Mike Allen has the goods:

Advisers to Fred Thompson have begun exploring a range of staffing options -- including talking to potential campaign managers -- as the actor and former Tennessee senator firms up his plans to enter the Republican presidential contest, according to people involved in the conversations.

Thompson has not made a final decision but is on track to be ready to announce his candidacy in June or July, his advisers say.

Originally I thought it was less than 50/50 Fred Thompson would get in the race, but after the last few weeks of interviews, disclosures, op-eds, and high profile speaking engagements, it now seems easily better than 50/50 he will get into the race. At this point if Thompson chooses not to run he probably still takes the title from Colin Powell for biggest flirtation with a Republican presidential run in recent history.

Here's the new web video from the Giuliani campaign:

At the end of this clip from ABC's This Week, host George Stephanopoulos and George Will have this interesting exchange:

Stephanopoulos: If this now declared deadline of Gen. Petraeus of September, if the political goals haven't been met by then, do you see large scale Republican defections at that point?

Will: Absolutely. They do not want to have, as they had in 2006, another election on Iraq. George, it took 30, 40 years for the Republican Party to get out from under Herbert Hoover. People would say, "Are you going to vote for Nixon in '60?" "No, I don't like Hoover." The Depression haunted the Republican Party. This could be a foreign policy equivalent of the Depression, forfeiting the Republican advantage they've had since the '68 convention of the Democratic Party and the nomination of [George] McGovern. The advantage Republicans have had on national security matters may be forfeited.

As Stephanopoulos says, Wow.

Compare that to what William F. Buckley Jr. wrote the other day (which Drudge highlighted today in very important red lettering):

General Petraeus is a wonderfully commanding figure. But if the enemy is in the nature of a disease, he cannot win against it. Students of politics ask then the derivative question: How can the Republican party, headed by a president determined on a war he can't see an end to, attract the support of a majority of the voters? General Petraeus, in his Pentagon briefing on April 26, reported persuasively that there has been progress, but cautioned, "I want to be very clear that there is vastly more work to be done across the board and in many areas, and again I note that we are really just getting started with the new effort."

The general makes it a point to steer away from the political implications of the struggle, but this cannot be done in the wider arena. There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican party will survive this dilemma.

Even though both Buckley and Will are careful to hedge slightly on their predictions, essentially two of the most respected and smartest minds in conservative politics just declared that the Republican Party will not only suffer greatly in 2008, but that it is in danger of becoming a minority party for generations.

I won't dispute the possibility of such a scenario, but we need to consider where exactly the Iraq war will fit in history. For instance, does Will's Depression-analogy hold up? The only answer is that we won't know for several years, if not decades. But right now I think it's still a far-fetched notion. The Depression was a world-changing event that lasted for over a decade and affected every aspect of society. As bad as Iraq is -- and for the fallen soldiers' families, it is incalculably worse -- the average American is simply not suffering on a level commensurate with the Depression because of the war.

As for their more general point that 2008 will be another rough year for Republicans barring any real change in Iraq, that will almost certainly be the case, as would Will's point that the White House will start to see defections by the fall if not earlier should the surge not produce noticeable results.

I took the newly released list of the Top 20 newspapers by circulation posted earlier to Drudge and rearranged them by percentage of gain or loss versus year ago:

20) Dallas Morning News*, -14.3%

19) Newsday, - 6.9%
18) NJ Star-Ledger, -6.1%
17) Minneapolis Star Tribune, -4.9%
16) Detroit Free Press, -4.7%
15) Los Angeles Times, -4.2%
14) Boston Globe, -3.7%
13) Washington Post, -3.4%
12) San Francisco Chronicle, -2.9%
T-10) Chicago Tribune, -2.1%
T-10) Atlanta Journal-Constitution, -2.1%
9) Houston Chronicle, -2.0% New York Times, -1.9%
7) Arizona Republic, -1.1%
6) USA Today, +0.2%
5) Clevelan Plain Dealer, +0.5%
4) Wall Street Journal, +0.6%
3) Philadelphia Inquirer, +0.6%
2) New York Daily News, +1.4%
1) New York Post, +7.6%

*The Dallas Morning News is reporting for the first time since being censured in 2004 for misstating circulation figures.

Reporting Period: Six month period ending in March, 2007.

As you can see, only six out of the twenty posted positive circ numbers. It should be noted that two of those papers, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, are the biggest papers in the country by far at 2.278 million and 2.062 million, respectively. The NY Post is also in the Top 5 in circulation, making its 7.6% increase all that more impressive in relative terms.

Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD) has been discharged from a rehabilitation hospital and is now home with his family where he'll continue therapy and work with staff, though there are no details about his condition, other than apparently improved.

In presidential politics, the New York Times' Patrick Healy writes that the Hillary Clinton campaign has changed tactics in dealing with Barack Obama, opting for lighter touches instead of hammer blows against Obama, a new approach exemplified in an e-mail to reporters and supporters that talked about "commander-in-chief issues, such as how a president should deal with terrorists" after her performance in last week's debate. The e-mail included the overlooked line Clinton delivered during the debate: "Let's focus on those who have attacked us, and do everything we can to destroy them."

Finally, the UK's Telegraph declares in a headline, "Reagan's men are backing -- an actor" who is of course Fred Thompson. The article doesn't say Reagan deputy chief of staff Mike Deaver has actually done anything to help Thompson other than offering dismissive quotes about the depth of Rudy Giuliani's support and praising Thompson's rhetorical talent and popularity.

