w00t for Friday! How are your NCAA picks doing? I’ll bet none of you picked Murray State. You should know that teams connected to me do well. Pick Murray State (my parents’ alma mater), Kentucky (my home state), Wisconsin (my alma mater) and you’ll do well. I’ve won exactly 0 of brackets I’ve picked in my life so I know what I’m talking about. Enough with the important stuff, let’s open thread.
The anti-incumbent national mood also affects Republicans. John McCain is in trouble in Arizona.
The latest Rasmussen poll has John McCain up over primary challenger and former Rep. J.D. Hayworth by a mere 7 points. As a point of comparison, Rasmussen’s last poll of this race, from two months ago, had McCain holding a 22 point margin.
My, how the mighty have fallen.
Gen. John Sheehan is an asshole:
A retired U.S. general said Thursday that the Dutch policy of allowing openly gay soldiers to serve in its military led, in part, to its failure to halt the massacre of Muslims in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, “nations like Belgium, Luxembourg, the Dutch, et cetera, firmly believed there was no longer a need for an active combat capability in the militaries,” John Sheehan, former supreme allied commander – Atlantic, told a Senate hearing on the don’t ask, don’t tell policy under which gays are not allowed to serve in the U.S. military openly.
“As a result, they declared a peace dividend and made a conscious effort to socialize their military,” he said. “That includes the unionization of their militaries. It includes open homosexuality demonstrated in a series of other activities, with a focus on peacekeeping operations, because they did not believe the Germans were going to attack again or the Soviets were coming back.
“That led to a force that was ill-equipped to go to war. The case in point that I’m referring to is when the Dutch were required to defend Srebrenica against the Serbs. The battalion was under-strength, poorly led, and the Serbs came into town, handcuffed the soldiers to the telephone poles, marched the Muslims off and executed them,” Sheehan said.
“That was the largest massacre in Europe since World War II.”
I’m glad Sheehan is a retired general.