We’re up over 8,000 earmarks in the database, and they continue to flow in!

But Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL) posted his earmarks in a particularly difficult way. After the first two (Commerce, etc. and Transportation/HUD), they are zipped PDF scans of printed documents. That means they can’t be cut and pasted and they haven’t been OCR’ed (turned into text) by any search engine.

Who has the capability to turn these files into usable data? (We don’t need the two for the Defense Authorization Act – we’re just doing appropriations bills.)

If you enter them into the database, you will get credit for it in our earmark contest, but even breaking them down into text will allow one of your eager earmark hunters to move forward. (If you can tackle this problem, even in part, please let us know.)