsters have done.

Execute him if that's the sentence. But do it the way a confident nation does; quietly, lawfully, and without giving him the stage he always wanted. Let him be forgotten.

I expect our leaders to show at least as much discipline as the nurses who had to care for him.
They keep telling us they are defending what makes America different. Every day, they make that difference harder to see.

Robert W. Burns III is the editor and publisher of The Space Coast Rocket, an Army veteran and a retired trauma nurse. The views expressed in this column are his own.

[Boston Smalls @smalls2672]

So the pentagon is gonna live stream a public execution dec 3.

I would imagine this excites the pro life crowd quite a bit. Remember when they said we have to get rid of rainbow flags because its damaging to kids? Apparently live streaming public executions is cool tho.

Our country is falling back into barbarism.

[Matt Burnell @mdburnell]

Does Hegseth really think the consequences of their actions is what stops a terrorist from being a terrorist? Executing terrorists publicly doesn’t give future terrorists pause, it emboldens them because martyrdom in service of the struggle is the ultimate sacrifice to them.

There is a reason we execute our enemies, foreign and domestic, quietly and unceremoniously disperse their remains never to be found. They don't deserve ceremony. They don't deserve what is a hero's death to them.

Wheeling a paralyzed Nidal Hasan into a room to be publicly executed turns a man that should be forgotten to history as a traitor and terrorist into a video that every single person in every single terrorist training camp in the world watches.

He should be treated like every other traitor, terrorist, and enemy of the state this nation has executed. Killed in a dingy room in front of a select few witnesses including any victims that need closure, cremated, and his ashes scattered to the winds to be forgotten for eternity. That is how you make people understand there are consequences for these types of things.

[Dylan Williams @dylanotes]

You guys fucked up painting the bottom of a pool.

[MeidasTouch @MeidasTouch]

Pete Hegseth says Americans will be able to watch a Trump-approved firing-squad execution.

If he follows through, the U.S. could join a disturbing club of countries known for public executions—including Iran, Afghanistan, and North Korea. https://t.co/OyEavPIb4g

[Joe Walsh @WalshFreedom]

25th Amendment.

[reds56 @Reds56Art]

@atrupar All they do is lie

[𐡀 @Xyleniqq]

The "housing crisis" is a lie. There's no crisis, there's a hoarding problem. Investment firms are buying residential properties to convert into rentals, restricting supply to inflate prices. Homelessness exists alongside empty luxury apartments because profit matters more than shelter. Housing isn't scarce. It's being withheld. We have more empty homes than homeless people, but the market demands scarcity to protect property values. Homelessness is a policy choice disguised as economic reality.

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

People ARE NOT jealous of billionaires.

They’re ACTUALLY pissed that the dentist is a luxury.

[The Tennessee Holler @TheTNHoller]

“Could be a major conflict of interest” Lol ya think, @CNN?

The Trump family is the most brazenly corrupt family ever. American kleptocracy.

“While Kushner acted as a key Middle East peace negotiator, his private equity firm held the largest stake in an Israeli company backing businesses tied to Israel's military campaign in Gaza, including its largest arms manufacturer.”

https://t.co/TnybueVvH2