Give them $36 and you get a decal. No, wait: two decals.

Oh, Lordy, SC ETV radio's launched its fall fundraising drive. They want $270,000 worth of support for what has to be one of the worst NPR affiliates on the planet. This means days on end of their staff trying to explain why their product is so valuable, and NPR shills like Ira Glass encouraging listeners to rat out people who listen but don't contribute.

SC ETV runs least common denominator programs designed to not offend the elderly white people who are their base. In the upstate, if you want radio that even approximates thought, it's the only game in town, miserable and unresponsive as it is. But the bits that approximate thought they don't make, they buy from other, more creative NPR stations. Not to mention cutting in on the programs they take credit for even more than usual.

Never mind that if you wake up early you'll get to hear three and a quarter repeats of one hour of NPR's Morning Edition.The last hour you get the minstrelsy of "Making It Grow", the bidness plugging of "SC Business Review," mushmouth Rudy Mancke's snakes and bugs show, and the morose book choices of "The Radio Reader."

For $120 they'll give you two tickets to a production of Michael Feldman's show "Whaddya Know?" in Spartanburg come February, but once they reeled you in, all you get after that, being a good radio listener, is the one hour version Michael Feldman Radio Hour on Saturdays. So for  an overpriced donation you get half of what's available of what you paid to go hear.

Similarly, ETV Radio brags about running the quiz show "Says You but they only run half of it, too.This morning they were taking credit for running "Fresh Air" and you can't even get that on the radio. Of course this past Saturday they ran back to back ads claiming two country music shows would be on at the same time. The hacks on this morning are comparing the cost of a basic membership to going to the movies and  buying a Coke and popcorn.

But when you go to the movies they show you the whole two hours, not just one.

Give on this first day, they say, and you can be bored till by their endless chatter about shopping bags from Car Talk but with a clear conscience. Hit a home run, they say, and you can retire to the box and watch the rest of the game. The difference, of course, is that at a baseball game they don't suspend the game every twenty minutes to ask you for the price of admission again.

But at the same time they drop "Performance Today:- which they peddle as a reason to contribute- in favor of random musical choices by their on-air shillers, who have no idea what the music is about, and, frequently, no idea how to pronounce the selections' titles. Thus does SC ETV claim to be the best public network in America.

All of this in one morning, and in addition to rifling through your pockets when you're dead and wheedling you to give them cars all damn year long.