Three Stooges

Two stories from the news this Veterans' Day require me to write a pair of open letters to three conservative morons - I mean, icons:

Dear Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK): Don't go around waving the flag and touting the wonderful job the nation's veterans have done in service to their country and then block a bill that would expand health care to those same veterans, especially when 2266 veterans died last year for lack of health insurance and veterans account for one third of all homeless men.

Dear Sean Hannity: If you want to help the Fox News Channel, for whom you work (or something like it), preserve what little credibility it has as a source of journalism, don't run footage from your coworker Glenn Beck's September 12 rally and claim it was from the much more sparsely attended "press conference" (actually a rally, called a press conference by Republican congressmen so they could play for it with taxpayers' money) staged last Thursday to oppose the health care bill in the House. First you showed video from the "press conference," with leaves in the background changing color and trees partly bare, then you showed video of a rally with full, green-leafed trees in the background. Come on, even Fox News viewers aren't that dumb! Even Glenn Beck isn't that dumb!

Dear Glenn Beck: You are one big twit.

Okie Dopey

I wish the credit card reform bill that President Obama signed last week hadn't been passed in its final form. Although it speeds up reforms by implementing them by February 2010 - five months earlier than planned - prohibits interest rate increases during the first year of a customer's contract with the creditor and restricts rate increases on purchases already made, I wish this bill hadn't been passed as is. This is in spite of a federally mandated 45-day notice for rate increases on future purchases and limits fees and penalty interest. Why do I regret the passage of this bill with all of this in its favor?

Because it allows guns in our national parks!

WHAT?????????? Tom Coburn, a Republican senator from Oklahoma and without question the worst currently serving U.S. Senator in Washington - he infamously proposed executing abortionists after Roe v. Wade is overturned - attached a rider that allows people to carry loaded firearms - rifles, shotguns, even semiautomatic weapons - into national parkland, overturning a regulation that requires guns to be unloaded and in plain sight. Coburn's toxic rider was included despite its irrelevance to credit cards and opposition from park rangers and former national Park Service directors. Now guns will be allowed in Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and even the new national memorial dedicated to the victims of United Flight 93, which crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001 when passengers revolted against hijackers planning to plow that plane into the U.S. Capitol. So, Shanksville - the one place where a hijacked plane on 9/11 killed no one on the ground - could witness fatal gunplay thanks to Tom Coburn, a man who makes his fellow Oklahoman, global-warming-denier Senator James Inhofe, look like Robert Taft by comparison.

This even allows people to pack a rod at the Gettysburg battlefield - Gettysburg, where the guns last fell silent in 1863.

So the good news is, you can take that trip to Yellowstone on your Visa and not worry about paying it off. The bad news is, you may get shot there.

I can't believe a state with as many chuckleheads as Oklahoma got celebrated in a Broadway musical.