As supporters of Senator Barack Obama of Illinois try gingerly — and, lately, not so gingerly — to plant the idea that the presidential nominating season has run its course and the time has come to declare a winner, there is at least one obstacle. The Democratic voters of Indiana and beyond, who have been little more than bystanders through four decades of presidential primaries, seem to be in no hurry for this campaign to end.

At least not before their ballots are cast.  ...

“There are some people who are saying, you know, we really ought to end this primary, we just ought to shut it down,” Mrs. Clinton told a few thousand people who had gathered in Mishawaka, where a giant “Hoosiers for Hillary” sign served as a backdrop.

“No!” boomed the crowd.  ...

 “I know a little bit about comebacks,” Mrs. Clinton said with a knowing grin. “I know what it’s like to be counted down and counted out. But I also know there is nothing that will keep us down if we are determined to keep on.”

“My attitude is that Senator Clinton can run as long as she wants,” Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said at a news conference in a high school gymnasium here. “Her name is on the ballot. She is a fierce and formidable opponent, and she obviously believes she would make the best nominee and the best president.”

Israel and the Palestinians agreed Sunday to a series of ''concrete steps'' aimed at paving the way for a final peace agreement later this year, beginning with an Israeli pledge to remove some 50 roadblocks in the West Bank.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in the region for the second time this month trying to energize faltering talks, announced the measures, saying they ''constitute a very good start to improving'' the Palestinian economy, which has been crippled by Israeli restrictions.

Under the plan, Israel will remove about 50 roadblocks, upgrade checkpoints to speed up the movement of Palestinians through the West Bank and give Palestinians more security responsibility in the town of Jenin with an eye toward looking at ''other areas in turn.''

The Israelis also pledged to boost the number of travel and work permits it gives to Palestinians and support economic projects in Palestinian towns.

In return, the Palestinians vowed to improve policing of Jenin ''to provide law and order, and work to prevent terror,'' according to a State Department statement released shortly before Rice spoke.

MOST politicians lie. Most people over 50, as I know all too well, misremember things. So here is the one compelling mystery still unresolved about Hillary Clinton’s Bosnia fairy tale: Why did she keep repeating this whopper for nearly three months, well after it had been publicly debunked by journalists and eyewitnesses?  ...  It was also dishonest to characterize what she had done as misspeaking — or as a result of sleep deprivation, as the candidate herself would soon assert. The Bosnia anecdote was part of her prepared remarks, scripted and vetted with her staff.  

Perhaps she thought that by taking the huge gamble of misspeaking one more time about her narrow escape on the tarmac at Tulza, she could compensate for misvoting on Iraq. Instead, her fictionalized derring-do may have stirred national trace memories of two of the signature propaganda stunts of the war: the Rambo myth the Pentagon concocted for Pvt. Jessica Lynch and President Bush’s flyboy antics on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln during “Mission Accomplished.”

Senator Obama, for all his campaign’s Internet prowess, made his own media mistake by not getting ahead of the inevitable emergence of commercially available Wright videos on both cable TV and the Web. But he got lucky. YouTube videos of a candidate in full tilt or full humiliation, we’re learning, can outdraw videos of a candidate’s fire-breathing pastor. Both the CBS News piece on Mrs. Clinton in Bosnia and the full video of Mr. Obama’s speech on race have drawn more views than the most popular clips of a raging Mr. Wright.

Sen. Barack Obama refused yesterday to go along with other Democrats who are calling for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to step away from the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.   

Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr Sunday ordered his armed militia to get off the streets in Basra and to cooperate with the government to restore security. In exchange, he asked the government to release prisoners and declare an amnesty.

The Iraqi government quickly welcomed the comments as a move toward restoring calm.

A spokesman for the government, Ali al-Dabbagh, said on state-run Iraqi television that the government considered Sadr's statement a "positive step."

He repeated government assertions that the military operations in Basra were not aimed at Sadr's followers. "We expect all those who claim that they are followers of the Sadr movement to heed this call and those who do not shall be treated as outlaws and criminals."

Last but not least, it’s good to finally hear Maliki acknowledge the danger that Sadr’s militia pose to the country. Saying that Shia militias are “worse than al-Qaeda” signifies the ferocity of the battle and the enormous pressure it applies on the government. It makes me optimistic that the leadership has realized the extent and nature of the threat. In fact I hope that my expectation of a truce that spares the heads of evil proves wrong. Avoiding taking a battle to the end could cost us several times the price in recurrent outbreaks of violence.

