Exactly one year ago the Sunlight Foundation unveiled our Political Action Committee (PAC) Name Generator and today we revisit it with some shocking revelations. The project showcased the absurdity of the naming culture for these political funds. The agreeable names shield them from scrutiny - who isn't in favor of common sense, truth or America? As if our anemic disclosure laws and the impotent Federal Election Commission do not allow for enough obfuscation!

It was an enormously fun project to work on and we weren't the only ones who enjoyed playing with it - we ended up getting hundreds of thousands of visitors. As the anniversary approached we decided to research if any actual PACs had adopted one of the meaningless, random names we created. So we ran every possible result from our generator against the list of all 41,203 committees scraped from the Center for Responsive Politics.

At first this seemed a rather silly exercise because our beloved generator includes some rather unlikely results such as "Honest Workers for Snow Days," "Taxpayers for Twirling Towards Freedom" and the perfectly concise "Just Another Really Really Well Funded Grassroots Organization for Short, Pithy and Informative Names for Political Action Committees."

Yet, to our surprise, we found dozens of matches. In fact, based on filing at the FEC, many of these all-American groups were created after we launched our PAC Name Generator! To the right of this text you'll see screenshots of their official filing documents with the date highlighted - each organization's name is also a possible result from the generator. To anyone who wants to check our work or happens to enjoy scrolling, here are all possible name generator results.

A tool that we created to shed light on how these organizations cower behind a circus of patriotic gobbledygook is fueling the creation of even more murky committee names! What hath we wrought!

Special thanks to Ethan Phelps-Goodman for pulling the real committee names and to Jeremy Carbaugh for matching them up with fake names. Below is the widget and embed code for those who wish to provide inspiration to the unimaginative PAC treasurers around the country:

<iframe src="http://pacgenerator.sunlightfoundation.com/embed" height="260" width="560" style="overflow: hidden; border: 0; margin: 10px 0;" scrolling="no" seamless></iframe>

AT&T is already the second largest mobile phone operator in the country and is looking to get bigger through a merger with T-Mobile, the fourth biggest mobile operator. That merger will be the focus of a hearing held by Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wisc., in the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights. In preparation of scrutiny from Congress and the Justice Department AT&T is spending big on lobbying and campaign contributions.

In the first three months of this year AT&T has already spent $6.84 million lobbying the federal government. That is 44 percent of the amount they spent during the entirety of 2010. In addition, the phone giant's political action committee spread $616,500 to lawmakers and political parties, according to a Sunlight analysis covering January through March of 2011.

The Senate Office of Public Records shows 31 lobbying firms registering lobbying activity for AT&T, including four new registrations, all to lobby on the merger, this year.

One of those newly registered firms is Peck, Madigan, one of Washington's biggest lobbying firms. The former staff director of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is hosting today's hearing, and the former chief of staff to committee member Sen. Amy Klobuchar are both registered with Peck, Madigan to lobby for AT&T.

The AT&T lobbying team also includes six former members of Congress. Two of those former members, Trent Lott and John Breaux, hold one of the most expensive lobbying contracts with AT&T at $120,000 from January through March.

The AT&T/T-Mobile merger has been controversial as it would consolidate 80 percent of the mobile market in just two companies--AT&T and Verizon.

Much of the opposition to the merger has come from Sprint Nextel, currently the third largest mobile provider. An official statement from Sprint Nextel stated, "If approved, the proposed acquisition would create a combined company that would be almost three times the size of Sprint in terms of wireless revenue and would entrench AT&T’s and Verizon’s duopoly control over the wireless market."

Sprint Nextel's lobbying spending barely registers when compared to AT&T's. Sprint spent $583,000 lobbying from January through March or less than one-tenth of AT&T's lobbying expenses. There are currently nine lobbying firms registered to lobby for Sprint. (As mentioned above, there 31 lobbying firms registered with AT&T.)

Today's hearing will feature testimony by the CEOs of AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint Nextel.

The Sunlight Foundation will be covering the hearing through the Sunlight Live platform. The hearing will begin at 10:15 am.

A couple of analyses highlight the contributions of the United Auto Workers PAC to proponents of the auto bailout. The Center for Responsive Politics released an analysis of Senate votes and UAW PAC contributions last week. Yesterday, the conservative Business & Media Institute released their own analysis of UAW PAC giving and the alignment of auto bailout support. After calculating the 2008 UAW PAC giving and matching it up to votes on bailout, I found some differences with the BMI report.

In my review of 2008 UAW PAC contributions, I found that the PAC contributed a total of $1,111,250 to 182 lawmakers who voted "Yes" on the auto bailout. The UAW PAC also contributed a total of $111,500 to 18 lawmakers voting "No". (Also, seven lawmakers who did not vote received a total of $32,000.)

On average, however, there is little difference between the Yes and No camps in the dollar amount of the PAC contributions received. Lawmakers who received UAW PAC contributions and voted No, received slightly more money on average than those receiving UAW PAC money and voting Yes. On average the 18 No votes received $6,194, the 182 Yes votes received $6,106 on average.

Of all 207 lawmawkers receiving campaign contributions from the UAW PAC in 2008, only two are Republicans (Sen. Arlen Specter, voted Yes; Rep. Frank LoBiondo, voted No). Even more so than voting preference, the UAW's PAC contributions align with the long time union preference for Democrats.

UAW PAC contributions are definitely a strong predictive force in how a member will vote, but partisan identification appears to be a stronger force here.

(All data comes from the Center for Responsive Politics.)

From the Open Secrets blog Capital Eye, the Federal Election Commission put out a release showing a 1.3% increase in the number of registered political action committees over the last seven months. The best part of this release by the FEC is a long chart detailing PAC registrations from 1974 to the present. I broke down this down into some cool charts below:

As Massie Ritch points out at Capital Eye, corporate PACs outpaced others, particularly labor PACs, by quite a bit. That wasn't always the case: