From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Oct 21 19:15:11 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9LNFBR04221; Thu, 21 Oct 2004 19:15:11 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 19:15:11 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410212315.i9LNFBR04221@massis.lcs.mit.edu> X-Authentication-Warning: massis.lcs.mit.edu: ptownson set sender to editor@telecom-digest.org using -f To: ptownson Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V23 #505 TELECOM Digest Thu, 21 Oct 2004 19:15:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 505 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson They Can Hear You Now (Lisa Minter) Callsigns and Horse Teeth (jmayson@nyx.net) 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns (Neal McLain) Re: AMTRAK (was Re: Last, Sad Laugh! Nice Place to Work) (John R.Covert) Re: AMTRAK (was Re: Last, Sad Laugh! Nice Place to Work) (Mark Crispin) Re: Sinclair: From Bad to Worse (Thomas A. Horsley) Re: Sinclair's Disgrace (Lisa Hancock) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Lisa Minter Subject: They Can Hear You Now Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 11:06:08 EDT IQUITOS, Peru - A few miles downriver from this city in the western Amazon jungle, Andres Alvarado hops off a boat and walks up a muddy path to a hollowed-out log resting on a wooden stand. He beats the log with a stick, sending a series of low-pitched tones into the rain forest. "This is what they call the 'telephone of the jungle,' " says Alvarado, a tricycle taxi-driver and tourist guide. Moments later, as children of the Bora Indian tribe come bounding down the path to answer the "telephone," Alvarado's belt begins beeping: It's his cellphone. Iquitos and nearby riverside hamlets are among the more remote outposts in South America's expanding mobile phone system, part of a global network that is beginning to penetrate even the poorest and most undeveloped corners of the world. For millions of people living in countries where getting a fixed phone line remains a bureaucratic impossibility, the cellphone revolution has allowed them to leapfrog from archaic forms of communication straight into the digital era and that is changing the fabric of their daily lives. In East Africa, the mobile phone has brought a first, tantalizing taste of modernity to people who live on less than $10 a day. In China, the world's biggest market for cellphones, they are embraced by rich and poor alike, a tiny pocket computer with which to surf the Internet, play video games or even do banking. Here in Iquitos, where speedboats and lumbering old fishing craft ply the brown, wide waters of the Amazon, fishermen grab the wheels of their vessels with one hand and their cellphones with the other to check the price their catch will fetch at markets downriver. Alvarado uses his mobile phone to round up clients for his tricycle taxi. And earlier this year, it beeped with the most important call of his life. "My mother-in-law called me from the delivery room," Alvarado recalled. His wife had gone into labor with their first child, and he raced to the hospital on his tricycle. "We all thought we were going to have a girl, but it turned out to be a boy." He flashed the news from the hospital to his sister in Lima via his cellphone, the kind of call that might seem routine in the United States but which still carries for him an aura of science fiction. For Alvarado, a bright-eyed 23-year-old who has rarely traveled beyond the river cities and hamlets of the Amazon, the change brought about by the cellphone has been profound and rapid. A few years back, when Alvarado's grandfather died in a town several days' journey upriver, his family in Iquitos learned the news by telegram. A mourning relative walked several hours to the telegraph office, dictated the sad news to a telegraph operator, who sent it to another office, where the message was typed up and delivered by hand to the Alvarado household. "By the time we found out, they had already buried him," Alvarado said. The number of cellphones in Latin America has tripled since 1999, and one in five people now owns one. In Peru, as in many other countries in the region, there are more cellphones than fixed phone lines. Today, the world's fastest-growing cellphone markets are in places like Iquitos in rural South America and in sub-Saharan Africa, despite widespread poverty. "My cellphone gives me an 'address' just like any other businessman," said Baruwani Mbabazi, a money-changer who is part of a brisk trade in U.S. dollars in Kigali, the Rwandan capital. His $20 purchase of a used cellphone has liberated him from having to stand on the street waiting for customers. "I