Today looks to be quite a day — at least for one black bear named Lily in Ely, who went into labor Thursday and looks likely to give birth today, as the Associated Press reports. It's also going to be a big day for anybody who has ever wanted to watch a bear give birth live on the Internet, because there's a Web cam on her, and considering how dramatic human births are, with screaming and cursing and thrashing about, imagine what a bear's birth must be like! Oh, wait: "Lily has pawed at her face, left her den, then returned and has tried going back to sleep." Maybe it gets more exciting as it goes on.

Actually, it's been a week of zoological babymaking, as the Minnesota Zoo is now home to a newborn gibbon, according to the Pioneer Press' Jessica Fleming. The gibbon is endangered, so this birth is good news, although the gibbon's mother seems to have little interest in the infant, which is bad news. Nonetheless, zoo staffers are handraising the baby, which is in good health, and are doing what they can to get the mother interested in her progeny, so, as of this week, we at the Daily Glean are not finding ourselves fans of mothers in the animal world.

But if it's the start of something new in the ursine and Hylobatidae worlds, it's the end of quite a lot in the human world. You already know the outcome of the Massachusetts special election, in which a senate seat long held by the last of America's legendary Kennedy brothers was lost to a man perhaps best known for getting photographed naked, which may put the health care bill in jeopardy, but did you know that we're losing another liberal institution? Specifically, Air America, where Al Franken made his home for three years, is shuttering because of financial troubles, as TIME reports. Live programming ended Thursday, and the rest ends this weekend. It hasn't taken conservatives long to respond with glee, such as this quote from Paul Cooper on David Horowitz's Newsreal website: "The passing of Air America is another reminder that our nation is center right." It's a perplexingly non-tautological statement; one expects that one might get a little nervous if Cooper were to offer driving directions.

We're also nearing the end of GAMC, the General Assistance Medical Care program, which was unilaterally defunded by Pawlenty last year, and which provides medical assistance to "the sickest of the sick and the poorest of the poor," according to a story by KARE11's Scott Goldberg. There's still about six weeks left in the program, but Goldberg's story describes the scramble to prepare for the end of the program, which looks bleak. While some of those on GAMC will transition to the MinnesotaCare program, the Department of Human Services estimates it will only be about half of the people on the current program. [Correction: Everyone enrolled in GAMC on March 1 transitions; however, it's less than half the people who move in and out of GAMC in a given year.] Sen. Linda Berglin points out that many of the new MinnesotaCare patients will be on the program only for a short time: "Anywhere from 1-5 months." The story also reminds us that many of the people on GAMC are psychiatric patients, which reminds us at the Daily Glean of a man carrying a placard outside Hennepin County Medical Center a month back. The placard read, "You don't want me off my antipsychotics."

But let's not focus overmuch on health care and forget to ask, as President George W. Bush once did, is our children learning? The answer is yes, but less. Education policy fellow John Fitzgerald on Minnesota 2020 looks at the four-day school week that many Minnesota schools are adopting and determines, as the headline says, that it is "Based on Money, Not Education." Fitzgerald interviews Blackduck Superintendent Robert Doetsch, who complains that endless cuts to the budget have left the school with little options, saying "it's just a Band-Aid. We're doing this in light of the legislature gutting us financially. This shows how desperate we are."

With all due respect, there is one additional solution, and it's a time-tested one, and according to FOX9, it's one that has some robust support among students at the University of Minnesota. We speak, of course, of cheating. Apparently, cases of cheating and plagiarism are up 43 percent in the past year, but, then, students reporting other students for cheating is also up. Sometimes it seems like the only options you have in life are to be a crook or a stool pigeon.

Well, thank goodness we're at the end of depressing education stories -- oh, this just in: Jeff Strickler at the Star Tribune offers a story about Cottage Grove's Orthodox Jewish Yeshiva High School, which is looking at going under if it can't raise $600,000. But every cloud having its silver lining and every dreidel having the Hebrew letter "hey" on it (which allows you to take half of the M&Ms in a seasonal gambling game and this metaphor is getting a bit complicated), Yeshiva's non-Jewish neighbors are doing what they can to help out; the story quotes one as saying, "I'd seen the boys and the rabbis walking on the street, and when I heard [the school might close], I said, 'Let's at least show the boys that we care.' " Jewish or not, that's a mitzvah, which is a Hebrew word for actually it's a bit hard to boil complex cultural references down to a single sentence.

It's interesting -- and heartening -- to parallel this story with an older one: Minnesota Public Radio rebroadcast its 1992 documentary "No Jews Allowed," which looked at the deplorable anti-Semitism to be found in Minnesota in the 1930s and 40s. "Those feelings were so strong that a prominent journalist called Minneapolis 'the capital of anti-Semitism in the United States,' " MPR tells us.

But if Minnesota has gotten more tolerant of Jews, it has gotten, if anything, less tolerant of vampires, which is not the sort of sentence you ever expect yourself to write. But this is the time of the gubernatorial race, and so once again we find ourselves graced with the presence of Jonathon "The Impaler" Sharkey, a former wrestler/felon who wants to represent us. Hart Van Denburg of City Pages did a story on him on Jan. 18, which prompted Sharkey to make a succession of ill-tempered comments on the website, including an argument about a faux-campaign video that some prankster released to YouTube. So, of course, City Pages just had to track down and post the video, which is pretty ham-fisted, but possible worth checking out if only for Sharkey's response to it, which would make a Merchant Marine blush with embarrassment. Such language!

Speaking of embarrassment, Minnesota's most famously eccentric purple-clad rocker, Prince, produced a song for the Vikings in anticipation of the forthcoming game against the New Orleans Saints, which FOX9 debuted Thursday night and can be found on its website. It's, er, not good. Let's close this edition with a sample of the lyrics, and then let's never speak of them again:

r spirits may b tired

r bodies may b worn
but since this day is r destiny

r history – that's y we must b
4ever strong
as the wind that blows the Vikings' horn
in the name of the purple and gold

Correction
Thursday's Daily Glean misstated the target of the blog Bluestem Prairie’s unhappiness. The blog is displeased with Republican Party reports about campaign events in Senate District 26, not at coverage by area newspapers. MinnPost regrets the error.