Lost amid all the huffing and blowing regarding the startling revelations that rich people like the Clintons have lots of money and that they know a lot of rich people who have a lot of money, the marriage of Time Warner and Comcast has been called off. And I just bought some nice candlesticks, too.

Opponents portrayed Comcast's takeover effort as a land grab that would have given the company too much leverage in the industry, and over the last year lawmakers, consumers, public advocacy groups and media and technology companies rallied against the merger. Complaints reached a fever pitch in recent weeks. The fears were plenty: that customers would end up paying more for declining service; that the industry behemoth would use its heft to stifle competition in the budding online video business; that there would be a lack of independent and diverse voices on television. Critics also criticized the company for failing to live up to promises it had made in previous deals, particularly its acquisition of NBCUniversal in 2011.

That last sentence is a real gem, by the way. "Critics also criticized." And haterz gotta hate. And grifterz gotta grift. And huge media conglomeratez gotta conglomerate. Or not.

This is a gigantic win for consumers. It's also a gigantic win for Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.), which still sounds amazing to me, even now that he's in his second term. (Granted, it's not as amazing as the concept of "Congressman Sonny Bono," but that's the all-time champ.) Franken deftly and patiently built a coalition to cure this bit of corporate elephantiasis.

"My fear has been more and more concentration of power, and that is why I have been against this," said Senator Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat who has been a vocal opponent of the deal since it was announced in February 2014. "We need more competition in this space, not less."

Franken is a fascinating politician. His public profile is practically non-existent, at least by the yappy standards of the cable-news, clickbait era. He is a first-class fundraiser; his work on behalf of Senator Professor Warren was the stuff that dreams are made of, but he never gives you the sense on the stump that he's trading on his celebrity. And, in the Senate, he's gone out of his way to prove himself a workhorse, and not a show-pony, without ever giving the impression that he's overcompensating for having been a next-level comedian for all those years. He is a Minnesota liberal in the tradition of Hubert Humphrey and Paul Wellstone, but both Humphrey and Wellstone were more visible politicians than Franken has been. (Wellstone used to walk picket lines, and Humphrey could be positively frenzied on a rope line.) In his desire to get into the real nitty-gritty of the job of legislating, and in his ability to put aside simple celebrity for the grunt work of getting things done in an increasingly dysfunctional national legislature, Al Franken looks like nothing less than the heir to Ted Kennedy, and that's an amazing thing in and of itself.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io