Well, not yet, but this is certainly encouraging. On Tuesday, we brought you the story of Sen. Bennett’s request to carve out $5 million from vital maintainance funds to provide ‘digital scrapbooks’ to National Guardsmen. Big Government was able to shine a spotlight on an earmark buried deep inside a Committee Report to the Defense Appropriations bill. On Thursday, CNN picked up our story and confronted Sen. Bennett on the Senate steps to ask about the ’scrapbook earmark’.

Watch the whole wonderful thing.

An amendment will be offered Tuesday to strip out this and several other earmarks. Capitol Confidential is getting results.

The Senate is currently working on the Defense Department Appropriations. The legislation provides the framework for spending $625 billion for the nation’s defense. Yes, even today, in Obamamerica, that is a lot money. No surprise, then, that this enormous pot-o-money attracts a load of earmarks.

Now, an earmark itself doesn’t necessarily increase the total amount of money being spent. It simply allows a Congressman or Senator to slice off a small chunk of money and REQUIRE that it be spent in the way they think best.  Of course, there are all sorts of problems with this (see Murtha, John).

The least bad is that the money isn’t spent effeciently. A slightly worse problem is that the earmark consumes money that isn’t then available for what may be more pressing needs.  Which makes earmarks in the Defense spending bill, um, troublesome. Are politicians really the best choice for deciding how to allocate specific resources to defend our nation and protect our uniformed men and women?

Let’s take a current example:

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