“Doggone it, I’m still in this Senate Race” — the Minnesota Coleman/Franken recount is STILL undecided. Franken’s up by 225 votes; the whole lot of it is about to crash on Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s desk. Less intuitive implications of this could have lasting effects on Pawlenty’s potential gubernatorial reelection chances, if he decides to run in 2010.

BREAKING. Michelle Obama causes a media storm by touching the Queen. Semi-relatedly, OMG I can’t believe she looks that good in J. Crew. Awesome. Thanks, global media. Now, let’s please fix our international crisis.

Wonkish but good: nice blog commentary from the development field on the possible pros and cons of World Bank President Robert Zoellick’s call to the G20 conference for a global Vulnerability Fund, wherein wealthy nations place 0.7% of any stimulus package into what is essentially a social safety net for impoverished nations. Nick Kristof mentions it in his excellent NYTimes column today, too.

And finally, a really uplifting blip about education policy in Uganda. Hat tip to development guru/Yale professor Chris Blattman for continuously good coverage of the economic development scene.

OBAMA IS IN TALKS WITH RUSSIA. SOUND MATT DRUDGE.

…actually that’s not an April Fools’ joke. Sometimes I just can’t resist screenshot-ing the Drudge Report. The theme of the day is “civility,” folks. Anyway, Russian President Medvedev has invited Obama to the country to discuss offensive and defensive arms; Obama accepted the invitation. Politico dropped the story a little before 11:00 today; read the statement here.

G20 update — Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown held a conference this morning (our time) outlining goals of upping regulation in global markets. Obama stated that he was in London not to lecture, but to listen. Because I feel sorry for Time Magazine because The Onion rags on them so much, I’ll plug their link to the story… Read it over here.

I can’t bring myself to end on an ugly note so this one’s next: BLS dropped more private sector numbers today and it’s not good. 742,000 jobs lost in March. Manufacturing and constructing fell as well. Details here.

Less depressing — Seymour Hersh is back! Hersh’s new investigative piece running in this week’s New Yorker, “Syria Calling,” discusses the prospect of a new Middle East peace deal under an Obama administration. Teaser: It’s more optimistic than you might think. Read the piece here.

A growing chorus is questioning Barack Obama’s seemingly disparate policy on Wall Street versus the auto industry. The “Wall St. v. Detroit” tension was highlighted yesterday with the encouraged stepping down of now-former GM CEO Rick Wagoner, as well as the pushed coupling of Chrysler with Italian automaker Fiat in order to tighten the debt belt. But is he being too harsh on Detroit? Michigan Democratic Senator Carl Levin weighed in on the ultimatum: “Their option is either to take a haircut or a bath.” Sometimes haircuts and baths are good. But if these haircuts and baths include cutting the promised retirement pensions to autoworkers who were explicitly promised “If x, then y” regarding benefits of becoming lifetime employees, is it necessarily a fair pitch across the plate?

Next up, financial segue time – French President Nicholas Sarkozy is threatening to walk out of this week’s G20 Summit on the global economic crisis unless France’s demands for tougher financial regulation are met. Still, what’s with the outgroup-y quip about blaming “the Anglo-Saxons” (read: us and our fish ‘n’ chips-eating neighbors across the pond)? That, and he and Angela Merkel are suddenly strange bedfellows in a good instance of camaraderie by negation. Drama at the G20.

Or maybe just drama on Fox News. Because nothing made me happier than the fadeout music on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ this morning being “Proud to Be An American” after repeatedly playing the clip of Glenn Beck crying on air. Does that look real to you?

Did I say something about strange bedfellows earlier? …did you see this commercial? I mean, it’s March Madness. Strange and beautiful things happen in March Madness – including, apparently, but not limited to Rick Pitino and Bob Knight putting on a jam session in their underwear. What does that mean? “It means you’re gonna have to put on some pants, pops.”

“The United States of America does not torture.”

That was the phrase that stayed with me throughout President Obama’s address tonight. It was probably different for everyone. But what had started to feel over the last eight years like hapless, overly-idealistic hopes for norms that would never float in a nation walking a tightrope between ever-diverging left and right wings, tonight, was brought to fruition.

This was in the same speech that brought Sen. John McCain to his feet in support of responsibly ending the Iraq war.

In crisis, we’re coming together.

For all the hopes of Obama’s success in achieving a binding synthesis of opposing party values such that our country could move forward as a whole, this was a positive litmus test. At times he even joked with the Republican side of Congress, notably at mention of the parties’ respective opinions on the stimulus bill. But the take-away feeling — and I think it’s this, more than any policy stance or future proposition, that should be considered the most salient aspect of the night — was one of fondness toward fellow Americans and hope for the future. “Warm and fuzzy” is not generally a way in which politically involved Americans would describe their feelings toward the other side, but tonight, a new level of mutual respect and fraternity was proffered for the future.

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Photo: Chris Pickrell, IDS

A washed-up rapper and a poorly-planned frat event get some poor kid in a wheelchair maced by police; a Messianic Barack Obama glides through Bloomington in two hours of Ghandi-like shock and awe before evaporating to Terre Haute; and then my phone plunges to its death down a sewer grate. Another year, another Little 5.

Luckily my last three years of downing tequila being a classy lady during the Best College Week Ev-uh have been, on the whole, a good experience: Nobody died, nobody got arrested, and we all enjoyed the professed point of it all by watching bikes go ‘round in a circle while holding footlongs and screaming along to Tom Petty.

It’s more than can be said for a lot of people, though – walking around Bloomington this week yields a strong sense of…well, “tacked on.” As if we’re so concerned with making this “Best Week Of Your Entire Life, Ever, No Really” truly something for the record books that in the process, much of the fun is caught up in the transition, and a lot of genuineness of the thing is lost: We want so badly for it to live up to expectations that it’s necessarily always going to fall short.

And that’s the way it goes for a lot of things, I think – remember that birthday party when you were a kid that had to be perfect, only to end up feeling miserably sold short? The sentiment transcends right up to college – except swap out monkey bars for real bars and spike the punch along the way: Bloomington was nothing but a big kids’ playground this week.

So absolutely, it’s fun – I look forward to Little 5 just as much as the next person. But it’s the nature of the fun that’s getting skewed here, I think – it’s one thing to enjoy a stupid week and an excuse to act three years younger, but it’s another to slap some artificial quota on there, thereby creating an element of self-fulfilled prophecy that can never be reached, and entailing that we will always, always, always be slightly disappointed.

So sure, enjoy it. But there’s not much to be said for people waiting in 15-minute-long lines in the freezing rain, only to stand smooshed up against our college compatriots, plastic cup in hand, in a room that’s slightly smelly, over fire code, and too loud to hear anything anyway. It’d be infinitely more enjoyable if this almost-militant notion of “WE MUST HAVE THE ENCYCLOPEDIC EXPERIENCE OF LITTLE 5” didn’t flood the server with stiletto-clad input: all we end up with is a higher person-per-square-foot ratio and a slightly hazier memory of it all.

Chalk up one more tragedy associated with a college campus. University of Louisville student Gail Coontz, 37, is in custody after brandishing a gun on campus earlier today. A hostage situation at UofL ended when Coontz finally handed the gun over to authorities on the scene.

When Metro police were sent to check on the condition of her two kids, 10 and 14, they were found fatally wounded in their home by multiple gunshot wounds.

“She was a single mother raising two children on her own, and I thought doing a very good job,” a choked-up neighbor said on the matter.

The pictures of the house, the neighborhood, the family situation – all so…normal. Kind of frightening. Louisville is home for me – both my dad and brother teach/study at UofL – so this sort of thing makes you do a double take when it scrolls across headline news. And that itself makes you really think about, in the cases of VA Tech or NIU, how far those webs of “degrees of connectedness” span, simply in the sense of how many people are affected by these on-campus tragedies – especially when the death toll isn’t just two, which is bad enough, but far into the double digits.

