Via RCP, here’s what the House minority leader was doing tonight in Boston while the rest of America was busy tracking what’s going on in D.C. I’m burning to know what a Pelosi-approved GOP would look like, how far it would have to “evolve” before Nancy was willing to say, “It doesn’t matter so much who wins this election.” I can’t shake the crazy hunch that even a Republican Party that voted in lockstep with, say, Jim Webb or Heath Shuler would be deemed extreme and an offense to “our values” once campaign season swung around.

Or, to put it another way, why don’t centrist Democrats take back their party from the Pelosi wing that’s rocketing us towards a fiscal apocalypse? Have a look at Philip Klein’s sneak peek at the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s “solution” to the debt crisis. Values:

To extend the long-term solvency of Social Security, it would propose dramatically increasing payroll taxes on both the employer and employee side, and funneling the money into even more generous benefits.

Payroll taxes are economically destructive, because they make it more expensive for employers to hire new workers, meaning lower real wages and higher unemployment…

The plan would also build on Obama’s most notable initiatives. It includes an additional $1.45 trillion in economic stimulus spending. On health care, the plan would add a government-run plan, or “public option,” to Obamacare and have the government negotiate drug prices.

Yet while other parts of government would grow, the defense budget would be gutted.

All of that’s paid for, natch, with higher income taxes on the inexhaustible rich and an array of other taxes and fees. And, says, Megan McArdle, it still won’t be enough once the baby boomer entitlement gravy train really starts rolling: At some point, taxes will have to be pushed down onto the middle class too. Values, Pelosi style.

Remember, this is who House Democrats wanted in charge of the caucus after she delivered them to total destruction in November. They could have started new with Hoyer or an up-and-comer, but she was too “effective” to spare. Which, I guess, explains why she’s hundreds of miles away from the House floor tonight. Values.