There's been a whirlwind of earmark activity of late, with the two Democratic presidential candidates joining the all-but-nominated Republican candidate in backing an effort by Sen. Jim DeMint to institute a one-year moratorium on earmarks. In the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is considering a similar ban, and Rep. Jeff Flake, as anti-earmark as any member of Congress, takes it seriously enough to worry that Democrats will get the credit for ending earmarks rather than Republicans. Independent bloggers and organizations like Porkbusters, Americans for Prosperity, the National Taxpayers Union, Citizens Against Government Waste and of course Taxpayers for Common Sense deserve a tremendous amount of credit for driving this issue so hard and so long.

I've noted before that the original bete noir of the anti-earmark movement, the Alaska Bridges to Nowhere, were alive and well and still receiving federal funding. Today Matt Volz of the Associated Press reports that in May 2006, the Alaska state legislature approved spending $93 million in federal money on the Knik Arm Bridge (the official site for the bridge authority is here), and then, a month later, the board of the bridge authority voted, in a closed-door meeting--some fairly large pay raises for its top executives: