Considering that she took 80% of the vote last year to the Green Party’s 8%, I’m guessing Madam Speaker’s willing to take her chances. Besides, with Republicans heading for the lifeboats, U.S. troops warning that the new counterinsurgency strategy may be backfiring, and Bush’s own people hastily rewriting the benchmarks because Maliki can’t meet the ones that have already been set, the troop drawdown will be well under way by the time the election finally rolls around next year. With that feather in Pelosi’s cap, no one’s going to care about what she did or didn’t do about impeachment. Except of course for the special few who still take Mother Sheehan seriously.

One very small but satisfying consolation in the coming Republican electoral implosion: it’s going to put an awful lot of cretins like her and our pal Olby out of business.