How They Learned to Start Worrying and Stop Appropriating

Slate:

"The omnibus spending bill died in the Senate last night, and the death was a long time coming. It started to bleed in 2006, when a series of rule changes and the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act were passed, opening up the process by which bills were marked up to public scrutiny. It got a good hard kick in December 2009, when President Obama signed that year's omnibus, but only after an angry speech declaring that the bill had to 'mark an end to the old way of doing business and the beginning of a new era of responsibility and accountability,' and it got another kick after the midterms when Republican senators agreed to an intra-caucus ban on earmarks.
Finally, the omnibus had a grenade strapped to it on March 11, 2010. That was when the Senate Appropriations Committee stated its policy on earmarks for this year. Part of that policy:
As part of its website, the Committee provides a central webpage where the public and the media can access each Senator's requests, once they have been submitted.
Tick, tick, boom."