I cannot seem to sync the program guide with what's actually on tv right now. I live in Texas, U.S. Central. I made no changes during the mythtv install. The program guide shows the right channels, just not the right shows. I am talking about the program guide and the info that appears when changing to a new channel.
First, the time is completely wrong by about 8 hours. If I use tzconfig in debian, date -s and ntpdate, I can get either wrong time/right shows or right time/wrong shows. Any help?

Sounds like your time is synced with UTC time which is off by 6 hours from Central time. Check your time zone /etc/localtime and set it to the proper timezone with copy the correct /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/pick_your_closest_city to /etc/localtime.

Ok, I took your advice.
copied /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Mexico_City to /etc/localtime,
ran ntpdate

now, "date" returns the correct time, 6:30 AM CDT

run mythtv, go to program guide....

Example :
6:30AM channel 60 - Futurama

What's actually showing on channel 60 is "krytpo the super dog"

Program guide lists this show at 11:00 AM on channel 60.

My time is right, everything in the guide is right(channel lineup, show order), but all of the actual programs are off by 4hrs:30 mins. Seems like an odd figure. I can go to zap2it on another system and use my zip code to get a perfectly correct program guide. Is mythtv using some other mysterious clock to fetch the program guide?

Just to clarify :

The floating bar when I change to a new channel reports the description of what was on 5 hrs ago, what is actually on right now is in the program guide 5 hrs from now.
If the whole program guide was shifted 5hrs forward, everything would be fine. How to do this is another question.

ok, got it fixed.

1. cp /usr/local/zoneinfo/America/Closest city to /etc/localtime

2. run ntpdate pool.ntp.org to update the time

***3. run mythfilldatabase --refresh-today to refresh the program guide

seems like, by default, mythfilldatabase does no update data for days its already retrieved. I might have to run with --refresh today every couple days, but the data is now right for the next 48 hours at least.

When you have a TZ type problem, after you fix the clock setting, you need to restart the mysql server and the mythtv backend (rebooting is the easiest way) and reload the program guide. The documentation tells you to run mythtv-setup and say "yes" to the "delete the current settings" questions at the begining.