Good Thursday morning. It's the most wonderful time of year for basketball fans, and the time when all the teams Politics Nation picks to win decide to choke. Politics Nation contributor Kyle Trygstad points out that former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley still holds the record for most points in a Final Four game, with 58 in 1965. Aside from basketball, here's what Washington will be watching:

-- Both chambers are out of session for the week, as well as next week. Neither will return for another week. How many members scored prime tickets to basketball games today? In Washington, President Bush meets with prime ministers from the Bahamas, Barbados and Belize.

-- On the campaign trail, as John McCain continues to jet around the world, stopping in London today, the Democrats are still stuck on pastors, papers and political repeats. The uproar surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has "shaken" Barack Obama, he told CNN's Anderson Cooper, and it clearly has: Obama's poll numbers in the daily Gallup tracking poll have fallen sharply in the last week (though we won't see post-"the speech" polls until the weekend) and even a major speech on Iraq couldn't turn the page -- though it gave McCain an opportunity to get back in the fray. More on that later.

-- Yesterday's release of eleven thousand pages of schedules from her time in the White House threw Hillary Clinton's message under the bus as well, dredging up every old scandal from the 1990s. Reporters scurried to find out where she was when Vince Foster died and when Monica Lewinsky was at the White House. Questions about Clinton's private meetings, so designated by redactions from the National Archives, are still coming up, and if she's the Democratic nominee, they're not going away. Only Mark Silva asks the really important question: Any calls at 3 a.m.?

-- Obama is being hurt by his temporary distraction more than Clinton is, which goes to prove one point the Clinton camp has been trying to make: People don't know a lot about Barack Obama, and every revelation, no matter how minor, is going to make some kind of dent. On the other hand, people know everything about Hillary Clinton, and no new information would cause major damage because it's easily dismissed as a "vast right-wing conspiracy" or as old news. As Obama's polling against Clinton has suffered, so has his electability argument: Both Clinton and Obama trail McCain in the latest RCP General Election Averages by a narrow seven-tenths of a point.

-- Still, while it feels like Clinton has the momentum and Obama continues to backslide, Obama is ahead in the delegate count and the popular vote count by a significant margin, making Clinton's long-shot bid even longer, as the Times' Adam Nagourney writes. Clinton needs to reverse the popular vote gap, close the delegate gap and shake Obama's growing foundation with super delegates, making them question his effectiveness as party standard-bearer. To do so, she'll essentially need to win every remaining contest, and not by small margins, and maybe she can't even win without revotes in Florida and Michigan. Regardless of the Pennsylvania outcome, or the outcome of several other states, the Clinton campaign can afford no more slip-ups, and even then they'll be relying on Obama to make a fatal mistake. That's never a good position to be in.

-- The sense we're getting: It's only a matter of time before Obama, beaten and bloodied by his own mistakes and a primary battle, will come out ahead in the nomination fight, and that when he does, John McCain will be right there waiting. McCain and Clinton genuinely like each other (one source with knowledge of the incident told Politics Nation, without equivocation, that their rumored drinking contest on a trip to Estonia took place, and that the two are close, while Bill Clinton yesterday called McCain a "very fine man," per NBC/NJ's Mike Memoli). Thanks to spats over ethics and other issues, and a pronounced generational divide, McCain and Obama genuinely do not like each other, and when McCain doesn't like someone, he lets them know.

-- That temper was on display yesterday, as top McCain aide Mark Salter unleashed an acerbic attack on Obama's plans for Iraq. Salter, McCain's co-author on a number of books and frequently described as the candidate's alter-ego, pulled no punches: "John McCain wants American forces to come home when our clear and serious interests at stake in Iraq, which nearly 4,000 Americans have given their lives to secure, are truly safe, when al Qaeda is defeated; Iran's influence is contained, and the potential for a truly cataclysmic civil war in Iraq is remote," Salter said. "That, I think, is what is called 'making us safer.' Senator Obama's plan, if it can be charitably described as one, would do the reverse." Read Salter's full statement in response to a section of Obama's speech yesterday in North Carolina here.

-- Conviction Of The Day: Obama cited O.J. Simpson's trial as a way Americans have used race as a mere spectacle. But he actually brought it up himself the day before, telling ABC's "Nightline" that he believes the Juice is guilty. "I'm somebody who was pretty clear that O.J. was guilty," Obama said, per Don Frederick. The ruling infuriated many whites and elated many blacks, and Obama said he understood what his community was going through: "That reaction had more to do with a sense that somehow the criminal justice system historically had been biased so profoundly that a defeat of that justice system was somehow a victory," Obama said.

-- Today On The Trail: Moving on to the next electoral hot spots, Clinton is in Indiana, holding town halls in Terre Haute, Anderson and Evansville, while Obama's headed to West Virginia, with stops planned for Charleston and Beckley. John McCain is in London where he will hold a fundraiser this evening and will meet with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.