Welcome Instapundit Readers!  While here, you might enjoy my speculations about the New York Governor’s Reaganite rhetoric and the House Speaker’s potential for greatness.

Is my Congressman aware of the troubles small businesses are having setting up shop in Southern California — and the trouble those once-set-up shops have been having staying set up?  Is he aware of the vacant storefronts on the once bustling commercial thoroughfares that transect his district?

Now that Republicans have regained the majority in the House, Waxman has lost his perch as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, giving him more time to return to Los Angeles and see the damage his policies (combined with those of overzealous California legislators) have wrought.

Under Waxman, Walter Olson writes, Waxman’s “committee was an unending source of ghastly new legislative proposals for regulatory manacles to be fastened on one or another sector of the economy , ideas that with any luck we may now be spared for the next two years.”  (Via Instapundit.)  And the regulatory manacles the California Democrat did succeed in fastening on the private sector have prevented entrepreneurs from keeping businesses open and creating new jobs.

Maybe if Mr. Waxman walked down Melrose, he might understand the real-world consequences of his policies.  He doesn’t even need return to Southern California to get a picture of what things are like in the overregulated regions he represents.  He could just google the unemployment figures for Los Angeles County.

Contrasting the speech then-Minority Leader John Boehner gave in 2007 introducing the then-new House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with the one Minority Leader Pelosi  gave today introducing Speaker Boehner, Byron York points out:

There were no laundry lists, no talking points.  Following that brief statement, Boehner went on to pay tribute to “the battle of ideas” that takes place in a democracy, and then he handed the gavel to Pelosi.  That was it.

Read the whole thing.  In the contrast to the brief speech the Republican gave, the former Speaker blathered on and on, offering a laundry list of Democratic accomplishments, on a day when Republicans were taking power in the House.  This was neither the time nor the place for Democratic grandstanding.

But, well, what can you expect from the current crop of Democrats.  Given Ms. Nancy’s behavior today, maybe we should retain our Pelosi Watch category, to keep an eye on this hyperpartisan who couldn’t even keep her caucus united in the vote for Speaker.  Nineteen Democrats . . .

. . . abandoned their party’s pick for speaker of the House, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), a sign of their concerns about supporting the unpopular former speaker and of the difficulty she will have in marshaling her forces in legislative battles to come in the next two years. . . .

. . . the anti-Pelosi tally dwarfed the number of protest votes cast against leaders of both parties in the recent past, which never break into double digits.

Wonder how many of those 19 will be voting next week to repeal Obamacare.

Loved Michelle Malkin’s take on Nancy’s self-aggrandizing departure:

Pelosi won’t shut up: She’s breaking her arm patting herself on the back as 1st woman speaker, 1st Italian American speaker. Waves around kiddie human shields and cites litany of Nanny State “achievements” to spite GOP. Blathers about “fair prosperity.”

Update 2:00pm Eastern. She’s still going. Bitter clinger, clinging bitterly.

This is why we need someone with steel spine and no mercy.

Do hope House Republicans remember this spectacle in the coming months and treat Ms. Nancy accordingly.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Seems our reader  V the K sees Ms. Nancy’s attempt to rain on the Republicans’ parade as a reminder just how she’ll behave in the minority and how they should react:

Republicans should realize that they are going to take the same amount of crap from the liberal media no matter how much or how little they cut; so they should GO BIG OR GO HOME!

Good advice.

As I write this, I am visiting my home town of Cincinnati, Ohio, not far from the birthplace of incoming Speaker John Boehner.  It seems that that Buckeye State native will be leading a relatively youthful Republican caucus compared to the increasingly geriatric gathering of outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

In honor of her departure, we will soon be retiring our category “Pelosi Watch.”  That San Francisco Democrat’s glory days are behind her and I predict she will end her career in the minority.  Seems the new ideas and the younger voices are with the new majority.  As Michael Barone reports, building on a piece in the Wall Street Journal:

Curious fact, unearthed by Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal. The average age of Republican House members in the new Congress convening today is 54.9, younger than the Republicans’ average age in the previous Congress, 56.5. But the average age of House Democrats has risen, from 58 to 60.2. That can be explained partly by the high turnover in the 2010 election. Many younger Democrats, first elected in 2006 or 2008, fell by the wayside. The old bulls from 65 percent-plus Democratic districts survived. Meanwhile, many young Republican challengers won.

But the results are historically anomalous. Going back to the Congress elected in 1950, there has never been more than a 2.8-year difference in the average age of House Republicans and House Democrats. The difference in this Congress is 5.3 years, almost double that.

Read the whole thing.