Russ Is Out

Russ Is Out

Damn.

U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) has decided against seeking the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, saying he wanted to focus on his work in the Senate...

Best part of the e-mail:

While I've certainly enjoyed the repeated comments or buttons saying, "Run Russ Run", or "Russ in '08", I often felt that if a piece of Wisconsin swiss cheese had taken the same positions I've taken, it would have elicited the same standing ovations. This is because the hunger for progressive change we feel is obviously not about me but about the desire for a genuinely different Democratic Party that is ready to begin to reverse the 25 years of growing extremism we have endured.

While the two-divorce barrier may not have in and itself been insurmountable, one of my Wisconsin contacts notes that on paper Russ is the poorest Senator with a net negative worth; apparantly the second split was costly in the financial sense. I guess we'll leave it to Mitt Romney to test the religious barriers.

Not an entire bad weekend for Wisconsin, however:

Favre threw two touchdown passes without a turnover and Donald Driver had a career-high 191 yards receiving in a 23-17 Packer victory over the Vikings.

And I heard the Badgers had a good weekend too though my feelings are less positive about that.

Back to Feingold: it was always about the message. Sure, I liked the messenger too, but Feingold's personal decision does not set back the message.

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Congressman-Elect Loebsack takes the message to the New York Times:

Dave Loebsack, a political science professor in Iowa who unseated the veteran Republican moderate, Representative Jim Leach, said he intended to sign on to proposed legislation to create a single-payer, national health insurance program “as one of the first things I will do when I get to Congress.”

“I have no idea where it’s going to go next year,” Mr. Loebsack said, “but at least we can give it a fair hearing.”

Krusty reports on Iowa Senate Republican caucus infighting. Lundby is re-elected but:

Before the vote was taken, Senators, McKinley, Zieman, Boettger, Zahn, Hahn, Kettering, Behn and Senator-elect Hartsuch walked out of the meeting.

For those reading the leaves, that's the right, the old Iverson loyalists. Including Jim Hahn, the Senator from David Stanley and last Republican Senator left representing a square inch of Johnson County...