According to a post on Pennsylvania blog, House speaker Nancy Pelosi will allow a mere twenty minutes of debate on single-payer, albeit indirectly.

[So what's the outcome? I've been Googling, checking around, and nada. What's up? -- lambert]

On Monday Pelosi will decide whether or not to restore the Kucinich Amendment as a managers amendment.

If you live in her district you can contact herhouse site.

If you have a YouTube account you can leave a comment at her YouTube Channel.

If you have a blog you can write an open letter to restore the Kucinich amendment and track back to Speaker Blog.

NY Daily News

Washington, DC - Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA), Chairman of the Energy & Commerce Committee announced today that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has pledged to give Single-Payer an up or down vote when healthcare reform is considered before year’s end.

Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY), Co-Chair of the Middle Class Caucus and member of the Energy & Commerce Committee who led the effort with Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI); Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA); Rep. Elliot Engel (D-NY); Rep. Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL); Rep. Janice Schakowsky (D-IL); and Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT), released the following statement:

[Because I forgot to classify this under the Department of the Happy Dance, I'm leaving it sticky for a bit. -- lambert]

Pressure works. Bring the pain!

Je répète, re: "...Pelosi today said her top security adviser was part of a briefing in February 2003 in which he learned interrogators were waterboarding terrorists."

It's handy that those who were waterboarded are "terrorists," not "accused/suspected/purported" terrorists, etc. Illegal, inhuman, whatever -- a technique that is magically used only on guilty people is pretty impressive.

Arthur finds that Nancy's Senate counterpart is similarly aware of waterboarding's inerrant targeting. C'mon, if they weren't guilty of terrorism, why would they have been waterboarded? Case closed!

Also, it seems that Harry has a rather curious concept of how ordinary rendition works....

The Rose Garden: Obama Backed Off Social Security Push

The White House quietly sought to get the ball rolling on overhauling Social Security earlier this year, but it either abandoned or significantly downgraded the process under pressure from Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and outside liberal interest groups, according to sources familiar with the stalled effort.

On Pelosi:

What did Nancy Pelosi know and when did she know it?

A) Less than Bush and Cheney, who made contempt for the rule of law the centerpiece of their administration.

B) Long after Bush and Cheney went forward with their plans to make torture the new normal.

The trouble is that the hoopla over Pelosi is doing the Republican's dirty work for them by implying that she has some responsibility for the policy of torture, rather than her true responsibility, which was reviewing, comprehending, and opposing such policy.

Bingo.

[I'm going to leave this stickied for now. Let's make sure Pelosi's fax runs out of paper again first thing Monday morning. --lambert]

My local single payer activist passes along the following:

It appears that Congressional leaders are being deliberately dismissive of single-payer to the point of ludicrous statements. It's like they have put their fingers in their ears and are yelling "I can't hear you, I can't hear you." Here they are in all their Congressional member glory:

Baucus a few days ago: "Everything BUT single payer is on the table. Single payer is off the table."

Pelosi: "In our caucus, over and over again, we hear single payer, single payer, single payer. Well, it's not going to be a single payer."

Pelosi's aide: "Where are the phone calls, e-mails and faxes in support of single-payer? Speaker Pelosi has been in favor of single-payer for a long time. Now make us do it."

OK. We are up to the challenge. He wants to see the faxes. Let's break their damn fax machines with the faxes.

Following through on her commitment last week at the Commonwealth Club, Pelosi moves to schedule hearings:

Wall Street may be heading for the deepest investigation of its practices since a congressional panel’s probe of abuses following the 1929 stock market crash.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to push for a comprehensive inquiry, saying that three-quarters of Americans want to know what led to the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and the collapse of Bear Stearns Cos. and Merrill Lynch & Co. She favors one patterned after Senate Banking Committee hearings led by Ferdinand Pecora starting in 1933, according to her spokesman, Nadeam Elshami.

The Pecora review “was probably the single most important congressional investigation in the history of our country, except perhaps the Watergate hearings,” Donald Ritchie, associate historian for the U.S. Senate, said in an interview.

I never thought I'd use the words "predictably lame" and "Barney Frank" in the same sentence, but The Big Disappointer, er, does not disappoint: Barney Frank's response is predictably lame:

Speaking Wednesday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she will act next week to begin setting up an investigatory committee to examine and document what went wrong with economic policy and practices.

