In her hometown paper, no less.

Carolyn Lochhead reports in the San Francisco Chronicle on the outrage the progressive community is beginning to express about the boondoggle farm subsidy bill House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has not just rubber stamped, but actually characterized as reform.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi signed off Friday on a five-year farm bill that would keep multibillion-dollar subsidies flowing to cotton, corn and a handful of other crops, deeply disappointing Bay Area food and environmental activists who had hoped that Congress might shift federal farm policy this year to combat obesity, air and water pollution and industrial farming.

Pelosi, a San Francisco Democrat, hailed as reform legislation that would grant subsidies to farmers earning up to $1 million -- five times more than the cap sought by the Bush administration -- while increasing actual payments to farmers. The bill comes during the most prosperous era American agriculture has seen in decades as crop prices and farm income approach or set record highs.

"Bush seems to be taking a harder stance on millionaires than the Democratic Party, which is surprising," said Kari Hamerschlag, policy director for the California Coalition for Food and Farming, a Watsonville group urging lawmakers to move money from crop subsidies to environmental and nutrition programs.

But what do we know? The subsidy lobby Speaker Pelosi has sided with--making clear she will use the full power of her position to help crush amendments Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson doesn't like--can no longer hide its contempt for the people she actually represents.

House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, a Democrat whose Minnesota district receives large corn subsidies, said Pelosi backs his bill and will use her power to make sure it passes the House next week.

Peterson called the $1 million payment limit a "huge change in direction" and warned that the House leadership would quash any attempt -- a rebellion has been promised by Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis. -- to make any significant changes.

"This is not a deal just between me and the folks that represent these people," Peterson said, referring to members representing subsidized farmers. "The speaker is involved in this."

Peterson dismissed critics outside the traditional farm belt.

"I know people on the outside can sit and complain about this, but frankly most of those people have no clue what they're talking about," Peterson said. "Most people in the city have no concept of what's going on here."

Wheat subsidy flack Daren Coppock must be kicking himself this morning that he didn't deride reformers' "San Francisco values" in the speech Lochhead cites from earlier this year.

Commodity groups ridiculed the idea that subsidies have anything to do with obesity.

"The farm bill did not require people to eat more than they should," Daren Coppock, chief executive of the National Association of Wheat Growers, told a Washington conference this year. "If the farm bill causes obesity, it also causes AIDS, global warming, the extinction of endangered species, bad grades in school and probably dancing."

That's what the subsidy lobby really thinks about Nancy Pelosi and the people and interests she represents. It makes her embrace of this farm bill--and her refusal to hear out much less heed any critics of it from the "outside"--doubly sweet for them.

And the more time we spend with the Pelosi farm bill, the more we understand why.