Roughing the passer, on CQ. That's a 15-yard penalty for this lede ($): If Congress' appetite for earmarks has been greatly reduced by recent scandals and public pressure, it is not especially evident in the nation's largest domestic spending bill. And then we find out that the bill has "more than 2,200 earmarks and special projects totaling more than $1 billion." Holy cow! That's a lot of earmarking. But then here comes the late hit: That is about seven-tenths of one percent of the bill's total discretionary spending of $150.7 billion...Lawmakers in charge of the legislation have estimated that they cut the volume of earmarks in the measure by 40 to 50 percent compared to fiscal 2005, the last year that the bill contained earmarks. Image by Flickr user jotefa used under a Creative Commons license