You know that guy’s a Democrat.

YIKES. If it’s a nasty time for Wall Street, it’s a nastier time for our good friend Ben Bernanke. (“The fate of the free world is riding on him!” as the econ professor I T.A. for put it so blandly this morning.)

Yes, the rates, they are a’changin,’ and U.S. monetary policy is getting a feather-ruffling for the ages here as of late. Even the 75 basis point cut today was a quarter-point short of what investors bet on with enough certainty to spike the Dow 300 points pre-Fed decision – and still managed to produce an overall result of the best single-day point jump in five years.

 And now, for the fun part: This is where we all turn around, close our eyes, and play a nice game of “Recession? What Recession?”

Here’s the thing: Any sixth grader in America could probably regurgitate a surface-level blip she saw on the news and tell you something to the extent of “The economy is headed toward a recession.” But then, look at our top politicians and economists – they’re using kid gloves with their phrasing and words, toying with verbiage that’s blatantly ambiguous (and in many times, flat-out contrary) enough to make even non-economically inclined citizens scrunch up their faces and say “Wait a second…”

No, this is not one of the many cases where America can point and laugh at the TV regarding how much more we know than our exalted Commander in Chief. Bush’s seemingly ignorant approach to the ugly state of economic affairs is actually – and I never thought I’d say this – right in line with, frankly, what the public needs to be doing in order to minimize the blow to the economy: ACTING NORMALLY.

Why? For the same reasons why Ben Bernanke chose to take the extraordinary risk of bailing out the over-borrowed Bear Stearns: The alternative is much, much worse. Recessions, depressions, generally anything “bad” within economics, is exacerbated by a lack of public (read: investor) confidence. Lack of confidence in the markets will cause aggregate demand to slide further, thus slowing down an already-braking economy even more. If Bush – speaking through qualified economic advisors – makes a national address about the economy, and at best only mentions a slight downturn of economic activity, it’s not because his advisors are blind; it’s because they don’t want the public to flip out any more than it already is. It’s important to remember that Ben Bernanke, before he served as Federal Reserve Chair, was an academic-based economist – whose area of focus was the Great Depression. He’s trying to curtail analogous activity to what led to a financial fiasco decades ago. Bailing out the financial sector was the best option he had – in desperate times, an opaque, slightly-sneaky subsidy of the private sector was the most efficacious quick-fix the Fed could come up with.

And now we’re getting into concrete signs about “how the economy’s doing.” If the Fed’s actions — bailing out an i-bank with a less-than-beloved reputation (Bear Stearns has been described in The New York Times as “operating in the gray areas of Wall Street with an aggressive, brass-knuckes approach”) – is the best-case scenario? …You guessed it. Unprecedented in scope, this bailout has some super-scary implications indeed.

Nobody panic…

An angry Hillary Clinton was spotted in Ohio on Saturday, recoiling at two new campaign releases of Barack Obama’s which her camp holds to be “blatantly false,” drawing comparisons to the less-than-squeaky-clean smear tactics of Bush spinmeister Karl Rove. The literature makes allegations regarding Clinton’s health care plan and her position on the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement.

 But then, it’s not as if the recent Texas debate was completely free of pot shots from her end, either: Hillary’s cringe-worthy attempts to call Obama out on plagiarism right after he earned enthusiastic appluase on calling for less nit-picky politics seemed to do more harm than good.  (read the transcript)

 And now he’s doing it? Debatable move.

Ohio and Texas aren’t even until March 4th. Our Dems are playing dirty and McCain is yelling Castro’s better off dead?

 I love campaign season.

Shaved heads, sequined bikinis and redefining the umbrella as an assault weapon can only be funny for so long.

Here’s what I have to say about that.

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