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.)

Biden taps economist and ... how can we not say it ... frequent TPMCafe blogger Jared Bernstein as his chief economics advisor.

Is the Rocky Mountain News going to be shut down?

I have to agree with Michael Hirsh on this one. I'm fine, probably more than fine, with Obama's economics appointees. But there's one problem. Where's Joe Stiglitz? He should be in the mix.

It seems that Rep. Nadler (D-NY), who actually represents the part of New York City where TPM is located, is set to introduce a constitutional amendment to limit the president's pardon power.

I'd be curious what people think. It's certainly come in for some abuse. But in addition to always being leery of fiddling with the constitution, I don't know if I like the idea of changing the pardon power. I think it's an important safety valve in our constitutional system. If it's been a problem, rather than changing the constitution, maybe we need better presidents.

Obama's total haul for the 2008 elections: nearly $750 million. That and the day's other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA): "[Obama's] going to have to be more assertive than he's been. At a time of great crisis with mortgage foreclosures and autos, he says we only have one president at a time. I'm afraid that overstates the number of presidents we have. He's got to remedy that situation."

A new caucus of pro-Depression 2.0 Republicans? Ed Kilgore looks at the possibility.

Check out Ed's post, and his reference to another of Stoller's. There's an interesting and I think important question here as to whether neo-Hooeverite Republicans are pushing Hooverite policies for strictly economic reasons (creditors can do well in a deflationary economy), moral reasons (need a good hard recession to re-teach the poor moral values) or just because they're economic illiterates who just don't feel right echoing the calls of centrist and liberal economists. I think both Ed and Stoller are both on solid ground, with respect to the moral and economic rationales, respectively, though I think many of the folks I see on Cavuto's show fall squarely in the third category.

Late Update: This too, from TPM Reader JF ...

I tend to believe there is a simpler explanation for the Neo-Hooverite positioning: Given the new demographic realities of the country, Obama's presidency must be a failure if Republicans are to ever emerge from the political wilderness. The more they obstruct, the more Obama and Congessional Democrats will be forced to water down economic policy. And a watered-down policy just won't cut it at this moment in history. This is sabotage, pure and simple. If the poor and the middle class have to suffer in order for Republicans to have something to run against in 2010, so be it.

David Bonior mounts aggressive behind-the-scenes effort to get union activist Mary Beth Maxwell installed as Obama's labor secretary.

What about massive infrastructure stimulus aimed at telecommunications infrastructure? Yochai Benkler lays out the possibilities.

I'm listening to one-time DC celeb Fred Thompson on Neil Cavuto's show on Fox talking about the virtues of economic retrenchment as opposed to fiscal stimulus as a way to deal with the faltering US economy. I'm hearing this here and there from a few Republicans. But I'm curious how much this is coalescing into an opposition position.

Late Update: It seems Yglesias has dibs on the phrase neo-Hooeverite.

As we just flagged in our breaking news section, there were initial BBC reports moments ago of up to six gunmen shot by Indian security forces at the airport in New Delhi. But the BBC now seems to be dialing that report back, now only saying there were shots fired, with no details about who they were shot at or whether anyone was injured. Meanwhile, there seemed to be no word on this in the English-language Indian press -- other than a few reports sourced back to the BBC. And they're now putting 'shootings' in quotes. We'll keep following this closely. But great caution seems warranted about those initial reports.

Late Update: Now it's been dialed back to a report of "sharp sounds" that the airport officials are now investigating. So, well ...

We bring you more of our conversation with legendary political operative Roger Stone. In this installment Roger tells us what he sees as the current state and future of the Republican party ...

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

Let me follow up on what I just wrote below about Krugman's and Atrios's views on our difficulty in finding ways to spend on stimulus quickly enough to pull the economy out of its nosedive. We're not just looking for ways to spend -- capital projects like major infrastructure spending -- but also ways to prevent things that will force an even more rapid deterioration -- like big budget cuts by state and local governments (Atrios's point.)

I'd be very curious to hear from the real economists on this one. But if these assumptions are right (and I assume they are) I do not see how they do not become the major factor in the auto maker bailout discussion. Whatever we think of the long-term or even the medium-term fate of the US auto industry, it's hard to think of many other stiff accelerants to the downturn than one of more of the big automakers going bankrupt any time in the next year.

For all sorts of reasons, we couldn't broadcast the idea that we're just propping up these companies in the near term as a de facto stimulus effort or as a way to keep money flowing into people's pockets (nor am I proposing that approach, as opposed to a plan which keeps them spending and employing while also laying the groundwork for longterm health). But if Krugman's prognostications are right, it's not clear to me that such an effort would not justify itself in macro-economic terms.

The best indicator of the severity of our economic crisis is the fact that there now appears to be a broad, party-transcending consensus in favor of levels of stimulus spending that would have been treated as preposterous only a couple months ago by all but the most left-leaning economists. But in this post this morning Paul Krugman suggests that we may not be able to spend the money quickly enough "to pull the economy out of its nosedive before unemployment goes into double digits."