can't imagine my business without it," Mbabazi said. Rwanda's cellphone boom has followed a pattern typical of many developing countries. It now has more than five times as many cellphones (134,000) as fixed telephone lines (23,000), according to the International Telecommunications Union. As in Rwanda, people elsewhere across Africa are coming to appreciate and rely upon the magic of the cellphone; communicating with a distant friend while under a baobab tree in Mali, for example, or on the Kenyan savanna. In Senegal, farmers use them in their annual, age-old battle against plagues of locusts, calling each other and the authorities to keep track of the progress of insect "hopper bands." In Somalia, men in loincloths flash their cellphones as they guide camels to port. Masai warriors in Tanzania pull phones from their red *shuka* robes to call gem brokers when they find glimmering purple-blue tanzanite, a rare gemstone found only in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro. But mostly, Africans use their phones for the same purpose as people everywhere -- conversation. "We're a nation of talkers," said Kayode Sukoya, a Lagos taxi driver known by the nickname "Guv'nor." He links the cellphone's popularityto the ancient storytelling customs of Yoruba culture. The cellphone is spreading, thanks to "prepaid" service plans, which can lower the cost to a few dollars a month. In Lima, Peru's capital, vendors sell prepaid phone time the same way they sell peanuts: by standing between lines of cars waiting for the light to turn green. You hand over the equivalent of a few dollars and get a coded card, which you use to "charge up" your phone with time credit. In Peru, these consumers far outnumber "postpaid" users, who get a bill for their calls each month. "To get a postpaid cellphone, you need to have a consistent source of income, and since the economy here is mostly informal, people don't have that," said Juan Edgar Chavez, southern Peru sales director for Telefonica Moviles Peru, the largest cellphone company in the country. As in the United States and Europe, cellphones link people in the developing world in ways no one imagined possible just a few years ago. In South America, the cellphone has become a tool of rebellion, and a *de rigueur* accessory for crime bosses who, in certain corners of the region, act as a kind of parallel government. In Brazil, drug kingpin Luiz Fernando da Costa was widely believed to have used a cellphone from his prison cell to control his minions in the *favelas,* or slums, of Rio de Janeiro, leading authorities to install jamming devices outside the city's largest penitentiaries. The cellphone is the communication instrument of choice for leaders of the secessionist Aymara Indian movement in the highlands of Bolivia, where it comes in handy when trying to coordinate strikes and highway blockades. In China, which has more than 300 million users, the cellphone has come to symbolize the national search for prosperity and self- expression. On the streets of Beijing, along with on-the-go businessmen, farmers chatter on cellphones as they drive their vegetables to market in mule-drawn carriages. Xiao Zhao, a 15-year-old purveyor of false documents, uses his phone to keep one step ahead of the law. "You can't glue yourself to a fixed telephone and still do the business," he said. "Once the police get your regular phone number, they'd be able to find out where you're living and have you arrested." One enterprising Chinese author has written a novel meant to be read in 70-word chapters transmitted by mobile phone text message. "Outside the Fortress Besieged" tells the story of an extramarital affair in 60 chapters totaling about 4,000 words, according to China's state-run press. The text-message explosion in China has not escaped the attention of the authorities, who this summer announced a plan to employ new technology to improve surveillance of mobile phone messages. Officials said the campaign was aimed at cleaning up "pornographic, obscene and fraudulent" phone messages. Some say the new scrutiny is aimed at squelching political dissent. Chinese police sometimes use text messages as an anti-crime tool: When they find a cellphone that is being used for illicit purposes, they use a computer to call the phone and flood it with phony text messages, running up such a high bill for the owner that the phone becomes unusable. Xiao, the phony-document seller, said this has happened to him. "I've changed numbers twice since last year," he said. Providing the good, reliable service the market demands is not easy in developing countries such as Peru, where engineers face a series of technical challenges presented by untamed jungles and