For your summer reading pleasure we have posted all the earmarks in the House FY08 Defense and Agriculture spending bills. And I can assure you we have saved the best (worst) for last.

We’ll see if the House ever gets around to it, but the Defense spending bill weighed in with 1337 earmarks worth more than $3 billion. Although they held to Chairman Obey’s promise of having the number and cost of earmarks for previous year levels, Chairman Murtha earmarked like the happy, mad, earmarking days of lore. In fact, he exceeded his earlier fiscal year totals by bagging 48 earmarks totaling more than $150 million for his pet projects. Of course there’s more in our database .

We have also released our earmark database of the Agriculture Appropriations bill. Although the voting ended in acrimony, there was plenty of bi-partisanship in pursuing 410 member earmarks worth nearly $300 million.

There are of course other odds and ends, the President has promised to the veto the Water Resources Development Act, which ballooned from $14 and $15 billion in the Senate and House versions to a waddling $21 billion out of conference. The Senate also passed earmark disclosure rules. The teeth were ground down from what we were promised in January, but at least they will have some transparency rules in place.

Next week we will begin our digging out and actually poke our heads out the hole and figure out where we are on the earmark databases and where the country is on FY08 spending.