The point here is that no matter how much money you're willing to spend, you need some level of planning and preparation before you can start hiring contractors and paying people to do anything.

Now, when it comes to unemployment, 'double-digits' covers quite a bit of territory. To provide some perspective, unemployment topped out at just over 10% in the 1982 recession and about 25% in the Great Depression. So I'd be curious to hear from Krugman and others which end of the spectrum we're talking about.

(ed.note: I'd add to this that Krugman's point is a good reminder of why it's nice to have some real economist as part of the conversation. I've been sort of disappointed to see the degree of emphasis on aid to states and local governments as opposed to major capital projects and green R&D in the initial round of spending. But as Krugman suggests and Atrios makes explicit, a lot of my concern in this regard is likely misguided when you take these realities into account ... Ed Kilgore expands on the point about spending by state and local governments.)

TPM Reader AB's thoughts ...

I believe the "don't reward bad management" argument about the prospective Auto Industry bailout is a red herring, which I'll explain below.

First, to add to the irony of the Auto Industry treatment vis a vis the Financial Sector Bailout, remember that in large (if not whole) part, the Financial Sector is directly responsible for the Auto Industry's current situation.

Which brings me to the red herring issue. The Auto Makers just released their sales figures and sales across the board were down over 40%. No industry can absorb those kinds of losses. Now the problem isn't that in the last year more than 40% of buyers in the auto market had a revelation and decided they absolutely needed hybrids, or fully electric cars. These sales are off because of tight credit and uncertainty about the economy as a whole, including the housing market.

I have no problem using the bailout to get "green" concessions from the companies who have been heretofor resistant. But using it for some sort of morality play while messing with real people's real jobs (people who can't just transition easily into other fields) is wrong.

I have no brief for the auto companies. Clearly, their plight is due to years, decades of mismanagement -- much more than the demands of their unions, and in many cases because they've spent years lobbying Washington to stop the kinds of regulatory changes that might have helped them on the way they're now going to have to go now. But there's no ignoring the massive disconnect between the controversy, attention, number of hearings and general controversy over the relatively small number of dollars it would cost to bailout the auto makers.

I want to be clear: what I'm saying here is not necessarily that we should go easier on the automakers or that we act carelessly about allowing the banking system to collapse because it's managers have acted like idiots. But I do think a big, not very good, and really underappreciated reason for the disjuncture is that the auto makers are structured in a way, are economic entities in a way, that most of us can have some basic understanding on how they operate, what they do. And to the extent that they've been habitually mismanaged we are, as a country, understandably reluctant to reward incompetent management. On the other hand, I think the financial services giants are getting some level of a free ride because a lot of us (and this would seem to include some of the people running the big financial services giants) just have a really hard time understanding what it is they even do or how their fundamental business model works.

TPM Reader MM sent this in a couple of days ago:

For years, the complaint was that the auto companies were full of insular 'car guys' who failed to appreciate how business was being done in the modern era. So Ford and Chrysler went out and grabbed successful CEOs from outside the auto industry to turn things around, and these CEOs are now supposed to agree to a wage of $1 a year to atone for mistakes made before they arrived to clean things up. I can't wait for the tsunami of business talent that will soon be pouring into America's most important manufacturing sector.

Citi sucked up $25 billion to no discernible effect, then got a check for $20 billion more and $300 billion + in loan guarantees. AIG has received over $100 billion. Where are the demands that their CEOs turn their corporate jets into tin cans, and reduce their salaries to $1 a year? Since when do banks and investment houses get a free pass for their short-sighted decisions and overpaid employees?

I agree that the auto execs could have done a better job of public relations. But let's remember that the CEOs of the financial companies did not have to do anything at all for their $700 billion. They were not dragged in front of Senate committees to endure Star Chamber treatment. Treasury officials fly to them, go to their offices and work the phones to find buyers and bridge financing to get them through this recession. Failing that, Treasury and the Fed open the money floodgates, and give them whatever they want. ...

Here's a dispatch from 'flyover' country: the millions of workers who depend on the auto companies and their suppliers, and the even more millions of workers who depend on the spin-off from them, have noticed the double standard. A couple of contracts ago, the UAW negotiated a national holiday on election day so its members could work phone banks and drive voters to the poles. The UAW and other industrial unions have donated millions of dollars and thousands of hours to Democratic causes and candidates over election cycles that go back before you or I were born.

It is easy to make fun of the car companies and their execs, especially for those whose prejudices and information about manufacturing in the US are 20 years out of date. But denying bridge loans to the auto companies would screw a social movement that has stood by Democratic candidates and causes since WW II.

This year, we won a huge victory in (large) part because the sons and daughters of Reagan Democrats became Obama Democrats. Those voters are watching, and waiting. They have a hell of a lot of skin in the game, and they will remember what the party does on this issue.

With the Republicans winning a senate seat in Georgia, can the collapse of the Democratic party be far behind?