rickety electrical grids. Each base station requires electricity. "In rural areas, the electricity fluctuates," said David Holgado, Telefonica's chief technical officer. "It's supposed to be 220 volts, but sometimes I get 160 or 250." Often, only battery power keeps the cellular station and all the people using it to make calls online. A donkey is required for the technician with the unenviable task of performing routine maintenance on the antenna that sits atop a 13,100-foot peak above the city of Pasco, one of the highest in the world. "There is a lot of equipment to carry, and of course there is no road or any other way to get up there," Holgado said. Telefonica covers Peru with 400 base stations, the circular towers now a ubiquitous feature of the urban landscape in the U.S. On flat terrain, each tower transmits a signal with an 18-mile radius. But in Peru's mountainous topography, the signals are shadowed out or echo in unpredictable ways. One recent evening, two Telefonica technicians sat inside a nondescript office in the Lima headquarters monitoring the nationwide cell system on a video wall displaying charts and graphs that pulsated as if the network were a living organism. "What we look for are the symptoms of trouble," Holgado said. "Because you see the symptoms before you see the problem itself. Right now, everything is operating normally." One small square showed the base station at the jungle port of Puerto Maldonado, on the Madre de Dios River near the Bolivian border. Puerto Maldonado is so remote that the usual fiber-optic or microwave connections linking base stations to the home network in Lima are unavailable. So all the calls from the jungle outpost where Spanish conquistadors once searched in vain for the mythical El Dorado are routed through space. In some villages, people climb to their roofs to get a good signal, Holgado said. In others, they raise 60-foot-high antennas and rig their phones to them. In villages without electrical power, people charge up their phones with car batteries. "You see all the ingenuity we Peruvians are famous for," said Carlos Zamora Guanillo, a Telefonica engineer. The fishermen of Iquitos know all about ingenuity. Sometimes you have to be quick on your feet to sell your Amazon catfish, or *zungaro* at the right place. Having a cellphone can help you get a good price at the big markets in faraway Leticia in Colombia, on the border with Peru and Brazil. Juan Flores, who was elected president of the Artisan Union of Fishermen of Iquitos in part because he owns a mobile phone, talks about the phone signal in the same tone he might use to describe shifting currents and hazardous sandbars. "When you get to the fork of the Ucayali or the Maraon, it doesn't work," he said, naming a couple of Amazon tributaries. "But in Tamshiyacu, the signal is pretty good. By the time you get to Yurimaguas and to Pucallpa, the signal is nice and strong." The fishermen follow the signal upriver and down, in long, flat boats with thatched roofs that look a lot like floating cigars. The other day, one of the ships of the Iquitos fleet, the El Veloz Quinto (Speedy the Fifth), hit a sandbar and began to sink. The captain couldn't raise the local river patrol on his radio. Luckily, he had a cellphone. He called their office and read them the riot act: "What's wrong with you guys, aren't you listening to the radio? Get out here quick, or I'm going to lose all my ice." They saved the ship. But the ice was lost. ------------------------------- Times staff writers John M. Glionna and Yin Lijin in Beijing, Davan Maharaj in Nairobi, Kenya, and Jube Shiver Jr. in Washington contributed to this report. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Los Angeles Times. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: jmayson@nyx.net Reply-To: jmayson@nyx.net Subject: Callsigns and Horse Teeth Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 02:44:07 GMT Organization: Road Runner High Speed Online http://www.rr.com Whenever I get into these discussions on the Internet, I always think of that old adage about Greek philosophers. They would argue for hours, even days, over things like how many teeth a horse has and no one would bother to go look in a horse's mouth. I looked up callsign history. I was mostly right. According to this page: http://earlyradiohistory.us/recap.htm there were three owner requests for exceptions to the E/W rule: WACO, WDGQ, and WMT. There are other W callsigns west of the Mississippi and these exist for a number of reasons including: pre-existing callsigns, portable stations that moved from east to west, stations that changed their community of license across the divide, and government error (KTGG in Michigan because