Here we go again.

At a dinner the other night during which he was honored by the Hawaii Institute for Public Affairs, Senior Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye spent a fair amount of time defending, if not bragging about, his record on congressional "earmarks." Those are the special budget items inserted by members, usually in support of projects and programs important to their home districts.

There has been a growing backlash against the earmarking process, fired up mostly by the presidential campaign in which all three major candidates insist they will do away with the process. A number of senators and representatives have joined the bandwagon.

In his remarks, Inouye repeated his well-known claim that many projects vitally important to Hawaii would not survive without the earmarking process. They may be big stuff in the Islands but just don't rise to the top in the regular budget process.

And now, as Washington correspondent Dennis Camire reports, Hawaii's Congressional delegation resolutely declines to say what earmarks it has in mind for the current budget. From a political standpoint, this makes perfect sense. Why would anyone make promises they are not sure they can deliver? It's one thing to over-promise during a campaign, its quite another to position oneself ahead of time in the nitty-gritty of the legislative process.

But there is a growing sense that the delegation will release detailed lists of earmarks once they are approved. It's called transparency, and it is the real cure for suspicions of politics in the process. If every member of Congress produces a complete report on what earmarks were requested and approved, then it is a simple matter for voters to decide whether the money went to good projects or to wasteful pork barrel spending.

Transparency like this is surely a better approach than driving the appropriations game deeper and more secretively into the budget-writing process where politics -- as ever -- reigns supreme.