Check those facts.

The debate over government spending is heating up on the campaign
trail and raising greater focus on which presidential candidate will
really change the way Washington does business.

Sen. John McCain has been a crusader against so-called earmarks and
says his opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, has asked for almost $1 billion
in pork-barrel projects for his state in just less than four years in
the Senate.

“Nearly a million dollars for every day that he’s
been in office! And that’s change? My friends, don’t be fooled,” McCain
said September 9.

Earmarks are requests for money by a
specific legislator, usually for her or his constituency, added onto
often-unrelated government spending bills.

According to the
nonpartisan watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, Obama has asked
for nearly $1 billion in earmarks during his Senate term. But the group
gives him credit for disclosing his requests, which most members of
Congress don’t do.

Obama
has not made any requests for the next fiscal year, and even when he
was asking for earmarks, he was far from the worst offender, the group
says.

“Just to put it into perspective, he got $98 million
worth of earmarks in fiscal year 2008. Sen. [Hillary] Clinton got more
than $300 million in earmarks, and Sen. [Thad] Cochran, Republican of
the [Senate] Appropriations Committee, got $800 million in earmarks,”
Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense said.

Obama’s running mate, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, doesn’t come close to
that. But Biden also has never disclosed what he’s asked for, until
this year. Biden’s office said he’s requesting about $300 million.

The Obama campaign points out that although McCain hasn’t asked for earmarks, his running mate hardly has room to talk.

“When you’ve been taking all these earmarks when it is convenient and
then suddenly you’re the champion anti-earmark person, that is not
change,” Obama said Monday.

According to state records and Taxpayers for Common Sense, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has asked for about $450 million in federal money since she became governor. But she also gets some credit.

“As governor, she has, by all records, started to reduce the number of
earmark requests … so it’s a downward trajectory by our analysis but
still significant earmark requests,” Ellis said.

Palin also got into the earmarking
game early, before she became governor. According to state records and
Taxpayers for Common Sense, she helped get about $27 million, some of
which went to the small Alaskan town of Wasilla, during her second term
as mayor there, from 1998 to 2002.

The
watchdog group said one of the reasons was that she hired a lobbying
firm run by a former staffer for Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, one of
Washington’s most legendary earmarkers.