Is there a level of dishonesty that would embarrass Nancy Pelosi? It appears not.

Asked whether she classified herself as a “Washington insider” at a briefing sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, Pelosi answered, “Oh, absolutely not. No.”

Who could possibly imagine that a mere 22 years in Congress made the daughter of a “prominent Maryland political family” part of the system? Just because she’s spent her time as Speaker of the House making sure Bush and Cheney get everything they want?

Pressed for an explanation, Pelosi said that being an insider is about a person’s “state of mind,” not their tenure in politics.

“Inside, outside — you have to know the territory so you can work it, but you never become a part of it”, she said.

This kind of dishonesty with herself helps us understand why she’s been so dishonest with us.

Cindy Sheehan for Congress! Honesty, for a change.

This just in:

“The executive’s current claim of absolute immunity from compelled Congressional process for senior presidential aides is without any support in the case law,” Judge John D. Bates ruled in United States District Court here.

Unless overturned on appeal, a former White House counsel, Harriet E. Miers, and the current White House chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, would be required to cooperate with the House Judiciary Committee, which has been investigating the controversial dismissal of the federal prosecutors in 2006.

Judge Bates, a Bush appointee, has hitherto stayed loyally on the reservation. Chief Justice John G. Roberts even appointed him to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2006 to replace a judge who resigned after learning that Bush had been been illegally bypassing FISA for years.

Apparently Judge Bates is not so picky that he won’t serve on a rubber-stamp court. But it turns out he draws the line, thank you Lord, at the idea of turning Congress too into a rubber stamp.

Bates is likely to be reversed on appeal, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia having been systematically packed with GOP hacks for decades. (Its chief judge is David B. Sentelle, of blessed memory for siccing Kenneth Starr on Clinton and overturning the felony convictions of Oliver North and John Poindexter.)

Or the whole can of worms could easily be kicked down the road until the election is past. Or the case could be fast-tracked to the Supreme Court where it would be sure to receive the same sort of rough frontier justice meted out to Al Gore in 2000.

But still, but still. We strict constructionists must content ourselves with the occasional crumbs thrown to us by judges who legislate from the bench. Thus it is encouraging to see that at least one Bush appointee wants to put a leash, however flimsy, on Little Caesar’s imperium.

Chris Dodd is mad as hell and he isn’t going to take it anymore. In a speech yesterday, the senator from Connecticut started out attacking Bush’s plan to issue a get-out-of-jail card to the telecom companies who helped Bush to spy illegally on us all.

But he went on to attack Bush’s contempt for the entire rule of law, which exceeds even that of Richard Nixon. Here are excerpts, but do read or listen to the whole magnificent screed here.

So, why are we here? Because, Mr. President – it is alleged that giant telecom corporations worked with our government to compile Americans’ private, domestic communications records into a database of enormous scale and scope.

Secretly and without a warrant, those corporations are alleged to have spied on their own customers – American customers.

Here’s only one of the most egregious examples. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Clear, first-hand whistleblower documentary evidence [states]…that for year on end every e-mail, every text message, and every phone call carried over the massive fiber-optic links of 16 separate companies routed through AT&T’s Internet hub in San Francisco — hundreds of millions of private, domestic communications — have been…copied in their entirety by AT&T and knowingly diverted wholesale by means of multiple “splitters” into a secret room controlled exclusively by the NSA…

A prisoner at Guantanamo — to take one example out of hundreds — was deprived of sleep over 55 days, a month and three weeks. Some nights, he was doused with water or blasted with air conditioning. And after week after week of this delirious, shivering wakefulness, on the verge of death from hypothermia, doctors strapped him to a chair — doctors, healers who took the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm”— pumped him full of three bags of medical saline, brought him back from death — and sent him back to his interrogators…

Barney Frank is known for a lot of things. The most prominent gay member of Congress, he’s now the chairman of the Financial Services Committee. In his 14th term in the House, he made a kind of splash by appearing, without smiling, on The Colbert Report, a non-trivial accomplishment in itself.

But he does have quite a sense of humor, as the Times reports.

Between an economic stimulus package and the Federal Reserve’s rescue of Wall Street, he said, “they [the Bush administration] have been pushed into accepting a lot of government help for the market.”

“People aren’t good at doing things they dislike,” he added.

Then, in a flash of trademark wit, he said that asking the White House to support more government intervention was “like asking me to judge the Miss America contest — if your heart’s not in it, you don’t do a very good job.”

In addition, he can make a deal. And with this group of Republicans, that’s saying quite a lot.

Within the administration, where some high-level officials privately refer to him as “scary smart,” no one is underestimating him. After the House approved his bill on Thursday, though without enough votes to override a veto, Mr. Frank quickly went on the offensive, seeking to undercut the administration’s argument that homeowners in trouble should have known better.

“No dumb people got America into this problem,” he snapped. “You had to be really smart to understand collateralized debt obligation derivatives.”

Mr. Frank, who holds degrees from Harvard and Harvard Law School, understands collateralized debt obligations.

What vexes the administration, at times, is that he also holds strong liberal feelings about what he views as the government’s top obligations — to aid the poor and protect victims of discrimination, to police the markets and, in the case of as many as two million Americans at risk of losing their homes, to offer a helping hand if one is needed.

Really! I mean, can you imagine anything more distressing? By definition, if people are in need, they don’t deserve help. Only Wall Street, the weapons manufacturers, and the drug companies should get assistance from the government; everyone else is on his or her own.

“Barney has been very fair,” said Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California and one of the most conservative members of the House. “I think that I have been treated more fairly, and a number of my Republican colleagues have been treated more fairly, since the Democrats have become the majority than I was treated by my own leadership.”

Mr. Frank politely interjected, “I know the gentleman joins me in looking forward to continued years of such treatment.”

Such friendly banter was a far cry from the day in 1995 when Representative Dick Armey of Texas, the Republican majority leader, referred to him as “Barney Fag” in a radio interview.

Ah, the subtlety and intelligence of the Texas Congressman.