In a sparsely attended press conference at the RNC, Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) and a band of his congressional colleagues resolved to stamp out the furtive and often fraudulent appropriations known as earmarks. As Eric Cantor (R-VA) made clear, they spoke as reformed sinners: "We are all recovering earmarkers." Tom Price (R-GA) recalled that when he first arrived in Congress, he assumed that just a drop of transparency would be the best antiseptic--that the worst offenders would be too ashamed to continue, once their taste for pork-flavored appropriations was exposed. Wrong. "Shame in Washington is different from shame everywhere else in this nation," Price noted. "That didn't work."

All of the participants in this twelve-step process assured the audience that John McCain and Sarah Palin would be the best antidote for earmarking. This raises at least one awkward question, since the Alaskan governor had her own romance with earmarks during her tenure as mayor of Wasilla. According to the Washington Post, she hired a lobbyist to bring in approximately $27 million in federal funds to her town of 6,500. Was she too in recovery? In the video below, you can see DeMint's opening remarks, and his response to a question about Sarah Palin's earlier use of earmarks.