Can you guess which disaster this Washington Post article is about? In a stinging, wide-ranging assessment of..efforts, .... said that...had no strategy for restoring either government institutions or infrastructure. And in the years since, other agencies joined the effort without an overall plan and without a structure in place to organize and execute a task of such magnitude. Lines of authority remained unclear in the...effort. With a demand for speed and a shortage of government personnel, much of the oversight was turned over to the contractors doing the work. There was little coordination among the various agencies. The result was a series of missed opportunities to address the unraveling situation.... A. Hurricane Katrina. B. The Iraq war reconstruction C. The Afghanistan war D. It's an article from the future- it's about how they'll handle the next disaster.

Freshman House Member Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has let a New York Times reporter in on the process and pitfalls of selecting pet projects in her district for earmark approrpriations. The view from what the reporter calls "a rare spectator's seat" is described in an article appearing in today's Times. An open and transparent process becomes all the more important, as congressional appropriations for local projects rise:

In the article Matt cites below, Robert Novak reports on a related issue: Senate "appropriators' noncompliance" with a requirement in the Senate ethics bill (passed but not yet enacted) that a member requesting an earmark disclose any personal financial intere