Bill Allison over at the Sunlight Foundation has a great blog up about a report in Roll Call that the House Appropriations committee website was overwhelmed with requests for earmarks shortly before yesterday's deadline. Because the website crashed, the deadline has been extended until next week. Bill makes the excellent point that instead of a one-year break for earmarking, only to return to the same system in 2009, why not just make the appropriations committee online submission system public, so people can judge for themselves the merits of the requests submitted by their representatives? Sounds like a great idea to me.