the FCC thought "MI" stood for "Missouri"). Now to give this more of telecom flavor ... I used to work at a major long-distance company, the one with a logo similar to a large object in the Star Wars movies. A clerk was sending circuit orders to the small independent local telecos in our region and addressed an envelope to Mississippi with an "MI". I told her that was Michigan and she said no, Michigan would be "MN". I said "MN" was Minnesota which she claimed to be "MA". I start to point out that was Massachusetts, but saw it coming ... Mass. would've been "MS" which is Mississippi and around we go again. I figured the USPS went by the ZIP Code anyway, so the order probably got there. John Mayson Austin, Texas, USA [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Actually, no matter how many teeth you saw in the mouth of some particular horse, there can always be exceptions. For example, how many toes does a cat have on its paws? Some people would say 'five', which is normally the correct answer. But some cats have *six* toes on one (or all four) feet. The vernacular name for such cats is 'polydex' and my first cat 'Nicholas' (the one who was so warm and loving, not the later Nicholas who was always hateful with humans) was that way. Nicholas had six toes on each of his two front paws, five toes on each of his back paws. I guess it is some genetic thing going back a million years or so. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 02:37:38 -0500 From: Neal McLain Subject: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns Anthony Bellanga wrote: > Louisiana and Minnesota both "straddle" the Mississippi River. In my experience (mostly in cable TV), the Mississippi-River rule can be more accurately stated as follows: "K" = west of the Mississippi River plus the entire state of Minnesota. "W" = east of the Mississippi River plus Louisiana parishes located in the Baton Rouge and New Orleans DMAs. But even with this version of the rule there are numerous exceptions, especially in the case of low-power television stations (LPTV, Class A, translators, and boosters). Here's my list of television-station exceptions: - "K" callsigns in the "W" half: K07WE Baton Rouge LA K10NG New Orleans LA K14IE New Orleans LA K55EX New Orleans LA K58GB Baton Rouge LA K59DG New Orleans LA K65FP Baton Rouge LA KDKA-TV KDKA-DT Pittsburgh PA KFOL-CA Houma LA KWBJ-LP Morgan City LA KYW-TV KYW-DT Philadelphia PA KZUP-CA Baton Rouge LA - "W" callsigns in the "K" half: W61AF Grand Marais MN W62DB Minneapolis MN WBWX-CA Minneapolis MN WCCO-TV WCCO-DT Minneapolis MN WCMN-LP Saint Cloud MN WDAF-TV WDAF-DT Kansas City MO WDAY-TV WDAY-DT Fargo ND WDAZ-TV WDAZ-DT Devils Lake ND WDIO-TV WDIO-DT Duluth MN WDSE WDSE-DT Duluth MN WFAA-TV WFAA-DT Dallas TX WFTC WFTC-DT Minneapolis MN WIBW-TV WIBW-DT Topeka KS WHO-TV WHO-DT Des Moines IA WIRT WIRT-DT Hibbing MN WOAI-TV WOAI-DT San Antonio TX WOI-TV WOI-DT Des Moines IA WOWT WOWT-DT Omaha NE Source: TvRadioWorld . There are even more exceptions in the case of radio. Robert Bonomi mentioned several of them in TD V23:500, but there are many others (far too many for me to attempt to list here). For anyone really interested, the place to start is: . Bonomi's list included: > WOI (AM, FM, and TV ... ), Ames, Iowa WOI(AM) and WOI-FM are licensed to Iowa State University. WOI-TV is a commercial station (ABC affiliate) serving the Des Moines/Ames/ Marshalltown DMA; it's still licensed to Ames, but it claims "Des Moines" in its publicity. ISU does not operate a TV station (most public television stations in Iowa are operated by Iowa Public Television, a state agency independent of the state universities). > WWL Waterloo, Iowa. Intrestingly, KWWL is in the same town. WWL(AM) and WWL-TV are now located in New Orleans, LA. > WSUI Iowa City, Iowa Also the home of KSUI. *SAME* owner, > even. :) WSUI(AM) and KSUI(FM) are licensed to the University of Iowa (formerly, State University of Iowa; hence, "SUI"). UI does not operate a TV station (same reason ISU doesn't). > WOW Omaha, Nebraska AM only; sister TV is WOWT. > WMT Cedar Rapids, Iowa WMT(AM) and WMT-FM only; sister TV is KGAN(TV), formerly WMT-TV. > WOC Davenport, Iowa AM only; sister FM is WLLR(FM); sister TV is KWQC(TV). > WRR Dallas, Texas FM only (PAT: classical music, streamed online!) > WBAP Ft. Worth, Texas AM only. > WCAL Northfield, Minnesota FM only. Sold to Minnesota Public Radio on 8-10-04; formerly owned by St. Olaf College. > WJOD Asbury, Iowa FM only (Dubuque market). > WJON St. Cloud, Minnesota AM only; sister FM is WWJO(FM). > WNAX Yankton, South Dakota AM only. > WOWT Omaha, Nebraska TV only; sister AM is WOW. > WTAW College Station, Texas AM only. > WWLS Moore, Oklahoma WWLS(AM) and