A Series of Tubes

So if you didn’t already know, congress passed a bill that granted retroactive immunity to telecom companies. Basically AT&T and other phone companies were given a get out of jail free card. Voting on the bill was pretty much split with the Democrats opposing immunity and the Republicans granting immunity. The bill came up for a vote twice in the house of representatives, and 94 Democrats changed their vote. The spotlight foundation found that the legislators that changed their votes got more money from the telecom companies.

So that’s all old news since it all happened in June. The new news is that the Democratic National Convention is going on right now and Barack Obama is being officially announced as the Presidential Candidate for the Democrats. The DNC is sponsored by…AT&T.  Every tote bag that every delegate will get will have the AT&T logo on it:

Again this is old news since Glen Greenwald over at salon.com already wrote about it.  The newest news isThat AT&T threw a party for the blue dogs (blue dogs are conservative Democrats and the most likely group to accept and act on a bribe).  An image of ad for the party:

You can read about some of the journalists that attempted to cover this story at Firedoglake and at Glen Greenwald’s blog.  The story also made it on to Democracy Now.  The video they shot of attempting to interview attendees was entertaining and disheartening: