It remains to be seen whether this compromise will give Congress enough new oversight powers to prevent the abuses that happened under Bush (and heck–I assume the Gang of Four, if not the Gang of Eight–has signed off on assassinating US citizens solely on the President’s say so, so it’s not clear that oversight will be any use in protecting the Constitution). But Jeff Stein reports both Pelosi and DiFi declaring victory, while the White House and DOD remain silent.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi just announced that she would call the House back into a rare August session “early next week” to get final passage on the state fiscal aid bill, which cleared a Senate cloture vote earlier today. This would ensure that states got the funding for their Medicaid and education programs without having to wait an additional month

While you work within the constraints put on any Speaker, to implement the agenda of the president who’s in your own party, please let San Francisco have real representation again. San Francisco values really matter to America. The City needs a Congressperson again. Let San Franciscans elect someone who needn’t compromise on their every viewpoint for the sake of the Speakership. You can do this, Madame Speaker. Please make it so. Finally, as I always close my letters and emails to you, more and more futile though they seem because of your dual role nowadays: Thank you for your service to San Francisco, to California, and to the United States of America.

In one of the most hilarious history fails I’ve ever seen, Nancy Pelosi actually compares the financial reform bill to the New Deal:

[This week's Wall Street-reform legislation has] the boldness and enthusiasm of the New Deal but with less government.

Nancy Pelosi tricked her own caucus into voting for a bunch of crap they did not know about, and now she’s running some bullshit campaign to blame the Republicans for wanting to do the very thing her own deception made possible: cut Social Security benefits.

Without consulting the progressives who voted her in as Speaker, Nancy Pelosi joined the Blue Dogs to come up with a brilliant plan to pass a rule saying they had passed a budget without actually troubling themselves to do so.

Thank you, Nancy Pelosi, for saving me money. The money in question being that which I might have donated to any Democrats this election cycle. Turns out I’ll need it, thanks to your pushing for a vote to put me on cat food when — or if — I retire.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has told the Huffington Post she expects a “serious drawdown” of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in the summer of 2011. The House Rules Committee has now approved an amendment for consideration on the war supplemental that will allow Speaker Pelosi to “put her money where her mouth is.”

What isn’t often mentioned was how the CIA was given the green light to lie and obfuscate by their superiors in the Executive Branch.

At this stage of the legislative calendar, the immigration reform and climate change bills are a zero-sum game. If immigration moves up, something else must move down, and that would be the climate bill. John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman plan to drop their version of a bill next week, but they’ve already lost two key Republicans, who have split off to try and push their own scaled-back bill.