WWLS-FM only. > WWJO St. Cloud, Minnesota FM only; sister AM is WJON. > WYRQ Little Falls, Minnesota AM only. > and, some hair-splitting (Metro area crosses the river, > transmitter_could_ be on the Illinois side of the Missippi): > WIL St. Louis, Missouri FM only. Transmitter is located in Missouri. > WRTH St. Louis, Missouri The FCC has no record of this callsign. > WLTE Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota FM only. Transmitter is located in Minnesota, on the east side of the Mississippi River. That's still on the "K" side of the line according to the version of the rule I stated above. > WMCN St. Paul, Minnesota FM only. Transmitter is located in Minnesota, on the east side of the Mississippi River. > WBJI Blackduck, Minnesota FM only. Blackduck is in Beltrami County (page 72-B2 in DeLorme). > WIRN Buhl, Minnesota FM only; Minnesota Public Radio affiliate. Buhl is in St. Louis County, near Hibbing (page 75-D6 in DeLorme). > WACO Waco, Texas. FM only. R. T. Wurth wrote: > There were some W-s, WEW and WIL, licensed to serve St. Louis, > west of the Mississippi, and thus signing as WEW, St. Louis, and > WIL, St. Louis (technically broadcast radio/tv call signs had to > include the community of license as well as the call letters). > These would appear to be breaking the Mississippi rule. I can > think of a few possible reasons that might make them technically > non-exceptions. It is possible that they transmitted from > across the river in Illinois, and that the rule referred to > transmitter site, not to community of licensure, or it may have > been that they were originally licensed to E. St. Louis, IL, and > then petitioned to move their license to St. Louis. Does anyone > know the real explanation? Were these stations exceptions, too, > or were they special cases? They're both exceptions. Callsigns are attached to the community of license without regard to the location of the transmitter. WEW(AM) is licensed to St. Louis, but the transmitter is located in Washington Park, Illinois. FCC record at: . WIL-FM is licensed to St. Louis, and the transmitter is located in Missouri. FCC record (scroll down below WILL-FM) at: Neal McLain [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Is there a 'WIL' (one /L/) in St. Louis? The reason I ask is because there is a 'WILL' (two /L/) at the University of Illinois in Champaign, 580 KC on AM band.) PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 15:38:45 EDT From: "John R. Covert" Subject: Re: AMTRAK (was Re: Last, Sad Laugh! A Nice Place to Work!) Mark Crispin wrote: > You'll see streetcars in Germany and Austria, as part of an > aboveground S-Bahn network which is invariably slower and less > preferred to the underground U-Bahn. The S-Bahn quickly becomes > rapid transit once in suburbia. Mark, let's get the terminology correct. In Germany, "S-Bahn" is short for "Stadtbahn" (City Railroad) and is almost invariably run by "Deutsche Bahn" (the national railroad) using full-size electric rail vehicles in a system fully integrated with the intercity rail network. It's the equivalent of "commuter rail" in the United States, although in some cities (Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, and Hamburg in particular) it is quite well developed and provides a significant amount of very high speed service within the city limits. It is not "streetcar" in any sense of the word. The U-Bahn (Untergrundbahn) is usually completely separate, and typically operated by a local city transit agency, quite often the same agency which runs the busses and streetcars. There will often be a transit union of several companies across nearby communities to provide a single fare structure (often including the Deutsche Bahn's S-Bahn services in the area). Streetcars and S-Bahn have nothing to do with each other. In fact, it's much more likely that streetcars and U-Bahn will be integrated, as is the case in cities other than Berlin and Hamburg, where there was previously no heavy-rail U-Bahn, and tunnels were built for certain portions of the streetcar system. Two examples come to mind immediately: Bonn and Stuttgart, where the light-rail streetcars go into tunnels with these streetcar stations marked "U". However, the major S-Bahn stations in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart (and most other cities) are the same stations at which you would catch a long-distance train to anywhere in Europe. The S-Bahn also serves many local stations, most of which you would pass through (without stopping) when travelling on high-speed intercity trains. Regards, /john ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 13:33:46 PDT From: Mark Crispin Subject: Re: AMTRAK (was Re: Last, Sad Laugh! A Nice