Today's Los Angeles Times is finally running the story I've been harping on for months. Hillary Clinton is the queen of pork-barrel spending (aka "earmarks").

Since taking ofice in 2001, Clinton has delivered $500 million worth of earmarks that have specifically benefited 59 corporations. About 64% of those corporations provided funds to her campaigns through donations made by employees, executives, board members or lobbyists, a review by the Los Angeles Times shows.

All told, Clinton has earmarked more than $2.3 billion in federal appropriations for projects in her state since her election to the Senate, much of it for public works projects funded in conjunction with fellow Democratic Sen. Charles E. Schumer and others in the New York congressional delegation.

A different scale

Clinton is not the biggest earmarker in Congress; senior congressional leaders and members of the appropriations committees can and do write many more such provisions into the huge spending bills they draft. But Clinton does significantly more earmarking than most others with her relatively low level of seniority.

Barack Obama has been in the forefront of calling for ethics and earmarks reform, and is the ONLY Democratic candidate who has released his earmarks.

Democrats made earmark reform a priority when they took over Congress in January. The Senate passed rules making it easier to identify the authors of the once-secretive practice.

Clinton supported those basic reforms, but she and other Democratic senators running for president balked at a proposal by Obama that would have required members to disclose their proposed earmark requests, not just those that were enacted into law.

If you want to see a list of his earmarks, click here. He has called for openness and accountability from our government with his call for Ethics Reform in Washington.

It's such a big issue. If you want to read more on Barack Oblogger's take on this, read here.

Just remember folks, it's Hillary "Politics as Usual" vs. Obama "Change, Ethics, and Accountability."