I remember the first time I saw the “Madame Speaker” billboard someone put up here in SF when she won the post; I confess that I teared up.  She has done an amazing job since then, and every election I’m so thrilled to be able to vote for her.

Nancy makes a lot of loud, incomprehensible noises in public, then quietly, methodically and reliably brings the House to heel.

A lot of quasi-Libs who hate her would be tearing their shirts over the state of things if she weren’t there chipping away at mountains of bad, established policy and steering around the iceberg of GOP resistance and rule-gaming.

I know this question will make heads explode on both the right and the left, but can you ever remember a time in your life when the Congress worked harder than they have since the beginning of 2009 (when they weren’t, you know, intently examining the Clenis)? Pretty good for the underrated Pelosi/Reid combo and the inexperienced, lazy-ass Kenyan.

They wouldn’t hate her so much on the right if she wasn’t so darned good at her job.  I’m a big fan!

Not to mention that she lives the kind of family values (one marriage, five children, seven grandchildren) that her Republican colleagues extol in public but violate in private.

BUT SHE SAID NOTHING ABOUT THE SEXISM AGAINST HILLARY IN SOME COMMENT SECTION ON DKOS!!!11111ELVENTY!!

BUT SHE SAID NOTHING ABOUT THE SEXISM AGAINST HILLARY

I don’t know nothin’ about that, but Nancy could have put a bug in Hillary’s ear about the Iraq vote, her crappy campaign, her shitty advisers and her ginormous negatives…just as a “solidarity” thing.

I know this question will make heads explode on both the right and the left, but can you ever remember a time in your life when the Congress worked harder than they have since the beginning of 2009 (when they weren’t, you know, intently examining the Clenis)?

Excellent point, Kevin. I kept saying this when the “kill the bill” stuff around HCR was going on—given that this Congress had already worked a fuck of a lot longer on that than they were accustomed to, the notion that they would go back to work for something even riskier was just totally unrealistic.

And it still cracks me up how many purity lefties in San Francisco always hated Nancy. Of course, these were the same people who usually couldn’t remember deadlines for press releases, so I’m not sure just why they thought they could do a better job organizing a national progressive agenda.

And it still cracks me up how many purity lefties in San Francisco always hated Nancy.

I’m sure some formed their opinions of her back in her Board of Supervisors days, when she was (in the Bay Guardian scheme) part of the Downtown-Big Business faction. 

But there aren’t really all that many of them.  How many votes did that carpetbagger from Cow Town end up getting?

Tom, you got it—it was the Bay Guardian that hated her guts. In fairness, I wasn’t around in SF before she was in Congress, so maybe she did some unsavory stuff, who knows? Most politicians do.

I can’t remember who it was who pointed this out—it was over at Balloon Juice a couple weeks ago, maybe: If you were to ask a random assortment of self-identified lefties for a list of cinematic heroes, Atticus Finch would probably make the list. But Finch failed—Tom Robinson dies.

That doesn’t make Finch less noble. But deliberately seeking failure out of a misplaced sense of ideological purity isn’t idealism—it’s nihilism, which is what you get when idealism sits out on the counter stewing in its own self-important juices for too long.

I cheered when I read Gail Collins’ column (yeah, I love Gail).

Admittedly, my knowledge of all things Pelosi was rather limited until she became Speaker (east coaster here). Mostly I heard slurs about her and the SF libs so I figured she HAD to be totally fab. But she’s gone way above and beyond. She’s impressed the shit outta me since grabbing the gavel from the sausage-stuffed fingers of Hastert.

Sad that she gets such little credit for her work as Speaker, esp as the rest of Congress (hello Senate) crashes and burns around her.