"It doesn't make much difference anymore which party has the congressional majority. The Senate's Water Resources Development bill, for instance, has 446 earmarks, the House version 692. (Earmarks are measures giving members of Congress exclusive control over the spending of federal tax dollars on a project they favor.)

Those figures exceed the then-unprecedented total for the 2006 GOP version of the same bill, despite Democrats' promises last year to clean up the Republicans' culture of corruption epitomized by the explosion of earmarks between 1996 and 2006.

And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's defense of Rep. John Murtha's angry spittle-laced tirade of threats last week to forever cut off a GOP representative from getting earmarks for his district confirms that the new boss is pretty much the same old boss, just a different party label." -- The Washington Examiner