Nancy Pelosi: Elections Shouldn't Matter as Much as They Do

• She had skills but the mean old elephants did not like the fact that she hated peanuts @

• That picture of Pelosi say's it all and she will always be remebered as the "Hammer Queen " of the DNC @

• She won her election. What is your point?

• What Pelosi is saying here is that there is near universal overlap between the Democrat and Republican positions, significant and consequential positions to be precise, that elections are really superfluous at this point because the option of political and economic choice has been eliminated. That lesson has been hammered home by Obama who did not get 365 electoral votes by promising to govern like Bush II on steroids, but leaves everyone with no alternative electoral options. Remember that Obama opposed Bush II's tax cuts for the rich before he supported them before he now promises to oppose them (again?). Greenwald's Sherlock Holmes impression uncovers the truth that Obama never intended to govern as a progressive or even as a liberal. The only question is why ostensibly intelligent observers like Greenwald took so long to figure out what has been apparent for 20 years now. What we are left with is a Democrat Party that leaves us with two options: slow the attack on reproductive rights as we all slide into serfdom and debt peonage, or give up reproductive rights and have a hope of challenging the corporate dominance that enslaves us. Note that Pelosi has local politics rigged to the extent that any challenge to her divine right to the CD8 seat is checked by political excommunication. Pelosi's local endorsements are far, far to the right of the center line of the local electorate. -marc

• milkcluber, the premature ending of reconstruction and the tolerance for southern pride over the confederacy created a festering sore that never healed. It is not like it just suddenly erupted recently in a flurry of states' rights claims. There are three ways to move forward on this: 1) let it continue to fester and erupt every so often, tainting politics permanently, 2) go in and cauterize the wound to remove the infection which would involve federal power confronting armed chicken fried hicks and 3) reverse secession where the Union expels fiscal burdens, those red states that overwhelmingly comprise tax-takers subsidized by blue states and which neatly overlays the old Confederacy, Texas and Florida excepted. If the Union were democratically functional and if the confederate virus were in check, then perhaps there would be something worth saving. But the devolution as is happening in so many other regions is appropriate here, the US is way too large and diverse for the center to hold and that is how the ruling elites bait and switch the electoral process to produce effectively the same policy results irrespective of electoral outcome. My preference is for devolution into bioregions, but a good first step would be to expel the welfare states in the old confederacy, because we're broke and can no longer afford to cover for those states' inability to take personal responsibility for their impoverishment due to their irrational embrace of libertarian capitalism, especially when they take a big steaming dump on 365K dead and 275K wounded union soldiers every time the go off on states' rights, nullification and racist crap.

• Pelosi is a relic. She is a part of the old progressive guard that uses brute force to get their way. Good thing that the voters figured her out...in an election.

• Nancy Pelosi gave George Bush hell about the gas prices, saying he was in with his oil buddies. Well now that the prices are about to reach $4.00 a gallon, what does she have to say about Obama. Oh, I forgot, he's a Democrat like her so she won't have anything to say.

• Don't waste your time with these tree hugging/climate control hippies with no brain. It's fried from the 60's

• LOLOLOL Do people still listen to this loonie? I can't believe the country got so complacent as to let someone of her stature slip through the cracks.

• If our previous President would have said the same thing, I suspect that there would have been more than one comment here about "shredding the Constitution."

• Elections are about choices, but they ought not to be about destroying the nation. I think that’s Pelosi’s point. Have you noticed the revival of states rights 150 years after the Civil War, and the revived doctrine of nullification of laws that one finds objectionable by a small segment? There is a very disturbing direction in the country toward denying that we are one nation, with national priorities and national needs. Instead we take what we want and discard the rest, regardless of its impact on the common good. There are always choices, but to get a political equivalence to the devotion of business with measures like canceling collective bargaining, you’d have to have a major party calling for making private property ownership illegal. I’m sorry that I have to regretfully conclude that someone here skipped the 11th grade government class (or was it the 8th grade)? Anyone been to Yosemite lately and seen the gift shop run by the US Park Service? it includes brochures on creationism. Simply astonishing. They want to repeal the planet itself.

• What's the deal here? Everybody who's commenting on the speech by Rep Pelosi uses the same edited soundbite-sized quote. (W)(T)(F)? I thought the news media was all liberal. Why don't you show the whole section of her speech without all the convenient edits removing portions of her speech?

• Not that I care much about Pelosi, but I think her point was more about how elections don't matter towards shared values. You're taking her out of context and quoting a single line in a much larger speech.

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