Although this is mostly an article about earmarks and "pork", it is an interesting article into the world of the watchdogs.

From the Washington Post: These are dark days for earmarks.

Packing bills with special provisions has long been an honored tradition in Congress, but now a pall has fallen over the practice. Bolstered by a budget crisis and a series of scandals involving legislative favors, an increasingly prolific government watchdog movement is turning "pork" into a four-letter word.

These scrappy outfits are run by small corps of veteran staffers whose offices look more like dorm rooms than the posh K Street suites occupied by their archnemeses: lobbyists. Taxpayers for Common Sense elevated an obscure Alaska highway project into the now-infamous "Bridge to Nowhere." Citizens Against Government Waste started battling runaway Hurricane Katrina spending three days after the storm hit the Gulf Coast.

This is a laudatory article, and one that points out that what the watchdogs do, which is sometimes only seen when something is interesting enough to catch the eye of the public.

A response from Bob Bauer's blog:

These are tax-exempts: they patrol Congress on the look-out for pork and sneaky, expensive earmarks. When abuses are spotted, they complain loudly, publicly, and often effectively. It seems that they are not lobbyists, but "legislative watchdogs." When this debate is over and reforms have been enacted, some will have the good fortune to be "legislative watchdogs." Others will be "lobbyists" or "527s."