Python :: Make A Flex Application Where It Gets Data From A Telnet Connection?

I am trying to make a flex application where it gets data from a telnet connection and I am running into a weird problem.To give a brief introduction, i want to read data from a process that exposes it through a socket. So if in the shell i type telnet localhost 8651i receive the xml and then the connection is closed (I get the following Connection closed by foreign host.)

Anyway i found a simple tutorial online for flex that essentially is a telnet client and one would expect it to work but everything follows Murphy's laws and nothing ever works.Now i have messages being printed in every event handler and all places that i can think off. When i connect to the socket nothing happens, no event handler is triggered even the connect or close handler and if i do the following the socket.connected returns false! I get no errors, try catch raises no exception. I am at a loss as to whats going wrong?

socket.connect(serverURL, portNumber);
msg(socket.connected.toString());

Is there something about telnet that i do not know and its causing this to not work. Whats more interesting is why none of the events get fired.The following is the python code that works!

def getStats(host, port):
sock = socket.socket()
sock.connect((host, port))[code]....