I was going to stop here but now I see that Sadr finally decided to break his silence and make the first public appearance in several months. While the location of the interview remains undisclosed, the fact that he was interviewed by Ghassan Bin Jidou suggests that he’s either in Iran or is enjoying the generous hospitality of his Lebanese twin Nesrallah (can anyone check the recent stamps on Bin Jidou’s passport?).

I want to end this by saying that if we put together Sadr’s words that he’s in control of the Mahdi army and Maliki’s words that Shia militias are worse than al-Qaeda then the logical conclusion should be that Sadr must be dealt with in the same manner in which we deal with terrorist chiefs when we spot them.

"America must be a model citizen if we want others to look to us as a model," he said. "We can't torture or treat inhumanely suspected terrorists we have captured. I believe we should close Guantanamo and work with our allies to forge a new international understanding on the disposition of dangerous detainees under our control."

In an equally significant address to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, McCain, the certain Republican nominee, refused to back off his support for remaining in Iraq but put that decision in a broader context of American foreign policy, outlining a vastly different approach from President Bush's and one that might heal the wounds left here at home and abroad by the past seven years.

Finally, McCain signaled not just a break with Bush but an abandonment of his own past preference for strongmen such as Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf by saying that time has run out on the U.S. "strategy of relying on autocrats to provide order and stability" in the greater Middle East. "We relied on the shah of Iran, the autocratic rulers of Egypt, the generals of Pakistan, the Saudi royal family and even, for a time, on Saddam Hussein," he said. But that game has ended: "Change is occurring, whether we want it or not."

All this puts McCain's insistence on staying in Iraq until it is a "peaceful, stable, prosperous, democratic" state in a broader context, even if it does not reduce the yawning gulf between his vision of what is achievable in that country and those of Obama and Hillary Clinton.

This has the makings of a great debate, and we now know that both sides are intellectually and politically ready for the battle.

Here's how complicated the Basra battle is: The Iraqi army is loyal to the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, who represents the Shiite faction known as the Dawa Party. The army is fighting against Sadr's Mahdi Army, in some areas against the Badr Organization of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, and against a hodgepodge of other local Shiite militias and gangs. To make matters more complicated, all three main combatants have some support from Iran.

Sadr wants to fight, but he also wants to talk. I'm told that he sent a verbal message through an Iraqi intermediary last month to Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq. The gist of the message was that the Mahdi Army in the Baghdad area was no longer under Sadr's control but Iran's. The United States apparently didn't answer this message, but at some point, through some channel, America will need to talk with Sadr and the forces he represents.

Long after he retired, Ted Williams ran into a former pitcher who said he once struck out Williams. "Slider low and away," said Williams. "Old men forget," said Shakespeare's Henry V at Agincourt. Old baseball men don't.

Washington was the setting for "Damn Yankees," the most stirring drama since Shakespeare, who didn't do musicals. Opening in 1955, it concerned a Senators fan who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for one terrific season as a Senators outfielder. This is supposedly a Faustian bargain, but such bargains are presumed to be bad. What is a mere soul when weighed against such a season?

Of course, there might be a gender difference here. As the philosopher Dave Barry has noted, "If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base."

Bill Veeck, who did more for America in one night than most of us do in a lifetime (the night in September 1937 he planted the ivy along Wrigley Field's outfield walls), said that the great thing about baseball -- aside from the fact that you do not need to be 7 feet wide or 7 feet tall in order to play it -- is: Three strikes and you're out, and the best lawyer can't help you. Baseball, which provides satisfying finality and then does it again the next day, is a severe meritocracy that illustrates the axiom that there is very little difference between men but that difference makes a big difference.

Even if you are not big. Asked in 1971 how it felt to be the shortest player in the major leagues, the Royals' Freddie Patek, a 5-foot-4 infielder, said, "A heckuva lot better than being the shortest player in the minor leagues."

Over time, the movies that politicians create in their heads become real to them. In that sense they lie, as was said of Henry Kissinger, not because it's in their interest but because it's in their nature. When certain buttons get pushed, the projector turns on and the fantasy begins.

