pediatric nurse, runner, wannabe photographer. Boston sports fan. Music, love, laughter...and the beach.
Joined October 2013
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sharon mcauliffe retweeted
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.
sharon mcauliffe retweeted
Dolly Parton was one of those supremely rare good souls to where if you have negative things to say about her, you're only exposing issues with yourself.
Her awesomeness was so apparent that even MAGA is paying respects, despite her political statements leaning towards the Left.
Some people are just gems.
So much so that is actually transcends politics.
We're living in a timeline where we need good people in the world, and we lost a big one with her.
RIP Dolly
My thoughts, no AI written bullshit.
sharon mcauliffe retweeted
BREAKING: MASTERCLASS! Dr. Abdul El-Sayed goes on Fox News and DOGWALKS Jesse Watters on one hot button issue after another — and even gets the far-right hack to laugh at prominent Republicans.
He went into the lion's den and came out with a new fur coat...
"You'd give them back their Air Force, their Navy?" Watters asked El-Sayed about Iran.
"No, I'd go back to the time when we were at peace and we actually had nuclear containment," El-Sayed said. "Now Jesse, you like to, I mean look, I understand selective memory about history, but we had a JCPOA that was well negotiated, that actually had nuclear non-proliferation far more securely than what we have right now after having gone to war for the better part of six months."
This is an absolute bullseye of a point. Obama's Iran deal was ironclad and ensured that Iran wouldn't obtain nuclear weapons. Trump tore it up because he hates everything related to our first Black President and Republicans cheered him on as he did it. Now, we find ourselves embroiled in a failed war to supposedly destroy Iran's nuclear program, even though our own intelligence agencies concluded that they were not pursuing such a weapon.
Obama used diplomacy to score an unprecedented win. Trump used military force and it ended in a historic defeat.
"Yeah, I like the fact that the nuke program is buried under a mountain of rubble, they can't even get access to it, but that's me," said Watters, trotting out a childish White House talking point. "I think we'll figured [sic] it out. The thing you said about—"
"Let me just stop you right there," said El-Sayed, refusing to let him pivot.
"Sure. Go ahead," said Watters.
"I understand you're not good at math. I get that. I'll give you that," said El-Sayed. "But science, we gotta talk about science, okay? You understand that like nuclear material doesn't just go away because you buried it under a mountain of rubble. You understand they can still go back and bury it out, right?"
"Yeah, we're watching it from Space Force," said Watters.
"So we're not any more secure than we were back then," hammered El-Sayed.
"Okay, let's move on," said Watters, unable to defend his point. He then asked El-Sayed about his claim that Republicans attacking Sharia law is a tendril of white supremacy. Once again, El-Sayed crushed him.
"So getting rid of Sharia law is white supremacy? Can you explain that one?" said Watters.
"Do you know what canon law is, Jesse? I assume you're Christian, right?" said El-Sayed.
"Yeah, tell me," said Watters, who clearly had no idea what canon law is.
"All right, so canon law is the name for Christian law," explained El-Sayed. "I don't begrudge you your right to practice your faith as you choose. I don't know why the idea that I could practice my faith as I choose is a problem. Nobody is trying to push Sharia law on anyone else. Just like, I hope, nobody is trying to push canon law on anybody else, because we live in an America where you should have the freedom of your religion."
"So the idea that you have somebody like Tommy Tuberville, who barely was good at coaching football," said El-Sayed, causing Watters to laugh at the ignorant MAGA senator's expense, "is out here trying to ban Sharia law when there's less than 1% of the Muslim community in America, as if somehow Muslims are out here trying to push Sharia law, that seems to me to be deliberately targeting the Muslim community because they're different."
"And I'm just saying that I have no issue with people practicing their faith," El-Sayed said. "In fact, I would never want somebody to push their faith on me, and I would never want to push my faith on somebody else."
"Good, because no one wants you to get rid of your religion. No one wants that," said Watters, who is part of a political party that absolutely wants to get rid of Islam.
"But when people preemptively go out there and start preemptively passing laws to ban something that's not happening, what you're trying to do is target a very small community because they're different, and this operates. I mean, look, I'm just going to say there's statistical evidence that the President and the Vice President want to target me simply as a function of my faith," said El-Sayed.
We have to just stop and applaud El-Sayed for this particular point. This man went on Fox News — the most Islamophobic network in the entire country — and proudly defended his Muslim faith. That takes serious courage. And he wasn't done there...
At one point, El-Sayed referred to his MAGA opponent in the Michigan Senate race as a "beta," causing Watters to laugh once again.
This guy is so damn charming, even a Fox News hack like Jesse Watters isn't immune.
Predictably, Watters eventually tried to turn the conversation to the topic of transgender athletes. When he did, El-Sayed gave one of the best responses we've ever seen to the bad faith talking point.
"Again like Jesse you have not asked me one time about the issues that people actually care about in Michigan," said El-Sayed.
