Our friend N.Z. Bear has a new sign up page on the Porkbusters site that allows citizens to volunteer to evaluate some of the 36,000 some earmarks flooding the House--so many that Rep. David Obey, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, announced a while back that they couldn't possibly publish them all until the absolute end of the process--when it would have been too late to do anything about them--because of the time needed to vet them. It appears Obey is now saying that lists of earmarks will be published "in The Congressional Record a month before they come up for final approval." Of course, there's no reason to wait that long -- lists of earmarks and earmark requests are sitting around the committee offices for months now; why not make the whole process transparent by making the requests publicly available the moment they're sent to the committee?

I think Steve Ellis from Taxpayers for Common Sense characterized and summed up the shortcomings of the plan quite well in the above linked Times piece:

...under Mr. Obey’s new plan, the final decision on each earmark would be made by the handful of leaders of a House and Senate conference. Mr. Ellis called that “the proverbial smoke-filled room.”

In any case, having a crack team of citizen earmark evaluators ready to roll whenever these lists are published is a great idea.