Last spring the fee for my basic cable service hit $50, and it was Good Night Deacon. That was it. These greedy crooks, Adelphia/Comcast, are simply gouging us at will, charging, literally, whatever they want because they’re the only game in town. And I have no doubt they’re engaged in price fixing with the satellite companies because, like cell phone plans, the rates are just too similar. And we, the American public, are simply too stupid or too lazy to do anything about this.

Charging me fifty bucks a month to watch MSNBC and CNN is just obscene, especially since both have websites that broadcast news all day anyway. And that price hike was simply the last straw.

It would be one thing if these cable companies gouged us for fifty bucks and then ran everything commercial free. But these folks have the nerve to not only rip us off, but to inundate us with commercial ads all day and all night—more than I could ever have imagined. In the old days, the early days of cable, cable meant, explicitly, no commercials. CNN had no commercials. HBO had no commercials. MTV, when they started, had no commercials. You were *paying* for TV. The shot was, paying for TV meant you didn’t have to watch commercials.

Cable TV now has at least as many commercials as broadcast TV, if not more. And I’ve had more than enough. As it turns out, I have an antenna on my roof. And it works just fine. I do miss my all-day news fix, but it wasn’t worth the indignity of being mugged by these leeches every single month.

Last weekend the Dish network sent some plebes by to hustle my business. Man, it’s been so long since I had cable, I just snickered at him.