Here’s an interesting graphical representation of where the federal earmarks go, courtesy of the Sunlight Foundation. The image shows earmarked federal dollars on a per capita basis by state.

I had to scrunch this image down a little. But as you can see, one fact stands out pretty clearly: Alaska bags a lot of earmarks. The runner up states tend to be smallish states. And that’s a clear effect of the disproportionate weight small states get in the senate. But, still, Alaska gets almost four times more in federal earmark dollars than the next runner up, Hawaii.

Another interesting way to look at this is, look at the top three states: Alaska, Hawaii, and West Virginia. All smallish states but each also have senators that have been in office, respectively from 1968 (Stevens), 1963 (Inouye) and 1959 (Byrd).

All this said, I think earmarks in many ways have gotten a bad name. Earmarks seldom change or in theory at least never change the amount of money being spent. It simply takes the decision-making power over how money gets spent out of the hands of federal bureaucrats and puts it into the hands of legislators. It’s a system rife with potential for abuse. But there’s nothing wrong with it in itself. If a big federal transportation bill goes through you probably want your representative to do his or her best to make sure some of that money is allocated for making sure the bridge in your city gets fixed. The problem of course, or one of them, comes when he or she is earmarking money for some project on the other side of the country because it’ll make millions for some campaign contributor who’s bought your member of Congress.

Is Room 641A of 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco the heart of the Terrorist Surveillance Program? And does that room hold the key as to whether the National Security Agency engaged in warrantless domestic surveillance as well? If the Justice Department prevails in a court hearing tomorrow afternoon, we might never know.

A new report details Mitt Romney’s $250 million in assets. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.

Karl Rove, martyr to Democratic partisanship.

As we get deeper into the election cycle this year, we’re going to be involving readers more and more in TPMtv. We’re going to be up in New Hampshire in a few months reporting from on location about the primary. We’ll be at the conventions. And we’ll probably make a few other trips too. But we’re a tiny operation. So there’s just no way we’re going to be able to be in all the places where events are happening.

As I noted a while back, we’re particularly interested in verite footage of campaign events on the ground. How do the candidates look, what’s their presentation when the national TV cameras aren’t rolling. Of course, if you get footage of Tom Tancredo slipping and calling for summary execution of illegal aliens caught on American soil, yeah, we’d like that video. But that’s not mainly what we’re interested in. We want to bring readers a sense of the retail politics of how the campaign is unfolding around the country. So take your handcams, keep them running and send us in the results.

Today, we have a short video that TPM Reader Greg Hauenstein shot at this weekend’s Ames Straw Poll. I didn’t have much of a sense of what the event was actually like until I watched …

Does President Bush need a primer on the US Constitution from Gen. Petraeus?

From the Times …

His view, he says, is that he is “on a very important mission that derives from a policy made by folks at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, with the advice and consent and resources provided by folks at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. And in September, that’s how I’m going to approach it.” Whether to fight on here, he says, is a “big, big decision, a national decision,” one that belongs to elected officials, not a field general.

Alberto Gonzales given special new powers over imposition of the death penalty.

David Frum, conservative writer and one-time Bush speech writer, has a column the New York Times evaluating the legacy of Rovism. The verdict, which I hinted at in my post last night, is that Rovism was not only a disaster in terms of public policy and governance. It was also a disaster in political terms — the latter fact just took longer to reveal itself.

The only specific point of disagreement I have with David is that he says that strictly speaking the only wedge issue Rove ever used was immigration. Even by the somewhat narrow definition he employs, I don’t see how this can be true. Gays were clearly Rove’s wedge issue of choice when the going got rough in recent years. And the biggest wedge issue may not appear to be one at first glance because it wasn’t a social issue, at least not in the old-fashioned sense: namely, the War on Terror. There are of course numerous other examples of lesser magnitude one could cite. The difference with the 1980s variant, Lee Atwater wedge issue menagerie is that Rove did not so often or as explicitly target African-Americans as a wedge issue. Attention to them was reserved for keeping them away from the polls.

The point on which I think Frum is correct is when he says that Rove reminded him “of a miner extracting the last nuggets from an exhausted seam.” That is right on the mark and it suggests that people should go back to re-reading Judis and Teixeira’s The Emerging Democratic Majority, a book which seems now not to have been dead but only asleep.

Having said all this, I think there is one other issue about Rove that could use a little more saying. Everyone knows that Rove’s popularity in the Republican party has dropped dramatically as President Bush’s popularity went into free fall and took much of the GOP with him. But it’s more than just that and more than just Iraq, which of course the congressional Republican party supported more or less to a man. There’s a distinct and additional level of unpopularity tied to the fact that even as the president’s popularity has dropped — which obviously he and Rove didn’t plan or want — they’ve basically been indifferent to the fate of the congressional GOP, even the future of the GOP as a whole. Again and again over the last year the White House has had chances to take some of the heat off congressional Republicans — to ease back on Iraq, to can Alberto Gonzales, to let go or punish this or that crook. And they haven’t done one. And that’s spawned a level of rage — though seldom openly expressed — that in some respects almost rivals that felt by Democrats.

As with the country going back seven years now, they’ve shown little interest in the future fate of the GOP after they leave or even at present unless it bears directly on their ability to protect themselves.

In other words, they are now treating the Republican party much as they’ve treated the country for the last six years.

Hillary says she’s “struck a nerve” in the White House with her Iowa ad blasting the President. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.