Duncan Black (AKA Atrios) at Eschaton often has a special segment called “What Digby Said”. Not having a whole lot more to add after this miserable Sunday, I’ll mainly leave comment on the Obama administration’s Lucy-like pulling the football away on the issue of emergency contraception to Digby.

For the life of me, I don’t understand this. The science is not the issue, seeing as how the scientists said to go ahead with it. Thus, the reasoning has to be politics, which as Digby points out, makes zero sense. Nobody who already hates Obama isn’t going to vote for him based on this decision. On the other hand, the large number of currently non-voting young people who would be happy to fill in the oval for Obama if they would just vote are going to absolutely hate this decision. It’s politics as usual, it’s patronizing, it’s wrong.

Once again, the Obama administration is engaging in something that is both bad policy and bad politics.

• Current Mood: Sore
• Currently Listening To: "Woodstock", Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young

Allen Quist is running for Congress again. Since he has little chance of getting the GOP endorsement, let alone beating Tim Walz, this news is about as important as yet another Ole Savior run for something. However, I have a special place in my heart for Quist, as he is one of my oldest memories of Minnesota politics.

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• Current Mood: Cruddy
• Currently Listening To: "One Of These Days", Pink Floyd

There’s a primary next Tuesday in my senate district, SD59. It’s the first round in the special election to replace former senator Larry Pogemiller, who resigned earlier this year after a long stint in the senate. Given the political leaning of the district, it’s almost a guarantee that the winner of the DFL primary is going to be elected to the district, and that has made the campaign on the DFL side a crowded one, with a number of candidates vying for the privilege of running in the general election next January under the DFL label. Among all the candidates, one has risen to the top of my list, and the candidate I’m going to be voting for next Tuesday is Mohamud Noor.

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• Current Mood: Friday
• Currently Listening To: "Make Me Smile", Chicago

I really don’t care about Herman Cain’s affair. Of all the reasons to not vote for him, and they are myriad, this doesn’t even make the top one thousand. His love life is his own business and that of his family. We don’t know the circumstances surrounding his relationships, or anything else of that nature, and frankly, it is none of our business. If this is something he kept from his family, the pain they are going through is enough without the punditry piling on.

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• Current Mood: Tired
• Currently Listening To: "All Over The World", Electric Light Orchestra

The “Supercongress” failed today, as pretty much anybody with an existing EEG could have told you. Who would have thought that after a Congress full of people with vastly different ideas about how to fix the budget failed, a smaller group of Congressional leaders with vastly different ideas about how to fix the deficit would also fail. The only real way that the Supercongress could have worked is if the goal were to get the number of people down to such a small amount that the brain scramblers from Men In Black would work.

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• Current Mood: Monday

If you want a list of the most controversial political issues in the Twin Cities these days, two that are near the top are the Vikings stadium and the proposal to replace the Stillwater Lift Bridge. The controversy cuts across partisan lines, with Amy Klobuchar, Al Franken, and Michele Bachmann on the side supporting a new bridge, and Betty McCollum and Keith Ellison against it. 30 state legislators have signed a letter opposing the bridge. Environmental groups are largely against the bridge, as the St. Croix River has protected status under federal law. The Department of the Interior would have to exempt the bridge from the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, something that they are apparently unwilling to do.

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• Current Mood: Pending Disappointment
• Currently Listening To: "Look What The Cat Dragged In", The Rolling Stones

I’ve been taking Harris Online Polls since college. In that time, I’ve racked up a lot of rewards for taking all those polls, from gift cards to binoculars to universal remotes to an room air filter, of all things. Recently, though, they changed their rewards structure, and pretty much the only things available are magazine subscriptions. I’m not terribly interested in sports magazines, and less so in so-called “men’s” magazines (although I have not one, but two subscriptions to Complex magazine purchased for me by some anonymous strangers, since 2007). Eventually, I chose a subscription to Forbes magazine, thinking it would be interesting to read a viewpoint that I’m not as familiar with. Little did I know how “different” that viewpoint would be. After reading it for several months, I’m still not convinced that it isn’t an absurdist right-wing Onion.

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• Current Mood: Gym
• Currently Listening To: "She Said Yeah", The Rolling Stones

I don’t watch or listen to talking heads very often, especially those that are supposed to be “newscasters”. It’s a depressing display of hackery, made all the more frustrating since these people are presumably paid many, many times what the median family in the U.S. makes, so that they can do a poor job of finding the real truth. Nowhere is this more clear than when it comes to two of the major issues of the day, where perplexed journalists scratch their heads and mutter “Why are those crazy Greeks/Occupy Wall Street people so upset? It’s a mystery we’ll never figure out!”

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• Current Mood: Zen
• Currently Listening To: "Smooth", Santana
• Just Watched: The Amityville Horror

Congress has capped the interchange fees that banks can collect from retailers for debit card transactions. As a result, some banks are now charging customers directly for the use of a debit card, up to several dollars a month. This has prompted some people to blame Congress for the increase in fees. And while it’s true that Congress did pass the regulation capping interchange fees, this change is a good one, not a bad one.

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• Current Mood: Weekend
• Currently Listening To: "Cosmic Charlie", Grateful Dead

One of the many wonderful things they teach you in a Master’s program such as MSST is policy analysis. Part of that analysis is looking at a politics versus policy matrix. Whether a certain course of action is good policy versus good politics is largely orthogonal, so you really have four different boxes that an idea can fall into: good policy and good politics, good policy but bad politics, bad policy but good politics, and the box where you never want to end up, both bad policy and bad politics.

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• Current Mood: Geographic
• Currently Listening To: "Money", Pink Floyd