"You don't want to talk about gas prices."
"You don't want to talk about groceries."
"You don't want to talk about healthcare."
"You don't want to talk about this stupid trade war that's about to destroy Michigan's economy."
"You don't want to talk about the actual war that's destroying our military."
"You don't seem to want to talk about any of those things. You want to bring up all this culture war that you know I'm not here to fight a culture war," he added.
Watters sputtered a response and whined that it was his interview so he got to choose the questions. He then asked a question about trans athletes. El-Sayed refused to take the bait.
"I'm running for U.S Senate and in Michigan, as the next U.S. senator in Michigan, I'm interested in getting money out of politics, putting money in your pocket, and passing Medicare for All," said El-Sayed.
Watters refused to drop it, and kept driving for a sports-related soundbite.
"At the end of the day the decision of who gets to play what sports ought to be decided by the people who govern sports. I'm running for U.S. Senate!" said El-Sayed. "Jesse it's insane, I'm out here trying to take on like the healthcare crisis and Big Pharma and you're asking me about who gets to play what sports?"
"I don't know. It's kind of a big thing if you've been following the news recently Abdul," said a desperate Watters.
Towards the end of the interview, Watters called El-Sayed "naive" and that said some Democratic policies are "wacky." Once again, El-Sayed had the perfect response.
"You know what's wacky, though? Can I just tell you, you know what you didn't ask me about?" said El-Sayed. "We've got a President of the United States who cares more about the drapes in a ballroom that shouldn't be built than he cares about the war he just got us into, or that he cares about the affordability crisis.
"That seems to me to be a little bit wacky. If we want to have a serious conversation about what Michiganders are feeling, I'd love to come back on and talk about getting money out of politics, putting money in your pocket, passing Medicare for All, because I'm telling you, none of that is whacky, and that's what Michiganders want."
"We'll do it again, Abdul," said Watters.
"It was a good conversation. Thank you so much," said El-Sayed.
This is how it's done ladies and gentlemen. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is going to make one hell of a senator.
Please ❤️ and share if you're a fan of El-Sayed!
Damn near everything out of trump's mouth is a lie.
The sheer number of lies from President Trump about Canada – growing again today – is remarkable. Just some fact checks from the last 18 months:
- Trump falsely said today that Canada's unemployment rate is "10% and rapidly rising,” though it is 6.4% (under the Canadian method that adds about a percentage point) and has been declining for three months
- Trump falsely said today that Canada does 95% of its business with the US, though 72% of Canadian exports went to the US last year
- Trump falsely said today that high Canadian agricultural tariffs have caused the entire US trade deficit with Canada, though that deficit is overwhelmingly caused by US imports of cheap Canadian crude and though something like 97% of US ag exports to Canada are tariff-free
- Trump has falsely said Canada generally doesn’t “take” US agricultural exports, though Canada is the world’s second-biggest buyer of those exports
- Trump has falsely said the Canadian public likes the idea of becoming the 51st state, which the Canadian public overwhelmingly opposes
- Trump has falsely said Canada is one of the world’s highest-tariff countries, though it is actually low in WTO global rankings
- Trump has falsely said Canada essentially doesn't have a military, though its military has fought with the US in multiple wars and its force size ranks in the upper half of NATO
- Trump has falsely said Canada hiked its dairy tariffs during the Biden administration, though they hadn’t changed since Trump’s first presidency
- Trump has falsely said the US trade deficit with Canada is “$200 billion,” though it is nowhere close
- Trump has falsely said Canada prohibits US banks, though it doesn't and though more than a dozen US banks were operating in Canada at the time he spoke
- Trump has falsely said Canada is “constantly surrounded” by Chinese and Russian ships, though that is fiction
- Trump has falsely said then-outgoing PM Trudeau was using their trade battle to run again for prime minister, though Trudeau obviously wasn’t running
Lies exposed...again.
Every single part of the story President Trump told today about South Korea's military cost-sharing spending is wrong:
- "They essentially weren't paying" for the US troop presence before Trump's first term? Actually the US cost-sharing deals with South Korea have existed since 1991; Trump secured an incremental 8.2% increase, not some transformational boost
- Trump got South Korea to agree to "$3 billion" a year and that it would go up every year? No, SK agreed to pay less than $1 billion even with that 8.2% increase, and it was a one-year deal; negotiations on a longer-term arrangement were unresolved when Trump left office
- Then the 2020 election was rigged? No
- South Korea then called Biden, declared it shouldn't be paying, and Biden "immediately rescinded" the "order" for SK to pay? No, Biden actually secured two new deals with further increases in South Korea's payments: 1) a 2021 deal with a 13.9% SK increase and then 2022-thru-2025 increases tied to SK's defense budget increases; 2) a 2024 deal with an 8.3% increase in 2026 and additional increases tied to South Korean inflation.
sharon mcauliffe retweeted
You know, I don't expect much decency (none, really) from the jackass napping and farting in the Oval Office.
But there are HUNDREDS of Republicans in Congress now, many of whom call themselves Christ-loving Christians, who should be ASHAMED sitting in silence as trump attacks Biden in what could be his final days.
Hunter described his Dad as being in great pain as he battles the cancer that has "metastasized into his bones."
For f*cks sake, where is your decency???
Have you lost no one to cancer?
Is this what Jesus would do?
I don't even blame trump, because his brain is mush and he doesn't know if he's shitting or eating.
But I blame the people around him, so-called "trusted-advisors" and members of Congress. You all are shitty, cowardly scumbags.
Unlike trump, you KNOW the difference between right and wrong, and you sit there in captive silence to wrong 10 out of 10 times.
I don't expect you to slap him upside his stupid rotted pumpkin head, but at the very least stop acting like he'll disintegrate if you criticize his behavior.
We know you've all been programmed to blame everything under the sun on Biden, and that's unfortunate because he accomplished WAY more as President than trump could in 10 terms.
But can you just leave him the f*ck ALONE while the man is suffering extreme pain from cancer????
Rediscover what the hell it felt like to have a moral bone in your diseased bodies, to have a goddamn spine, and start acting like it.
The man gave up 47 years of his life in service to the public, he deserves better than this.
This. 100% this.
Unless you held your personal phone up to a dying patient so they could gasp “I’m sorry…I love you…goodbye…” to their family on a group call you organized, you do not judge Fauci.
Unless you did the same for a patient who was already unresponsive and nearing death so their loved ones could say the things they never said and you were never meant to hear, you do not judge Fauci.
Unless you rationed oxygen, medical equipment and life-saving medications, because your top-rate, first-world country, and its self-aggrandizing medical system failed, you do not judge Fauci.
Unless you’ve lost three patients in 45 minutes going from one bedside to the next so they did not die alone, praying the prayers a priest was meant to say because they could not come, you do not judge Fauci.
Unless you’ve zipped a human being in a bag knowing no one else would ever gaze upon that face again, and placed it on a table in an office or on the floor of a refrigerated trailer meant for sides of beef, you do not judge Fauci.
Unless you hold a degree in nursing or medicine, or epidemiology, or public health, or at the very least can connect the dots, the very simple dots, you do not judge Fauci.
For if you lived and sit in judgment of decisions you did not make and do not understand, decisions for which you were never considered, and never would be, you are a fool and look dumb before humanity and God.
And may God help you, because you clearly cannot help yourself.
~Jason M. LaForest, July 30, 2026
sharon mcauliffe retweeted
Hakeem Jeffries received his bachelor's degree in political science from the State University of New York at Binghamton (Binghamton University), graduating with honors in 1992. He then earned a master's degree in public policy from Georgetown University in 1994. Jeffries completed his education by receiving a Juris Doctor (JD) from New York University School of Law in 1997, graduating magna cum laude. Now do Comer and Trump?
sharon mcauliffe retweeted
Boston has been defying kings since we threw the tea into the harbor in 1773.
WTF? How is anyone expected to respect THIS?
Talk about "3rd world shitholes"...the #wannabeking has turned us into this!
sharon mcauliffe retweeted
House Dems should drop a ‘Charlie Kirk Gun Safety Act’ on the floor just to make Republicans go on record voting against it.
sharon mcauliffe retweeted
JUST AIRED
Very disturbing interview on Jen Psaki with Dr Demetre Daskalajis who resigned from CDC
He stated that RFK Jr agenda is based in eugenics where the strong will survive and thus be “selected” to reproduce … and the weak will get left to die which is why Kennedy is defunding feeding needy children … where have we heard this eugenics theory before ?
“There is a fundamental scary thing happening here and we are trying to raise the red flags so people know ”
sharon mcauliffe retweeted
I’ll donate to Texas Democrats like @JamesTalarico and others fighting the GOP’s gerrymandering scam:
💰 $0.10 per like on this tweet
💰 $0.50 per retweet
💰 $1 per follow
(Starting at 86,373 followers)
It costs ~$500/day for each Dem to block the TX GOP from rigging the midterms.
Let’s help them hold the line.
P.S. If this blows up, I will cut y’all off eventually. 💙
sharon mcauliffe retweeted
🚨🚨🚨This is exactly how I feel. 🚨🚨🚨
CHARLES PIERCE WRITES:
“In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and say, "And we shall overcome."
I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over.
I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh's madness in Oklahoma City.
I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing 'Amazing Grace' in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
"These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job.
They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless.
"And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators.
Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House.
"The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides.
We never have had such a cheap counterfeit of a president* as currently occupies the office. We never have had a president* so completely deserving of scorn and yet so small in the office that it almost seems a waste of time and energy to summon up the requisite contempt.
"Watch how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency simply to shut up even when it is in his best interest to do so. Presidents don't have to be heroes to be good presidents.
