It’s no news that earmarks are an entrenched part of Congressional politics. Each year billions go to legislators’ pet projects, ostensibly to spur economic growth, if not one’s popularity back home (see: Bridge to Nowhere). So far, disclosed earmarks tacked onto fiscal 2010 spending bills are nearly $6 billion, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense. And that’s even before the notoriously pork-laden defense spending bill has been accounted for.

Call me naïve — comments are open below — but I sort of thought (okay, hoped) that Congress would be more judicious in how it doled out money from the $787 billion economic stimulus package signed into law last February. After all, that’s not exactly business-as-usual funds; it's money to get us through a national crisis.

No such luck. More

On Thursday morning, Warren Buffett said that a second stimulus package to help the economy might be called for. I'm not going to go into all the pros and cons of a second stimulus (you can read all about that here). But the metaphor that he used to break down the idea on Good Morning America was a little…how should we say it…odd. Buffett said, "Our first stimulus bill, it seemed to me, was sort of like taking half a tablet of Viagra and having also a bunch of candy mixed in as everybody was putting it into their own constituencies. It doesn’t have quite the wallop." (Credit to The Wall Street Journal's MarketBeat blog for picking this up.)

Viva Buffett!

In addition to Buffett's Viagra analogy, President Obama has fumbled over the definition of price/earnings ratios (fast-forward to about 1:50 into this clip):

And Treasury Secretary Geithner dumbed down his response to questions about the safety of the U.S. dollar and Treasury investments so much, that his audience of Chinese students broke out laughing:

I don't envy these guys. Trying to boil down an extremely complicated situation into a TV news bite is impossible. But I wonder what the Cialis folks think about Viagra getting all the attention?

Here’s your chance to watch your tax dollars at work. Literally.

An ambitious project launched by ProPublica, a non-profit investigative journalism news organization, is asking the same folks footing the tab for the $787 billion stimulus bill — that would be us — to keep an eye on how our money is being spent by volunteering to be stimulus watchdogs.

The initial focus of the Adopt-a-Stimulus Project is the $27 billion destined for repairing roads and bridges. The idea is to have local Joes and Joannes file reports on the progress of specific projects. ProPublica’s Amanda Michel — who ran the Huffington Post’s OffTheBus citizen-reported initiative during the 2008 presidential campaign — summed up the goal on the AaSP website:

“The Obama administration says the stimulus will "jolt" our economy into recovery. The questions we must answer, as investigative journalists, are 1) is the stimulus working? and 2) is it being enacted responsibly — without abuse of public trust?

We'll start by breaking down these questions into manageable pieces. …What exactly is getting repaired? Are we entrusting public money to the right companies? Are the companies that profit from the stimulus following environmental and labor laws? Are projects generating the jobs projected?”

Care to get your watchdog on? The Adopt-a-Stimulus website currently has 5,000 projects listed with 1,000 already adopted. There are no set job requirements, and the ProPublica team will be offering guidance on the how/what/where of reporting out a project.

You can tackle projects small ($25,000 budget for the McLean County, Ill. construction of a Route 66 multi-use trail in Chenoa), midsize ($2.7 million pavement reconstruction and rehab in Charleston County, S.C.) and large ($250,000,000 to reconstruct some freeway, frontage roads and ramps at the DFW Connector on state highways 114 and 121 in Texas.) The website has a searchable state-by-state database you can cruise through.

This will be an interesting project to watch. Sure, it lacks the institutional analytic chops of the Government Accountability Office, but there’s something compelling about trying to amass a national picture of how the money is being spent through a network of local citizens. President Obama has made transparency a priority for his administration. The Adopt-a-Stimulus Project may just provide more transparency than even the president could imagine.