Click here to see earmarks?

How easy is it to find a list of earmarks?

As noted previously, U.S. representatives had to post their requests for federal appropriations by last weekend, but few standards were set.

Many did not call them earmarks. Others practically hid them on their official Web sites.

Here's a rough guide to how easy they were to find:

Home Page: Reps. Larry Kissell, Mike McIntyre, Bob Etheridge, Mel Watt, Brad Miller, Howard Coble and Heath Shuler all had direct links from their home pages.

Hard to Find: Rep. G.K. Butterfield had a link on the side of an earmarks page that could be found under an "Issues" header on his home page.

Hidden: Rep. Walter Jones posted a footnote at the end of several paragraphs on his legislation page, while Rep. David Price posted a link at the bottom of a "Local Projects" page listed under "At Work in Congress" on his home page.

Kissell's list is by far the most Web-savvy, with an easy-to-scan list of all earmarks as well as individual pages for each one. Miller posted scans of his actual letters, but that made it hard to skim the list.

The least Internet-friendly were Watt, Shuler and Jones, who posted scanned PDFs for their lists. To make matters worse, Jones' was not searchable.

Update: In response to this post, Jones has put a new version of the list online that is searchable.