Apparently, Bill Nelson didn't get the memo. Or maybe he just forgot.

From President Barack Obama to the lowest ranking Republican on Capitol Hill, budget earmarks have become a Washington whipping boy.

But Florida's senior senator is sparing the rod and liberally piling on the pork as he and fellow Democrats in the state's House delegation shoved millions of dollars in special projects into the lame-duck Congress' omnibus budget bill this week.

"It seems Democrats learned nothing from the 2010 election," said Sandy Adams, R-Oviedo, who trounced one-term Democratic Rep. Suzanne Kosmas this fall. "A 2,000-page spending bill loaded with billions in earmarks? Ridiculous."

Kosmas, D-New Smyrna Beach, is hoping to go out with a bang as she sponsored several earmarks, including $1 million for a veterans medical city connector and $250,000 for park expansion in the city of Winter Park.

But Kosmas is a piker compared to the flip-flopping Nelson, who just weeks ago voted for an earmark ban. Now he leads Florida's pork-barrel parade. Among his largest parlays:

• $2 million for Florida Keys water quality improvements;
• $1.65 million for Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 36/46;
• $1.5 million for St. John's Heritage Parkway interchanges;
• $1.2 million for Jacksonville commuter rail alternative analysis;
• $1 million for Cooperative Grouper-Snapper Fisheries Data Collection.

While individual earmark projects may be worthy endeavors, such special set-asides have come under fire because they skirt the usual committee-hearing process and, thus, lack transparency.

Outgoing Republican Sen. George LeMieux calls earmarks "the gateway drug to ever-growing spending." LeMieux, who is considering a challenge to Nelson in 2012, said he has not requested any earmarks during his nearly two years in the Senate.

LeMieux spokesman Ken Lundberg said that while earmarks comprise "maybe 1 percent of federal spending," they are an "enabler for more government spending."

President Obama professed to share those concerns, saying his biggest regret of his first year in office was signing a budget bill that contained thousands of earmarks. He had campaigned in 2008 on a pledge to end earmarks and increase transparency in the budget process.

Though it's unknown whether Obama would sign another earmark-laden bill this time around, Congress is under a deadline to act. By the end of business on Saturday, the Senate must either pass the $1.1 trillion omnibus bill or approve another continuing resolution to fund the government, Lundberg said.

Conservative Republicans have pledged to block all earmarks on Capitol Hill this year. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., has asked that the entire budget bill be read on the Senate floor -- a process that could take days.

In addition to earmarks, DeMint notes that the omnibus spending bill contains more than $1 billion to implement what he calls "the unconstitutional Obamacare law."

Floridians are increasingly fed up with federal budgets that resemble a pork-grinding exercise.

Dale O'Leary of Avon Park calls the larded-up omnibus bill "a pernicious form of bribery."

"The leadership knows that, for example, there are congressmen who are loath to vote against salaries for the military. These congressmen don't want to have to face an opponent in the next election who can scream, 'My opponent voted against paying our troops on the battlefield,'" O'Leary states.

Just as insidious is House Majority Leader Harry Reid's eleventh-hour gambit to push through an earmark-laden spending bill that no one had seen until this week -- essentially daring recalcitrant Republicans to shut the government down. Reid, D-Nev., is eschewing a continuing resolution because earmarks cannot be added to it.