A righteous cause, and needless to say she’s 100 percent right both about The One’s shameless (and longstanding) earmark hypocrisy and the fact that this amounts to de facto theft of taxpayer money by incumbents to improve their chances of re-election. Even so, does the public really care about this issue? Not one in a hundred people on the street, I expect, could correctly define “earmark,” and given the kind of money Congress is tossing around these days, I’m skeptical that many more would care much about $5 billion or $8 billion or whatever the amount is of pork in this bill. Sad to say, but I think the public’s willing to tolerate billion-dollar corruption as the cost of doing political business so long as the overall spending package gets results. If it doesn’t, that’s how we’ll win, not by making earmarks a cornerstone of good government reform. Just ask Maverick.