Non Partisan citizens against government waste scores Obama 10%,Mccain 100%

Well, the good news is that Obama has no requests for 2009 yet, but you can bet your ass if he loses he will revert back to a big spender :)

The CAGW is a far rightwing organization founded by a John Bircher, which has campaigned on behalf of the tobacco industry and shutting down open source software development (on behalf of Microsoft...that poor little, downtrodden company from Seattle).

Patti, it's quite clear that you're going to vote for another 4 years of bush failures, but can't you at least bring up some OBJECTIVE information, rather than this tired, old partisan nonsense that you keep dredging up? Are there NO actual issues that you find favorable to McCain?

CNN and MSNBC stated this was a non partisan group when they reported on this story.

All Mccain's earmarks go for the military. Screw the constituents who voted for him.

"CNN and MSNBC stated this was a non partisan group when they reported on this story. "

I don't give a rat's ass who they CLAIM to be. I'm telling you who they ARE. Rightwing extremists. Hello.

Earmarks get silly sounding sure - like Palin's flip flopping bridge to nowhere. Some are probably very important and that is probably all a matter of opinion. Some building projects are scorned. Some science projects are scorned. So what, everybody won't agree.

But Obama isn't running an earmark campaign. McCain is. McCain is claiming that earmarks are our Country's budget problems and that's his solution for fixing our budget crisis. Earmarks aren't the cause of the budget problem and even if they could all be removed, that won't balance the budget.

It's such a non-issue MADE an issue so McCain can have one.

I seen it on da tv so it must be so,duh...................................

If you take a look at all the earmarks you would see it add up to billions.
http://www.cagw.org/site/DocServer/Senate_-_alpha.pdf?docID=3023
Thats just the senators

Wilma,Mccain had no earmarks

I mean the money he would ask for for his constituents, he gives to military set-asides. And he's voted for plenty of regular earmarks for his buddies. Palin's the worst abuser of earmarks in the country.

Yes, they add up to about 18 billion and cutting all of of them would hardly be a drop in the bucket. Where else is going to cut to pay for his budget?

Yes, a bridge to somewhere is expensive (crossing the Mississippi at Minneapolis?). McCain isn't going to stop all federal spending projects - (I do hope). The infrastructure always needs work. Science is a worthy ambition of government.

The Washington post says:

The Facts
The Arizona senator is promising to balance the budget by the end of his first term, while simultaneously extending the George W. Bush tax cuts, introducing billions of dollars of new tax cuts of his own, and remaining in Iraq as long as is necessary to stabilize that country. Asked how this miracle will be accomplished, McCain told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News This Week on April 20 that he could come up with $100 billion "tomorrow" by vetoing pork-barrel spending bills.

Here's $100 billion right here for you, George. Two years in a row, the last two years, the president of the United States has signed into law two big spending, pork barrel-laden bills with $35 billion (in earmarks). In the years before that, $65 billion. You do away with those, there's $100 billion right before you look at any agency.
Pouff! $100 billion in taxpayer money! Saved! Just like that! With a flick of the presidential veto pen!

There are a number of problems with this magical budgetary balancing act. First of all, the suspiciously round $100 billion figure is largely a figment of the McCain campaign's imagination. I have not been able to find a single independent budget expert to vouch for it. McCain's economics adviser, Doug Holtz-Eakin, will not say how the campaign arrived at the figure, other than that it is an extrapolation from various studies, including a 2006 study by the Congressional Research Service available here.

The CRS study breaks down earmarks by different government departments, without giving a global figure. According to Scott Lilly, a former Democratic appropriations staffer now with the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the CRS study identifies a total of $52 billion in earmarks for a single year. However, much of this money is tied to items such as foreign aid to countries like Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, that McCain says he will not touch.

By most definitions of the term, the amount of money spent on earmarks is much lower than the CRS study. The Office for Management and the Budget came up with a figure for $16.9 billion in the 2008 appropriation bills. Taxpayers for Commonsense, an independent watchdog group that focuses on wasteful spending, identified $18.3 billion worth of earmarks in the 2008 bills, a 23 per cent cut from a record $23.6 billion set in 2005.

How much of this $18.3 billion could be eliminated is a "difficult question that we have not yet figured out," said Taxpayers for Commonsense vice-president Steve Ellis. The figure includes such items as $4 billion for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which could not be eliminated without halting hundreds of construction projects around the country. Another big chunk goes to military construction, including housing for servicemen and their families, which McCain has also promised not to touch.

Bruce Riedl, a budget analyst with the Heritage Foundation, says it might be possible to eliminate roughly half the expenditure on earmarks every year, i.e. around $9 billion, using the Taxpayers for Commonsense figures. He identified $5 billion in Community Development Block Grant funds, most of which goes to local governments, as a prime target for cuts. Even if earmarks were eliminated altogether, many other expenditures would have to be shifted to other parts of the budget.

Like other analysts, Riedl was mystified by McCain's argument that previous year's earmarks automatically become a "permanent part of the budget." "I don't understand how they come up with that," he told me.

Excluding those programs McCain has promised to preserve, the draconian slashing of earmark expenditures might save around $10 billion a year. But that is still a long way from the $100 billion in savings that McCain says that he can identify "immediately."

The McCain camp now says that the senator never meant to suggest that his proposed $100 billion in savings would all come from earmarks. Holtz-Eakin told me that McCain had simply promised to cut overall spending by around $100 billion. Some of these savings will come from earmarks, some from other parts of the budget. He declined to identify which specific projects would be cut.

Asked whether McCain had misspoke or whether he had been misunderstood in his focus on eliminating earmarks, Holtz-Eakin replied: "a bit of both."

The Pinocchio Test
McCain's talk about eliminating $100 billion a year in earmarks is largely fantasy. His advisers are now promoting a more realistic plan of eliminating $100 billion in overall spending. But it is difficult to take even that promise very seriously given the fact that the senator refuses to identify exactly which projects he will be cut. To use a phrase coined by George H.W. Bush, this is "voodoo economics," based more on wishful thinking than on hard data or carefully considered policy proposals