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In the 1970s, Lily Tomlin developed an iconic comic character she named Ernestine--a telephone clerk who took perverse pleasure from hectoring customers. Her character was a perfect portrayal of the arrogance of AT&T, the monopolistic telephone giant of that day. In one skit on on the TV show, Laugh-In, Tomlin had Ernestine delivering a TV pitch for the corporation:

"A gracious hello," she cheerfully began, speaking directly into the camera. "Here at the Phone Company, we handle 84 billion calls a year. So, we realize that every so often, you can't get an operator, or for no apparent reason your phone goes out of order, or perhaps you get charged for a call you didn't make. We don't care!"

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MRS. MCCAIN HELPS OUT

By Jim Hightower - Mon., 6/2/08

Cindy McCain is heiress to a Phoenix-based beer-distributing company, making her worth about $100 million. Last month she was embarrassed into divesting herself of more than $2 million in mutual funds which hold stock in companies doing business with the genocidal leaders of Sudan. Through her giant Budweiser distributorship, Cindy McCain has also given her hubby fat breaks on air travel. The New York Times compared what the McCain campaign paid for using Cindy's private planes with the market rate for the trips taken and concluded that she was "subsidizing her husband's campaign" to the tune of perhaps a half million dollars.

Filed Under: Campaign finance, Elections, Political corruption, Republicans

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Big biz wants to own the information superhighway while We the People bump along the backroads