Place to Work!) On Thu, 21 Oct 2004, John R. Covert wrote: > Mark, let's get the terminology correct. In Germany, "S-Bahn" is > short for "Stadtbahn" (City Railroad) Schnellbahn. I checked my dictionary to verify my memory on this point. If Stadtbahn is used today that is a new usage. > It's the equivalent of "commuter rail" in the United > States, although in some cities (Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, and > Hamburg in particular) it is quite well developed I suppose you know that the Berlin S-Bahn is more or less totally reconstructed since the fall of the wall. Prior to that time, the U-Bahn was run by West Berlin authorities and the S-Bahn by East Berlin authorities. Most U-Bahn lines served the west, although one line had a stop in the east (Friedrichstrasse IIRC) and there was another line that was east-only. The S-Bahn was entirely streetcars in West Berlin, and generally avoided. Berlin's S-Bahn could have been how S-Bahn came to be interpreted as "Stadtbahn" since it very definitely was not schnell in Berlin!!! In Munich, the S-Bahn is a high-speed line from the suburbs into downtown, but only one or two stops in town (e.g. at Hauptbahnhof); everywhere else in town you take the U-Bahn or walk. I don't recall streetcars in Munich, but there definitely were streetcars in the Vienna ring which were part of the S-Bahn system. Those streetcars were definitely not schnell; I could walk faster than they would transport you. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you; I think that maybe you aren't aware of some of the history. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum. ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Sinclair: From Bad to Worse From: tom.horsley@att.net (Thomas A. Horsley) Organization: AT&T Worldnet Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 20:57:48 GMT > On Monday, Sinclair fired the head of its Washington bureau for having > the temerity to criticize the airing of one-sided propaganda (ironic, > considering Sinclair is claiming a First Amendment right to air the > film). I don't like Sinclair, but I'm afraid I can't find any irony here. Sinclair owns the stations -- he can put anything he wants on and hire or fire anyone he wants to. There is nothing in the First Amendment that guarantees there will be no consequences for speaking up -- it just guarantees the gummint can't do anything to stop you. "The truth will set you free" (and if you don't believe it, tell your boss the truth someday :-). >>==>> The *Best* political site >>==+ email: Tom.Horsley@worldnet.att.net icbm: Delray Beach, FL | Free Software and Politics <<==+ ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: Sinclair's Disgrace Date: 20 Oct 2004 20:05:45 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: You may be interested in a show to > be aired on October 27 at (I think) 10 PM eastern/9 central on > TV Land, called "Politics and Prime Time". Thanks for the flag, that show should be very informative. I just hope they show the historical commercials in their _entirety_, rather than quick brief snippets. > TV Land has been doing promotions for it for several weeks now, > including the infamous one of Barry Goldwater (who ran against > Kennedy as I recall) I think you mean Johnson. It's tough to say what kind of president Goldwater would've made. But Johnson was a HUGE disappointment. Vietnam, instead of going away, became a huge mess. The Civil Rights era became a huge mess though much of that was not Johnson's fault. > The other good one TV Land has shown almost daily of late is Bush > the First telling us "what America needs is a family structure like > the Walton's, not Homer Simpson." I know it sounds corny, but I agree with that statement. I've seen too many "Homer Simpson"-like families who had plenty of opportunity but screwed it up through their own irresponsibilities. I've got enough gray now to have seen lousy long term behavior patterns that end badly. > Smears and innuendo are nothing new at election time, are they, Lisa? Heck, no! I've already mentioned Nixon's early campaigns. At the same time, Truman was quite nasty in his 1948 campaign against Dewey. We like Truman (who was an excellent president) and cheer his big upset win, but he got pretty shrill in his campaign. Cover-ups aren't new either. It appears FDR's 1944 campaign was a huge coverup to hide FDR's failing health from the public; he had a very serious heart condition by that point. (In fairness, FDR himself appears to have been in denial and didn't follow doctor's orders. Even back then they wanted him to quit smoking.) ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. 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