Sunlight Foundation

BILL MOYERS: Welcome again and this time to our first collaboration with Exposé, the public television team that's gained national acclaim for bringing important investigative stories to television. Tonight our subject is the growing scandal surrounding earmarks. Once upon a time an earmark was just that -- a mark farmers made on the ears of livestock for identification. No longer. An earmark is how politicians fund their pet projects -- including some that reward their pet donors. In this year's spending bills alone Congress has inserted 12,881 earmarks worth over 18 billion dollars. That brought some tough talk from President Bush in his recent state of the union message