[bluedanieru]

He's referring to bribes. Typically with Republicans you buy a few of the important ones and the rest fall in line pretty quickly, however with Democrats you have to buy each one individually but generally at a cheaper price. Admittedly it is hard to say which way is more expensive on the whole, but there is something more admirable about a whore who plies his or her own trade, than a pack of them where the only one with any sense at all is the one in charge.

[schmittz]

I don't understand this at all. There's no direct bribing because of the ramifications, but there is a lot of post-office job offer and campaign contribution gamesmanship, as everyone recognizes. However, I'm not sure where you're drawing your data from. Could you enlighten me? My anecdotal perception is that the "required" donations operate largely the same between parties. As per data compiled by the reputable OpenSecrets, of the top contributing organizations from 1989-2010, most of them donate strongly to Democratic candidates (this I assume would be the amounts used to "bribe" politicians).[1] Regardless of this fact, I still don't see an analogy between a flip-flop vote (I don't know the vote numbers, so that phrasing might not be true) on TARP by the Republicans (while I don't know numbers, as I recall, the Democrats also voted heavily against a "bailout" package before voting for it) and the way that AT&T might use political clout to push through this merger.

[1] http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php

EDIT: Interesting to note, however, that AT&T is third on the list of all time donors and on the fence for Dem/Rep support. If the justice department wasn't full of appointments or hires as opposed to elected officials, this could strongly weaken the likely outcome of this suit. In any case, will be interesting to note the effect in upcoming elections that this has on AT&T's donation patterns.