Via Brad Plumer's article defending pork (which I've more thoughts on here), I spent some time playing around with the Sunshine Foundation's Earmark map, a cool web program allowing you to enter a city or zip and scroll across all the earmarks in the area. The applet, I assume, is meant to leave you furious at the wasteful ways of our lawmakers. But I was pretty impressed. In my home area I find we've earmarked a lot of medical technology, mostly for pediatric hospitals, a number of afterschool programs and school grants, an arts foundation for underserved youth. If I widen my search a bit, I find money for libraries in Los Angeles, the Braille Institute of America, an At-Risk program for African-American youth, chemistry labs for various schools, a mentoring program to fight child neglect and abuse, and so forth. The closest I came to obvious frivolity was $300,000 "naturally-occurring" Jewish retirement community demonstration in Los Angeles. I can live with it.
Anyway, I suggest you folks check your areas and see if the appropriations are any worse (put findings in comments), but for now, I'm a supporter. Given the content of the actual bills being passed, it looks like the earmarks are just about the only worthwhile things in them.
Update: Micah Sifry, an advisor to the Sunshine Foundation, e-mails to say that the organization seeks not to "disgust the user," but "to generate engagement." Looking back, he's obviously right: It was my assumption that they were against the earmarks, but their tool makes no sense from that perspective. It did, on the other hand, engage me, at least for awhile, and gave me a far better understanding of what earmarks actually go towards.
