Good Friday morning. After a slow news week, it looks like something is actually happening. Well, several somethings. No matter, so long as no news breaks after the first games tip off around noon today. Here's what Washington is watching this morning:

-- The Senate holds a pro forma session today to prevent President Bush from using his power to appoint officials during recess, a move Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has used for several months. The House remains out of session. Bush heads to Camp David for the weekend.

-- Last night, we thought snooping in Barack Obama's passport file would be the big story this morning. Then, at 3:08 a.m., New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson hit send on an email announcing, to his campaign list, that he is backing Obama's presidential bid. The news comes in spite of Bill Clinton's hard-fought effort to win Richardson's support for his wife, including a date during the Super Bowl. Richardson will hit an Obama campaign rally today in Portland, the AP reports this morning, and his nod is a big one: It comes as Obama faces trouble with Hispanic voters, who have largely favored Clinton.

-- The endorsement is a psychological blow as well. After a week in which Obama was forced to talk about race and the roles of his grandmother and spiritual adviser in his life, he needed some good news in a bad way. Richardson provides Obama with another super delegate vote, advertising that he isn't put off by the noise surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and becomes the second former Clinton cabinet official, along with former HUD Secretary Frederico Pena, to endorse Obama (are we missing anyone?). The Clinton strategy of winning over super delegates hasn't started to work yet, and Richardson's choice could go far in changing what has seemed like pro-Clinton momentum all week long.

-- But just when things have the opportunity to turn around for Obama, he put his foot in his mouth over the race issue yesterday during an interview with WIP Radio in Philadelphia. "The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical white person," Obama said (read the longer quote for more context). How will the media respond? Pro-Clinton bloggers are furious, wondering what sort of reaction an opposite comment from Clinton or John McCain would mean, the Wall Street Journal writes. The Obama campaign tried to walk back the quote, focusing on the generational difference rather than the racial difference, but the damage might already be done.

-- The comments on WIP add insult to the Jeremiah Wright injury, a story that has not gone away and that the Clinton campaign is exploiting as much as possible. The New York Times first reported that Clinton's camp is pushing the Wright story on super delegates to bolster her argument on electability. Asked yesterday at a press availability in Indiana if that were true, Clinton wouldn't back down, ABC's Eloise Harper reported. The story dominated this week in politics and shows no sign of slowing down (McCain won't use it, but we bet his allies will, even below the radar).

-- A measure of how worried the Obama campaign is about the Wright controversy: They're pushing a photo around -- first from an anonymous blog set up to defend Wright's church, then from the campaign itself -- showing the Rev. Wright shaking hands with Bill Clinton at a 1998 White House prayer breakfast. Hillary Clinton and Al Gore were also present. The New York Times, which writes the photo was provided by the Obama campaign, notes the Clinton camp's chortled response to the photo's emergence: "Urgent indeed -- a picture -- oooooooo!" wrote top communications aide Howard Wolfson. "Less than 48 hours after calling for a high-minded conversation on race, the Obama campaign is peddling photos of an occasion when President Clinton shook hands with Rev. Wright. To be clear, President Clinton took tens of thousands of photos during his 8 years as president," spokesman Jay Carson added. Obama hasn't proved the most effective at hitting back, but does this do more harm than good, keeping the story alive another day?

-- The fissure in the blogosphere continues to grow, as mounting tensions led to a boycott (blogcott?) of DailyKos by pro-Clinton liberal writers, who felt the site was becoming an Obama haven. But what happens when Joe Wilson, the former ambassador whose CIA agent wife was outed by the administration, abandons ship with such momentum? Wilson, a blogosphere hero, is unapologetically behind Clinton, makes one of the stronger cases about experience in the White House in an essay at the lefty Huffington Post. The left has always been ahead of the right on the blogosphere, and they can have an impact on primary elections. But does that advantage for Democratic blogger evolution only mean the eventual implosion will come before Republicans'?

-- We wrote yesterday that Pennsylvania is so passe, because it's not seeing the kind of active campaigning from both candidates that everyone expected. But both candidates may be getting a second wind in the state, and for good reason: Hillary Clinton is pulling away. With a 16.6-point lead in the latest RCP Pennsylvania Average, the big Clinton win that she needs to close the delegate gap looks plausible. Democratic registration in the state is up 3% since November alone, the Inquirer writes, nearing 4 million people total. Obama needs to reduce that gap, and, a source tells Mark Halperin, he'll start with television ads in the state's five biggest markets. Even as we dismiss it, Pennsylvania seems back en vogue.

-- Test Of The Day: Based on the headlines this morning, and really what we've seen in the last week, the spotlight is firmly and completely on Obama. What did Clinton say in Terre Haute yesterday? No one remembers. What about McCain in London? Fancy fundraiser, meet with Gordon Brown, walk back a gaffe a little more, and that's the list. Obama is undergoing the harshest scrutiny he's faced in the campaign so far, and it may get worse before it gets better. If he survives this week, if he can turn the conversation around, it seems like Obama can survive almost anything. But he's far from out of the woods just yet.

-- Today On The Trail: Obama and Richardson meet in Portland for a rally, followed by a town hall meeting in Salem, Oregon and a rally tonight with voters in Eugene. Clinton is down in Chappaqua, New York today, while McCain will meet President Nikolai Sarkozy in Paris as he winds up his tour of Europe and the Middle East.