Late last year, Obama began to push that button by belittling her travel to 80 countries as First Lady. He said that "having tea" with foreign leaders wasn't the big-time foreign-policy experience she claimed as a major reason to elect her. So Hillary began to tell the Tuzla story, which had first appeared in her memoirs, in a more dramatic fashion. "I don't remember anyone offering me tea on the tarmac there," she said, firing back at Obama. Michael Dobbs of The Washington Post fact-checked the tale in March and gave it "Four Pinocchios." It turned out to be untrue in almost every detail: no "corkscrew" landing, no sniper fire, no canceled airport reception. (She and Chelsea were greeted by an 8-year-old Bosnian girl, among others.) Sinbad and Sheryl Crow had come along to entertain the troops and saw nothing scary. Even the idea that she was the first wife of a president to go into a war zone was wrong. Both Eleanor Roosevelt and Pat Nixon had ventured closer to danger.

The Tuzla Tale has already had repercussions. Clinton was disappointed that the feeding frenzy over Obama's relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright didn't destroy his candidacy. It's her best hope of winning the nomination, so she tried to reignite the story. But her latest approach to bashing Obama only reinforced the impression that her recent setbacks have left her desperate. She stopped by for a cozy interview with billionaire publisher Richard Mellon Scaife, the right-winger who commissioned the most hate-filled anti-Clinton stories of the 1990s. For her to seek help from Scaife in publicizing Obama's supposed tolerance of hate speech sets a new standard in campaign chutzpah.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Islam has overtaken Roman Catholicism as the biggest single religious denomination in the world, the Vatican said on Sunday.

Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, who compiled the Vatican's newly-released 2008 yearbook of statistics, said Muslims made up 19.2 percent of the world's population and Catholics 17.4 percent.

"For the first time in history we are no longer at the top: the Muslims have overtaken us," Formenti told Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano in an interview, saying the data referred to 2006.

Gory Prospects   [Mark R. Levin]

So, the Democrat party's answer to the split between Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama might be to nominate Al Gore, who hasn't run in any primary or caucus. If that happens then none of the votes cast by any of the Democrat voters counted.  They will all have disenfranchised.  And how does a Gore nomination address all the talk by the Obama supporters that the convention must deliver the nomination to Obama as he has received (or will have received) the most popular votes and secured the most delegates?  Finally, what about all the excitement over the possibility of the first woman or first black president?  That goes down the tubes with the nomination of Gore.  It seems to me that a Gore nomination creates serious problems for the Democrat Party.  So, I would encourage the Democrats to do it. 

What could be less democratic than a major political party nominating a candidate for President who didn’t receive a single vote in the primaries? That would create the biggest example of smoke-filled-room politics and the biggest underhanded manipulation by a political party in decades. And ironically, it’s the Democrats who have begun laying the groundwork for exactly that scenario by pushing Al Gore as an alternative to the two candidates who have raised hundreds of millions from their followers to finish in a virtual dead heat...

...  All I can say is this: Rove, you magnificent bastard.

As for consistency, the only constant in Obama's views about Iraq is opportunism. Initially, as he likes to remind Democrats, he opposed the war. But he admitted in one of his books that, after the invasion succeeded so dramatically, he "began to suspect that I might have been wrong." By early 2004, as he geared up for his Senate run, Obama was telling the Chicago Tribune, "There's not that much difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage." Later that year, in the heat of the campaign, he said that although Bush had "bungled the war" getting out "would make things worse." That's been McCain's position throughout. At the end of 2004, he told Charlie Rose, "Once we go in, then we're committed. . . .We've got to do everything we can to stablilze the country to make it succeessful because we'll have too much at stake in the Middle East."

A year later, his position had evolved again. Now, he wanted to "reduce our footprint," but "not fully withdraw." Withdrawal was not the way to go because "we have a role to play in stabilizing the country as Iraqis are getting their act together." But another year later, in the fall of 2006 as he contemplated asking Democratic voters for support in a run for the presidency, stabilizing Iraq was no longer a priority. Instead, Obama was calling for "phased withdrawal," which should begin as quickly as possible. The administration, however, decided on a troop surge. Obama responded that such a surge would not "make a significant dent in the sectarian violence that's taking place there." Not long after that, as he tried to position himself to the left of Hillary Clinton, Obama was touting his plan to "bring our combat troops home by March of 2008."

There's plenty more, and it is all compiled in a piece by Peter Wehner in the April issue of Commentary. The bottom line is that Obama has flip-flopped on Iraq more often than John Kerry, and it takes more than a little audacity for Obama to claim that John McCain has been inconsistent on the subject.

Mr. Gore, who was Bill Clinton's vice-president and has since won a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for his work on green issues, remains an influential figure eight years after he beat George W Bush in the popular vote but lost the White House after the Florida recount fiasco.