Give the 110th Congress and the White House a little credit: we're seeing more information on earmarks than we ever have before. Our friends at Taxpayers for Common Sense just added to their comprehensive compendium of earmarked appropriations a batch from the Senate Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies bill (their analysis of that bill is here). Even though the Senate has yet to formally pass its earmark reform measures (in part because Sen. Jim DeMint is holding out for quicker adoption of the rule), the Senate Appropriations Committee has been publishing information on earmarks, including the financial disclsoure letters Senators file when requesting them.

Americans for Prosperity are already digging into the lists of earmarks that the House has released so far -- here they note that Rep. Jerry Lewis requested $500,000 to refurbish a Washington, D.C., Metro station that's four blocks from his house, and here they note that, just as Rep. Chakah Fattah has been good to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (he requested a $100,000 earmark for it), PMA's board members have been good to him (a little over $10,000 in contributions). Oh, and his wife is a board member too.

CNN contacted the offices of all 435 House Members asking for lists of 2008 earmark requests members made--and just 31 provided them with lists. Seven said they'd requested no eamarks. That means 397 either said no (68 of them) or didn't respond (329). CNN provides a tool with the story for looking up lawmakers to see how they responded; it might have been easier for users if CNN had separately provided the lists or links to lists of earmarks that they did get. What's apparent is that the overwhelmeing majority of House members--both Democrats and Republicans--are not exactly racing to be transparent.

A smart observation in an email puts the analysis that my colleagues Larry Makinson and Anupama Narayanswamy did on earmarks into sharper relief. They found that the top 20 corporate recipients of 2005 earmarks were all defense contractors, to which my correspondent responds:

The principal political science "justifications" for earmarking is that it enables elected representatives -- rather than unelected bureaucrats -- to allocate a small amount of scarce resources to small, useful, local projects that might get overlooked by the bureaucracy and about which the elected folks have superior, maybe exclusive knowledge and perception. How far away from that can you get when (1) the decisions are at the core of the national issue of "national" defense and the projects are part of a comprehensive, increasingly technologically driven interrelated military planning process, and (2) these get earmarked because tens if not hundreds of millions are spent obtaining these earmarks through highly paid lobbyists and related political contributions by the billion dollar beneficiaries of these earmarks.