Well, found some tailgate cables on eBay for ~$10+$10 shipping, and they arrived today. I got to work and found this task of replacing the cables was going to be a bit more involved than I first figured. After all the farting around and running to the hardware store, it took a little over two hours to replace both cables. To help others out and speed things up, here's what I did:
1. Remove tailgate and place on workbench or in my case a kitchen table.
2. Use a
T-40 Torx bit (this bit will be used for all the screws on the tailgate) and remove the 2 screws holding the plastic bed liner on. Set this aside.
3. After the plastic liner is removed, you will see one black screw that holds the tailgate handle in place. Remove this screw.
4. Flip the tailgate over. You will see the handle is loose inside the tailgate. Remove the plastic ring that surrounds the tailgate handle. Simply get your fingers behind it and give it a pull.
5. After the plastic ring is removed, you will see the rather simple mechanism used to move each latch. You need to remove both bars that move the latch. Simply rotate the plastic retainer and pull the bar straight up and out. A needle nose pliers comes in handy here. Leave the bar where it lays.
6. Remove a latch by taking off the two Torx head screws. The latch will come straight out and you will see how it attaches to the bar inside the tailgate. The bar's end is "L" shaped, so rotate the latch 90 degrees to free it from the bar. It's a lot easier to leave the bar inside the tailgate, than to pull it out, trust me on this.
7. You will see the tailgate cable is held on by a solid rivit. I used a bench grinder to grind down the thinner of the two sides of the rivit. I then used a drift pin to punch out the rivit. The old tailgate cable will fall off now, but keep track of the thin nylon washer! This nylon washer goes between the latch and the tailgate cable.
8. Now here is where you can do what you want, as far as attaching the cables goes, but this is how I did mine. I went to the harware store and picked up two 1/2" X 1/2" stainless steel bolts and the nuts to go with them. The nuts I used were jam nuts, which are thinner, but after installation I found they really aren't needed. I originally wanted to use a solid rivit again, like the factory did, but my hardware store didn't have any.
9. In order to use the 1/2" bolts I picked up, I needed to drill out the hole in the latch that holds the tailgate cable on. After doing that I shot each latch with some paint, because of the exposed metal from drilling and a few nicks from grinding the rivit off.
10. There isn't much room to put a bolt behind the latch, so I ground down the heads of each 1/2" bolt to roughly one half the original thickness. If you are not sure, then leave a little extra on the head of the bolt, because when the latch is tightened down, the latch holds the bolt in place by pressing it against the tailgate.
11. Install the bars, the ones inside the tailgate, back onto each latch and put the other end of the bars back onto the handle mechanism. Flip the tailgate back over and attach the handle with the one black screw. You will have to lift the tailgate slightly to get underneath to align the handle with the screw holes. You can replace the plastic ring around the handle now.
12. Put the 1/2" bolt through the back of the latch and attach the latch back onto the tailgate.
13. Put the nylon washer on the bolt, then put your new tailgate cables on and lightly screw on the jam nuts with some permanent (red) lock-tite. You want a little movement in the cables, you don't want to tighten the jam nuts down.
14. While the loc-tite is hardening, install your plastic bed liner back onto the tailgate.
15. Install the tailgate.
Yes folks, it's that simple! Just 15 easy steps! 
Maybe you will get lucky and have both tailgate cables THE SAME LENGTH. Because, after I installed mine, I found the passenger side cable to be almost 1/4" longer than the other... oh well. At least the person from eBay is sending me some new ones next week.
!M!
. My question is, where would be the best place to buy these tailgate cables? A little search yeilded eBay as the best place, but figured I would ask as well.
I use my tailgate multiple times a day too *sigh*
Uh, what else broke? Anything? Springs, shocks, etc?
Guess I'll be filling out that form listed above!!! 
!
) with the old two piece metal hinge system....worked for 16 solid years and never broke. maybe GM needs to go back in time to find asnwers to its modern problems???
