CAMPAIGN SLOG 371 Days to Go!

For you state officials still wrangling over the dates of your primaries, lay down your swords. The presidential tickets already have been decided, and not by the mainstream media:

Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic Party presidential nominee, with retired Gen. Wesley Clark as her running mate. They will oppose Republicans Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee in the general election.

Says? A poll of 355 "statistically representative" witches conducted by the New York Center for the Strange, which was established in the early '70s, associate director Lewis Scott said yesterday as a way to "upgrade the perception of witches."

"Witchcraft is a legitimate religion," Scott says. "Why should it be maligned any more than any other religion?"

Or denigrated below your garden-variety polling operation? After all, the witches accurately called the 2000 presidential election, "narrowly," for President Bush.

-- Sridhar Pappu