Today's customer service commentary comes to you courtesy of Disney, owners of the ABC television network. Disney and Cablevision (metropolitan New York cable TV provider) have been unable to come to an agreement over Cablevision's retransmission of WABC programming. At midnight this morning, Disney pulled the plug, leaving 3 million households without one of the country's major TV networks. The timing was clearly intended to tick people off, as it took place the day of the Academy Awards. This is Mickey Mouse politics at its best, figuratively and literally.

The Cardholder Services people called me on two lines at once again. I held cell phone up to speakerphone and the reps started talking to each other. As soon as one of them observed that the lines were crossed, I shouted "They're crossed because you people called me on two lines at the same time. Take me off your damned list." Obviously, they both hung up immediately.

The people of Maine have decided by a mere majority that two individuals of the same gender cannot be married in their state. This same result has so far happened in every state that has passed legislation to permit and recognize same-sex marriage. The tyranny of the majority is alive and well.

Dear Sen. Kennedy:

Today I learned that the National Park Service/DOI is using eminent domain to procure land in Somerset County, PA, for a Flight 93 memorial, without having made a good faith negotiation with the landowners, merely because of impending paperwork deadlines.

The DOI has had the nearly 8 years since 9/11 to work on this. Yet it waited, and now the people of Somerset County are suffering the loss of their land and their homes so that a bureaucratic deadline could be met.

I didn't E-File my taxes this year. I've never done it. I'm really not interested in unrelated third parties handling my tax data. I simply don't care how much they swear up and down that they'll hold it in confidence forever, that they won't look at it, that they won't use it to market stuff I don't want to me, and that their promises will hold true when their companies are bought. I simply don't buy it.

With the markets and major players collapsing all around us, it's no surprise that surveys have shown declining consumer confidence. Of course, this means that we consumers would rather tighten our belts to make sure we've got extra resources for lean times, rather than continue to spend at or beyond our means, perhaps even recklessly.