Here’s your chance to take part in an investigative project - congressional earmarks, and who benefits from them. They’re asking for volunteers to call their local congressman and find out what they sponsored. Transparency, accountability, all that good stuff - who isn’t for that?

Now for the down side. Most of the sponsors are, um, right of center (Sunlight Foundation, Citizens Against Government Waste, Porkbusters, and the Examiner Newspapers, the particularly extreme Club for Growth, Human Events Online, The Heritage Foundation and Tapscott’s Copy Desk), and of course I can’t help but wonder about their motivations, because the project is limited to (you guessed it) to the Labor-Health & Human Services Bill.

Gee. Imagine that.

Think about the odds of them selecting the one, possibly the only part of the budget that might actually make the powerless-minority Democratic House members look wasteful with your money.

You have to wonder why they didn’t select the military appropriations bill. (Well, no, you don’t. Which is my point.)

Zephyr Teachout of the Sunlight Foundation responds to a similiar criticism from Salon’s Scott Rosenberg:

This is not the last bill, but the first — which is an important point. This is the first draft of a process we want to make routine: citizen engagement in legislative review. And at Sunlight we’d like to make it better next time, so any advice is useful. How can we make this better?

This is, actually Scott, a nonpartisan project, brought together as a very very loose coalition that made this possible will probably change over time, though as with earmarks its always important to look at who is behind what. Though the people involved may have different motives, there seems to be a shared belief that we need to know where appropriations come from, and whether there are conflicts of interest in the process. At Sunlight, that’s our core goal — getting out from behind the veil of secrecy.

It’s quite possible that most of the items in the bill are benign, but the problem is that there’s no review and no accountability.

Arggh. How can she be so frickin’ naive? This was always my complaint about newspapers - the real bias in journalism is shown, not in how they cover things, but in what they choose to cover - more specifically, in what they leave out. Now we have non-profits whose leaders are just as clueless.

We have a war in Iraq that’s an outright boondoggle, with barely-concealed fraud and war profiteering on all fronts. We also have a poor economy, stagnant wages, massive underemployment and an administration which declines to enforce the few pro-labor laws somehow left on the books - and this “non-partisan” group decides their first big splashy project should be….

Congressional funding of labor and social services.

Speaking of, here’s that military appropriations bill right here. Now, if you really do want to be good citizen journalists, go to the Sunlight Foundation website, read all the nice helpful advice there, and apply it to this bill instead.

And be sure to let me know what you find.