By Yael T. Abouhalkah, Kansas City Star Ediorial Page columnist

Barack Obama said Tuesday he won't allow Congress to stuff its next stimulus plan with costly earmarks.

What a naive warning from the president elect.

Of course the bill will have earmarks. Congress will be under tremendous pressure from states and cities -- Kansas City among them -- to pump hundreds of billions toward special projects sought by governments.

In fact, in the rush to spend money and stimulate the economy, the next bill out of Washington will receive even less scrutiny per dollar used than most spending plans that come out of Washington.

Now that's scary.

Congress is going to hardly listen to Obama's brave words of Tuesday: "We are going to ban all earmarks, the process by which individual members insert pet projects without review.... We're not going to be able to expect the American people to support this critical effort unless we take extraordinary steps to ensure that the investments are made wisely and managed well."

But once again, Obama was short of specifics on who's going to do that and how.

The answer is that Congress will be passing out money based on requests from states and cities, requests that will include plenty of earmarks, no matter what Obama says now.