Speaker Pelosi gives an interview. Nice get for Maddow.  Read more…

This stimulus act isn’t all it should be, maybe five-eighths of a loaf, but it is better on close examination than first appearance and media reports had suggested.

One of them has come forward to identify himself and his cadre.

Naked Capitalist has a terrific post on the latest TARP maneuvering showing, essentially, that the only institutional* difference between Village Republicans and Village Demorats is the Dems use lube:

The Administration has evidently launched a campaign to warn the American public that the black hole banking industry will need more in the way of recapitalization funding than is currently on offer.... [T]hrowing money at sick banks with no plan as to how to shrink and rationalize the industry** does not strike us as a sound way to proceed (and the TARP II notion of buying bad assets at certain to be inflated prices is a cosmeticized equity infusion and not a real solution).

Perhaps as important, the public is sufficiently outraged over TARP I that something quite different (as in more punitive to incumbent management, stockholders, and in some cases, bondholders) is required to muster Congressional support. I don't have the sense that Team Obama fully appreciates that.

No, but then why would they? Team Obama's priority -- as Obama was quite explicit about in his inaugural speech -- is imposing "shared_{MR SUBLIMINAL [cough]} sacrifice"; that is, not less pain, but more. As we shall see, they're quite open about it.

Naked Capitalist continues:

This, people, is what Leader Nance comes up with when it's time to justify her stratospheric 9% approval rating. In her speech at Denver, she burbles:

I am very proud of the Democrats in Congress. Working with Majority Leader Harry Reid in the Senate, here are some of our accomplishments:

After years of inaction by Republicans, in our very first act, we passed the 9/11 Commission recommendations to protect the American people. That was just the beginning.

Indeed.

We helped rebuild the Gulf Coast for the survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

How's that working out?

We put recovery rebates into the hands of more than 130 million families.

And now that bounce is gone, and we're more fucked than ever, and the really poor didn't get a dime anyhow.

We passed legislation to keep hard-working American families in their homes and to keep toxic toys out of the hands of our children.

(Not all toxic toys, though. And not all children. As evidenced by the behavior of our famously free press this primary.)

We increased the minimum wage for the first time in ten years.

We improved fuel efficiency for the first time in 32 years.

We passed the largest college aid expansion since the G.I. Bill 64 years ago.

We passed the largest veterans' health care funding in the 77 year history of the Veterans Administration.

And, we enacted a new G.I. Bill to thank our veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by sending them to college.

Wars which are still cheerfullly going on. Some "thanks."

All this would be a reasonably competent performance for a Congress that wasn't facing, oh, a completely out-of-control executive (impeachment off the table, sternly worded letters), the trillion-dollar fiasco of death and looting in Iraq (nada*), global warming (nada), the collapse of the credit system (nada), an "health care" system based on the business model of denial of care (nada). And on and on and on.

And you know how Leader Nance wants us to think of her?

"Think of me as a lioness."

You know Nance, I'm thinking of a lioness right now. I know what a lioness looks like and I know how a lioness acts. And the lioness I'm thinking of? Her name doesn't begin with "N."

But I do have one question:

Pelosi firm: No vote on offshore drilling

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday ruled out a vote on new offshore oil drilling even as Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said he might be open to a compromise that included it.

This is a major major victory. Al Gore has told us that we have 10 years to change from carbon based fuels to renewable energy. Pelosi seems to have taken him seriously. She is our firewall between influence peddlers and the destruction of our planet. Could we say thank you?

Nancy Pelosi is soliciting questions; ask her about HR 676.

Read it and weep:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos on Friday that it would be "harmful" to Democrats if superdelegates were to give the party's presidential nomination to a candidate who is trailing in the delegates awarded in primaries and caucuses.

snip

"But what if one candidate has won the popular vote and the other candidate has won the delegates?" asked Stephanopoulos.

"But it's a delegate race," Pelosi replied. "The way the system works is that the delegates choose the nominee."

