…(or rather, a streaming-content company working with AT&T’s sponsorship) deliberately censor Eddie Vedder leading an anti-Bush chant during a live Lollapalooza webcast?

And in a related question, are there really still Lollapalooza concerts?

Yes to both questions.

But the company insists the sound-silencing was a mistake done by an overzealous “content monitor” employee at the content contractor.

It couldn’t have happened at a better time for critics of the company now known as AT&T. (You’ll recall, won’t you, that today’s AT&T is really Southwestern Bell Corp., one of the “Baby Bell” spinoffs of the original AT&T, which recently acquired the name and other remnants of its former parent.)

The company’s online critics have chided it for cooperating with the Bushies’ warrentless wiretap schemes, and for advocating so-called “throttled” broadband services (in which Internet service providers such as itself could speed up or slow down consumers’ connections to specific Web sites), and for cooperating too closely with MPAA/RIAA file-sharing crackdowns.

It’s not as if AT&T were censoring a site it wasn’t directly sponsoring.

It’s not as if you couldn’t get the deleted words from other sources. (Pearl Jam has put up the whole unbleeped sequence on its own site.)

And it’s not as if you can’t find anti-Bush messages online from many other sources.

Still, it ain’t good PR for a company trying to prove its trustworthiness (whilst basking in its share of the iPhone hype).