The real news is that Thompson will address the annual dinner of the Orange County, Calif., Lincoln Club this Friday -- a day after the GOP debate in nearby Simi Valley -- and full of some of the state's richest businessmen, who are a "necessity if you need to raise $20 million quickly in order to compete" in the Republican field.

If you haven't already done so, be sure to check out RCP's Video Vault page, where we have a full week's worth of the best political videos from around the Web.

In today's Video Vault, you can catch up on the best of the Sunday talk shows you might have missed, including the Fox News Roundtable and This Week's Panel. Also in there is Bob Schieffer's interview with Rep. Jack Murtha and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

From the Today Show this morning, we have Tom Brokaw's interview with former CIA Director George Tenet, who talks about his new controversial book.

Rick Klein is leaving the Boston Globe and will join ABC News as a Senior Political Reporter and head honcho at The Note, set to relaunch this week.

UPDATE: And The Note's old boss, Mark Halperin, is heading to Time as an editor-at-large and senior political analyst, starting this week, though apparently he's going to keep his job as an ABC News political analyst.

They may not be in the White House together, but the Clintons and Al Gore are a presence in the presidential race as today's news reminds us.

Bill Clinton took the stage yesterday in Detroit at the 10,000-strong NAACP Fight For Freedom dinner after speaking to the group last in 2000. Meanwhile, The Politico's Ben Smith reports that Gore hired a Democratic political operative who's worked for Sen. Joe Lieberman and Gore in their respective presidential runs. The operative worked for a company co-founded by pollster Mark Penn, whom the Washington Post's Anne Kornblut profiles today in his role as Hillary Clinton's political guru. Penn, who has made his influence felt on Clinton's campaign, is known to be mostly cautious in his advice and a hawkish centrist in his politics. If Clinton resembles an insider and appears arrogant about her chances to win the nomination, it's because Penn is both of those things, Kornblut writes, but he's also smart, experienced and loved by Clinton.

Both Clinton and Barack Obama have collected contributions from more than 100 donors who funded one or both of President Bush's campaigns for the White House, reports the New York Sun's Josh Gerstein. Some have become disenchanted with Bush, while others may have personal ties that "transcend partisan politics." Business executives "regularly straddle the field, even supporting multiple candidates in the same race" while other donors may give to undermine a politician by supporting a rival that seems like less of a threat.

In separate speeches at the California Democratic Party's convention yesterday, both Clinton and Obama said the bill Congress sent to Bush to leave Iraq next year is the best chance at terminating the war, the New York Times' Adam Nagourney reports. John Edwards was a little stronger in his rhetoric but supported a timetable for withdrawal. Sen. Chris Dodd, Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richardson all suggested the current bill was "too leisurely in its deadlines and urged Congress to adopt even tougher legislation by cutting off financing for the war."

While Obama was in California, he remembered the 1992 Los Angeles Riots and tied the war to domestic problems, saying, "We have now spent half a trillion dollars on a war that should have never been authorized, and should have never been waged. We could have invested that money in South Central Los Angeles, or the South Side of Chicago, in jobs and infrastructure and hospitals and schools. Why is it we can find the money in a second for a war that doesn't make any sense?"

On Iraq, Sens. Joe Biden and Sam Brownback may team up on a plan that would split the country into three loosely federated states, the Sun's Russell Berman reports. Fred Thompson's foreign policy would possibly help overthrow the Iranian regime next door by capitalizing on internal disdain for the regime.

Meanwhile, as recently as January Thompson was making calls on behalf of John McCain to potential donors and supporters, including politicos in Thompson's home state of Tennessee, reports Newsweek's Holly Bailey. Thompson called McCain in March before announcing he was mulling a run.

Elsewhere in the GOP field, The Politico's Jonathan Martin reports that McCain accused Romney of "naivete" about Osama bin Laden's importance to the War on Terror after Romney said "it's not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person."

Get these and today's other elections stories at RCP's Politics and Elections page.

More details emerge on the British fertilizer bombers. It turns out that two of them had direct links to the 7/7 attacks and not "on the periphery" as MI5 initially categorized them.

Rich Miller, a fellow Sun-Times columnist and proprietor of the influential Illinois political newsletter Capitol Fax, commissioned an automated phone poll of Illinois voters last week on 2008 preferences.

On the Democratic side, Obama holds a two-to-one lead over Clinton, while the Republican race is wide open with Fred Thompson making a strong 3rd place showing:

Democrats
Obama 52.6
Clinton 24.6
Edwards 9.5
Undecided 6.9

Republicans
McCain 26.1
Giuliani 25.7
F. Thompson 17.7
Romney 10.2
T. Thompson 3.3
Undecided 17

Here's Miller on the poll's methodology:

The automated phone poll was conducted by "Ask Illinois," which has done a lot of polling for political candidates and interest groups and has a good reputation among insiders. The firm uses special technology to blast out hundreds of calls simultaneously and they contact huge numbers of people. In this case 3,509 hardcore Democrats and 3,761 Republicans responded to the poll, leaving us with an extremely low margin of error of +/- 1.18 to +/- 1.52 percent, depending on the question. Republicans and Democrats who indicated they intend to cross over to the other party next year were omitted from these results. The difference was statistically insignificant.