The House, to its great credit, passed a FISA reform bill that doesn't eviscerate the rule of law by granting the telcos retroactive immunity, and doesn't completely gut the Fourth Amendment*. That's good news, and if we get lucky, the whole abomination might just get deep-sixed, at which point we would return to the status quo ante legally, while much strengthened politically. Kudos, I freely grant, to Nancy Pelosi** and the rest of the House leadership, including -- lambert blushes modestly for calling this one, against all odds -- Steny Hoyer. That said, let's do the classic blogospheric media critique thing on WaPo's not totally fucked coverage. Jonathan Weisman reports:

Remember when there was a burst of hope when a woman ascended to the Speakership of the House, and Hillary was the front runner? Remember when Barbara Boxer was beloved of progressives, before endorsing the Connecticut for McCain party candidate? Remember when Jackie Speier was the valiant survivor of a shooting incident that took the life of her employer and mentor Congressman Ryan?

You know why the public sours on Democratic Women politicians? Because the have a sense of entitlement, and they turn on the people who support them. Hillary is suffering not just because of her own sins, or the sexism of present contemporary society, a fact I get presented with every single day, but because of the arrogance of her cohort, the pure sense that the argument is over because of a kind of ownership built up by relationships. They can't open their mouths without telling everyone that they do not care what other people think, that the girl's tree house is closed and that anyone else will be clawed instantly for even looking at the rope.

That's why the "B" word and even the "C" word so easily cross people's lips, because everyone recalls back to the cheerleaders and class presidents of high school days.

Scum. Primary challenges needed:

Some House Democrats were prepared to support immunity, regardless. In a Jan. 28 letter, 21 Democrats in the conservative Blue Dog Coalition sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., supporting [retroactive] immunity and listing other provisions that they believed were needed in a FISA bill.

They wrote that the Senate bill “contains satisfactory language addressing all these issues, and we would fully support that measure should it reach the House floor without substantial change.”

Meanwhile, Steny Hoyer says:

Here:

I realize that Porter Goss and others are likely trying to taint Democrats with their own bad acts by leaking this information. But sadly, these Democrats actually do seem to be complicit. If it's the case that they have been being blackmailed with this information all these years, then Goss was quite foolish to show his cards. Now these Democrats have little to lose by revealing what they know, and they should. They must all come clean, take their medicine and tell the American people what they knew about the administration's torture regime from the beginning. They may suffer politically for it, but then they probably deserve to.

There is nothing stopping Speaker Pelosi from holding hearings on the tapes and the torture regime as a whole. It's all "out there" now.

Bingo.

[Pelosi's statement.]

Well, I guess now I know why impeachment was "off the table." Anybody for Barney Frank as the new speaker? Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen in WaPo:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique[ly illegal and unconstitutional?] CIA program designed to wring [torture] vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the Bipartisan group, which included future-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites [gulags] and the harsh techniques [torture] interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill [not to mention the US military**]. But on that day, no objections were raised.

With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods [torture] during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).

Yeah, the Village is a big sack of pus just waiting to be lanced. Unfortunately, some of that pus is blue.

Nice going, there, Leader Nance.

... Majority Leader turned out to be Leader Nance, who took impeachment off the table and gutted FISA and the Fourth Amendment.

So color me skeptical on this whole "First Woman" thing, OK?

Including "First Woman President."

Via Digby, Matt Stoller gives a telling vignette of Toxic Leader Nance:

I just got back from a fancy NYC fundraiser headlined by Nancy Pelosi for Kirsten Gillibrand to which I snagged a ticket.

I went up to Pelosi after her odd speech to ask her in person about her support for Al Wynn. I said 'I helped organize a fundraiser for Donna Edwards', and I was about to talk about retroactive immunity and ask her to take this as a sign of frustration, as well as to tell her how proud she makes me as the first female Speaker of the House. But the moment I mentioned Al Wynn, Pelosi's whole face abruptly changed, her smile melted away, and she got hostile and said in an icy voice 'I know about that.' She then turned away to talk to someone else.

Classy!

There seem to be two types of frustration, insider frustration and activist frustration. Many of the Democrats in Congress, Pelosi for instance, are insider frustrated. They know something is vaguely wrong somewhere, they know their activists supporters are unhappy, they are still raising lots of money, they know they are in power and feted at fancy breakfasts, and they are unwilling to consider new strategies that actually challenge the constraints they see as permanent.

And when someone else does, they get mean, their face turns cold, and they walk away.

So, if inflicting pain on the Beltway Dems is the only way to get their attention, so fucking what?