Debugging ogr2ogr "AddGeometryColumn failed" and "Terminating translation prematurely after failed translation of layer"

As noted in the title, I’m getting the following error:

ERROR 1: AddGeometryColumn failed for layer pretty_polys, layer creation has
failed.
ERROR 1: Terminating translation prematurely after failed
translation of layer mybeautifulshapefile (use -skipfailures to
skip errors)

I’m just adding a shapefile to PostGIS using ogr2ogr (PG connection data is all
fake placeholders, obviously):

ogr2ogr 
    -f PostgreSQL 
        PG:"host='000.00.000.00' port='5432' user='nullislandpatriot' password='nullisland4eva' dbname='data_i_like'" 
    "data/mybeautifulshapefile.shp" 
    -nln pretty_polys 
    -nlt POLYGON

I’ve tried to identify many possible sources for the error, but I can’t seem to
figure out what’s wrong, and the error isn’t descriptive enough.

So my question is, how can I drill down into this error to find out why AddGeometryColumn is failing?

Here are some of the things I have already tried:

• using different files. I receive this error with any file, including the
  natural earth countries shapefile
• checking the permissions in PostgreSQL. I have read and write access to
  the public schema that is being used. Though I should note that I am not
  the superuser, and we had to give explicit permission to allow me to access
  spatial_ref_sys, and geometry_columns.
• editing the -nlt option to make sure I’m using the correct geometry type.
• checking different arrangements of -a_srs, -s_srs, -t_srs, and not
  using them at all.
• lots of other things before I tried the natural earth data, like
  PRECISION=NO, different database schemas, text encoding, …

My assumption is that the error has something to do with permissions or
settings in PostgreSQL or the syntax for the connection info, since I get the
same error for well-known shapefiles like Natural Earth. I’ve tried the
connection info withou the interior single quotes.

I also tried CPL_DEBUG=ON, which shows me a bit more of what is working:

Shape: DBF Codepage = UTF-8 for
/Users/bgolder/Downloads/ne_10m_admin_0_countries/ne_10m_admin_0_countries.shp
Shape: Treating as encoding 'UTF-8'.
OGR:
OGROpen(/Users/bgolder/Downloads/ne_10m_admin_0_countries/ne_10m_admin_0_countries.shp/0x7f9a79d00720)
succeeded as ESRI Shapefile.
PG: DBName="'data_i_like'"
PG: PostgreSQL version string : 'PostgreSQL 9.1.9 on x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu,
compiled by gcc (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.3-1ubuntu5) 4.6.3, 64-bit'
PG: PostGIS version string : '2.0 USE_GEOS=1 USE_PROJ=1 USE_STATS=1'
OGR_PG_NOTICE: NOTICE:  CREATE TABLE will create implicit sequence
"countries_ogc_fid_seq" for serial column "countries.ogc_fid"

OGR_PG_NOTICE: NOTICE:  CREATE TABLE / PRIMARY KEY will create implicit index
"countries_pkey" for table "countries"

ERROR 1: AddGeometryColumn failed for layer countries, layer creation has
failed.
ERROR 1: Terminating translation prematurely after failed
translation of layer ne_10m_admin_0_countries (use -skipfailures to skip
errors)

GDAL: In GDALDestroy - unloading GDAL shared library.

Specs:

• PostGIS 2.0, with PostgreSQL 9.1.9 on Ubuntu 12.04
• GDAL 1.11.0 (on OS X 10.9.3, installed via Homebrew)