I’ve got a fun game for all of us to play, the object of which is to make the worst of the Congressional appropriators pee their pants…err, get really nervous (because I couldn’t think of a more Congressionally-appropriate figure of speech). Are you in?

All right. Here’s how it goes. This is what the pork from one appropriations bill looks like– 1,800 projects, worth more than $500 million total, averaging $268,000 apiece.

Go ahead and look at it. There are pictures. I’ll wait here. That’s the Labor/HHS Appropriations bill, set to possibly come up for a vote in September sometime.

Now, normally all those earmarks aren’t available in any easily accessible form. They’re snuck into bills and conference reports, whispered about between politicians, rarely talked about on the floor, tucked away from the public who pays for them.

Wouldn’t it be cool if someone took the time to enter each earmark into an electronic database, which would then be made available to the taxpaying and blogging public to comb through if they were so inclined? You know, given that it’s their money being spent and all.

And, wouldn’t it be double-cool if the taxpaying and blogging public were so inclined, and began identifying which pork project belongs to whom and ever-so-politely inquiring of their duly elected representatives just what the heck they were thinking funding the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service?

Here’s how you can play:

Check out the earmarks for your state and then call your congressman and ask if he or she sponsored any of your state’s earmarks. If the answer is yes, ask why the congressman’s name isn’t on the earmark. If you recognize the institution designated to receive the earmarked tax dollars, call them and ask them what they intend to do with your money.

Then email us at info@examiner.com with the subject line “Earmarks” and tell us what you found out. The Examiner will be asking more questions about who got the earmarks and why, so your information could be very important. You will be part of an army of citizen journalists determined to shine some much-needed light on spending decisions made behind closed doors by powerful Members of Congress.

You can find your Member of Congress by zipcode at the top of the House webpage. And remember, your Members are home from D.C. right now, so there’s no better time to bug them about this and make an impact than when they’re on their vacations.

Here’s that state-by-state breakdown again, and go check out how N.Z. Bear has applied his fantastical skills to the task, here. Lots of graphs, breakdowns by key word and per-capita spending. Yee-haw, right?

Hmm, yet another frenzy of political dorkiness. My Carlson count is climbing…

And, if you wonder, ‘why is she so mad at the pork? What did the pork ever do to her?’ you can check out my pork-blogging of days gone by.

Or, there’s this:

We were all out at the zoo one day, I was doing some acting, walking on the railing of the hog exhibit. I fell in. Everyone screamed and Tommy jumped in after me, forgetting that he had blueberries in his front pocket.

The hogs just went wild. They jumped all over his body and threw him around like a rag doll to get to those blueberries. One hog would throw him to another hog who tossed him to another.

Everyone panicked and cried out for somebody to help but it was too late. The hogs beat him to death before the zookeepers could gas them all.

Yeah, that probably has something to do with it.

Update: Many more folks blogging the pork, rounded up at my place.

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