Run-offs Postponed elections tonight in Louisiana. We're bringing you the results in our news section over to the right.

Late Update, 10:39 PM: This is starting to look pretty good for Paul Carmouche (D) possibly picking up the Shreveport seat Rep. Jim McCrery (R) held for twenty years .

Later Update -- 11:07 PM: Sigh, looks like a jinxed it.

Too Much Even for the Big Easy -- 11:10 PM: It's looking like Rep. "Dollar Bill" Jefferson (D) is going down to defeat.

Fork In It Update: Yep, Bill Jefferson outta there.

Shreveport Update: It seems, and I stress 'seems', that Fleming (R) has come from behind at the last moment to defeat Democrat Paul Carmouche. All the precincts are reporting. But the margin is only about 350 votes out of about 90k. And the local news outlets don't seem to have called it yet.

Yet Again on Shreveport Update: As you can see on our results box we're not 'calling' Louisiana-4 yet. Fleming has claimed victory. But Carmouche has not conceded defeat. The Shreveport Times is calling it for Fleming; but the AP seems not to have done so yet. It seems pretty clear Fleming, the Republican, pulled this out. But with a 350 vote margin out of 90k we're going to hold off until the AP calls it and/or they settle things out tomorrow.

From the AP ...

One of the two Indian men arrested for illegally buying mobile phone cards used by the gunmen in the Mumbai attacks was a counterinsurgency police officer who may have been on an undercover mission, security officials said Saturday, demanding his release.

The arrests, announced in the eastern city of Calcutta, were the first since the bloody siege ended. But what was touted as a rare success for India's beleaguered law enforcement agencies, quickly turned sour as police in two Indian regions squared off against one another.

Senior police officers in Indian Kashmir, which has been at the heart of tensions between India and Pakistan, demanded the release of the officer, Mukhtar Ahmed, saying he was one of their own and had been involved in infiltrating Kashmiri militant groups.

Obama to tap Shinseki as VA Secretary.

Shinseki, remember, was the Army Chief of Staff forced into early retirement by Bush and Rumsfeld for not lying to Congress about how many troops it would take to win the peace in Iraq.

Obama explains what the stimulus mega-bucks are going to be spent on ...

Late Update: Here's the run-down from the Times.

TPMtv remembers the Palin candidacy ...

Barack Obama lays out more of his economic recovery plan, focusing on investments in infrastructure, and promises to work with the incoming Congress as soon as it convenes in January. That and other political news in today's Election Central Saturday Roundup.

Obama's actually going to be president.

It's just little bits and pieces of evidence at the moment. But there are more and more signs that special prosecutor Nora Dannehy's investigation may have former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in its sights.

The White House and congressional leadership have reached a tentative deal to tide the Big 3 over until Obama gets sworn in.

Cold comfort to the newspaper industry in the US. But TPM Reader RC passes on this article that notes that print media in India is experiencing a boom of historic proportions. Once it is explained, this artifact of globalization isn't that surprising -- literacy is growing rapidly on the subcontinent, creating a mass market for magazines and newspapers, along with money to buy them. But infrastructure and wealth isn't nearly as far along as in the US and Europe so Internet access isn't nearly as widespread.

CNN says missile defense test today was a big failure. Reuters says it was a smashing success.

House to go back to five day work week for 2009.

WANTED: Former second-tier state elected official to chair national political party struggling to recover from devastating election losses and its own history of racial intolerance.

Last night at a Harper's-NYU forum on how to deal with Bush-era war crimes, TPMtv caught up with renowned civil liberties lawyer Burt Neuborne, legal director at the Brennan Center For Justice, who has sued every president since Lyndon Johnson. Among the topics discussed: Neuborne's idea for a "shaming commission" that could make life uncomfortable for Bush officials as they flee for the private sector ...

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

Let me preface this post by saying that it will include little new for those who work in media or those who follow the business side of the media business. This post is written for the vast audience of people who are consumers of newspapers, either in their traditional paper or newer digital forms.

Everyone probably realizes that over the long run paper newspapers face a daunting threat from digital news sources that have vastly lower distribution costs (bytes versus paper) and a growing population of people who would rather get their news online than on paper. What probably isn't clear to a lot of people is just how fast that change may be coming.

Let me start with a few recent news items. A few days the Newspaper Association of America announced that during the third quarter of 2008, newspaper ad revenues dropped 18% vs. the same quarter last year. And that number includes growing online ads. Print ads alone were down 19% and classified ads were off 31%. That's compared to a 7% overall decline last year. And that's a decline that has been accelerating since 2005 -- in other words, right through the cash-rich housing bubble years.

On the same day, Cox Newspapers announced it was shuttering its whole Washington Bureau. Gannett just announced it's cutting 2,000 jobs nationwide which will affect all 85 of its papers, with the exception of USAToday and the Detroit Free Press. And, as I noted earlier today, there's now some suggestion that Scripps may be preparing to simply shut down the Rocky Mountain News.

The key here is that this is not about the dire economic circumstance the country finds itself in now. This is a secular, not a cyclical trend. The economic collapse is only accelerating it.

In a sense we're part of this question, since we're on the other side of the divide. But in journalism as in life, no one is an island. And while I'm confident 'journalism' will survive this in the medium run, there's no getting around the catastrophic dimensions of what's happening for a whole generation of journalists. There's a lot I don't know about newspaper financing. But the year over year revenue declines across the whole industry just seem unsustainable.

Kevin Philips has written persuasively about how the official unemployment rate understates the actual jobless numbers, and you get a glimpse of that in some of the employment numbers that came out today. From the NYT:

A mass departure from the labor force helped to hold down the unemployment rate in November, which was up only two-tenths of a percentage point from October's 6.5 percent. The so-called underemployment rate, however, jumped to 12.5 percent, from 8 percent in October. Most of the underemployed are people working part time who want to work full time but cannot.

The 12.5 percent is the highest level of underemployment since the statistic was first compiled in 1994.

More than 420,000 men and women who had been working or seeking work in October left the labor force in November. Most presumably gave up looking for a job, the bureau's report suggests. If they had continued that search, the unemployment rate in November would have been closer to 7 percent.

Late Update: The NYT has revised its story since I first posted the above excerpt. It appears they got the October underemployment number wrong. It was 11.8 percent, not 8 percent. (Thanks to TPM Reader RC for the catch.)

As Minnesota Senate recount officially ends, Franken camp claims a lead that can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

The RNC paid $110,400 on hair and makeup artistry on Sarah Palin for her two months in the sun.

Plus $55,000 more for clothes.

(ed.note: Let me stipulate that the title refers very broadly to the insufficiency of expenditures on superficialities to compensate for Palin's shortcomings as a candidate.)