On the road today for a conference on the 2008 elections at the Dole Institute, which is affiliated with the University of Kansas. I'll be bringing you more from here later today and tomorrow, where there will be a series of panels featuring speakers who were directly involved in the campaigns, and others, like myself.

In the meantime, this bald eagle was perched right outside my hotel room window this morning on the banks of the Kansas River. Pardon the cell phone cam quality.

I mentioned a couple days ago how Canada's Tory Prime Minister had managed to act with such hubris, economic stupidity and desire to castrate the political opposition that he'd manage to galvanize the three very disparate opposition parties into organizing what amounts to a constitutional coup against Harper's government.

How this works is that Harper got close to a majority in the recent election. But not quite. So he's running a minority government. So if the two parties of the center-left and left could team up with the Quebec secessionist party, they could boot Harper with a simple vote of no confidence in his government. And Harper had pushed things so far that that's precisely what was about to happen.

So now Harper has gone to Governor General Michaelle Jean (technically an appointee of Queen Elizabeth II, Canada's head of state) and received permission to suspend Parliament until January. In other words, he's just shut the legislature down so it can't do anything.

I'm very gung-ho on using as much of this stimulus money as possible to jumpstart a green economy. That's actually the major shortcoming I see in most of the proposals I've seen on how this 500 or so billion is going to be spent. But I'm not sure I get the response to Obama's apparent decision to shelve the windfall profits tax on the big oil companies. As the name implies, windfall profits taxes are intended to tax windfall profits. But the cost of oil has now dropped to something like a third of what it was when this idea was floated. So I'm really not getting how this is breaking a promise or currying favor with the oil companies. This seems like a pretty straightforward case of adjusting policy to take account of demonstrable and undeniable changes in the economic picture.

What am I missing?

They're still not saying much specifically publicly on policy issues, but the transition team tells TPM Election Central that Obama remains committed to rolling back oil company subsidies.

Paulson: Give me one more hit of cheap credit, man, and then I promise to straighten out.

Is Chris Matthews really going to run for U.S. Senate? That and the day's other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

Late Update: Matthews trailing Senator Arlen Specter by only three in new poll. --gs

Congressional Quarterly bemoans Obama's broken promise of a bipartisan cabinet since he's only appointed one Republican to one of the top three positions in government -- State, Defense and Treasury ...

Now that President-elect Barack Obama's Cabinet is, by his count, half picked, the odds are fading that he'll have more than one Republican on his team -- suggesting that his campaign promise to include Republicans may have meant nothing more than the usual token appointment from the other side.

Obama did attract a lot of attention by asking Robert Gates to stay on as Defense secretary, and liberals have debated whether he's the right man to oversee a withdrawal of troops from Iraq. But that debate overshadows the fact that Gates isn't likely to have much, or even any, company. Of the Cabinet jobs that are left at this point, virtually all are domestic policy positions that would be hard to give to a Republican without prompting vicious internal fights, and it's almost impossible to find Republicans who have been mentioned as candidates for any of them.

I guess maybe it's a slow news period and there's not much to write about. But this is about as nonsensical as it gets. In recent decades it hasn't been particularly common for presidents to have any appointees from the opposite party. And when they do it's usually like Bush appointing Norman Minetta to be Transportation Secretary, a secondary cabinet post of no real consequence to the president in question.

Obama's put not only a Republican but his predecessor's choice in charge of the Pentagon. He's also named as his National Security Advisor a retired general who appears also to be a Republican, albeit one who was advising Obama during the campaign and not a particularly ideological sort.

I don't have any problem with Obama's cabinet picks so far. But it's certainly true that Democrats with a high partisan profile haven't figured prominently among his major appointments, with the notable exception of Rahm Emanuel.

I guess the idea is that Obama could only have come through on his promise of governing in a bipartisan spirit by staffing a cabinet with half Democrats and half Republicans.

Go figure.

Bob Reich explains why Wall Street beats out schools for the bailout bucks.

Seems that special prosecutor tasked with investigating various possible criminal acts in the US Attorney firing scandal has been in touch with our old pal Alberto Gonzales.

Nixon meta-biographer Rick Perlstein passes on word ...

Nixon did it "governmentally" within months of ascending to office, tapping reporters and NSC staffers suspected of being involved in leaks on the Cambodia bombing. 

Indeed, I'd figure the cointelpro operation would likely figure into the mix as well. But as I told Rick, for me this was a case where the larger comedic impact and Stonian effrontery trumped the broader issue of massive factual inaccuracy.

As you can see, I did an interview with famed, notorious, outrageous GOP political operative Roger Stone yesterday. We posted a preview of the interview today. But my favorite moment came when he was explaining his lack of support for President Bush and particularly the element of that non-support tied to Bush's terrible record on civil liberties. So at one point he's listing through the fact that various previous Republican president's had ever done such things. And as he's running through the list of past GOPers who didn't do wiretapping, he gets to Nixon, cracks a hint of a smile and says that "Nixon didn't do it governmentally," i.e., Nixon may have done it as a private criminal enterprise directed from the White House. But he didn't do it as a matter of governmental policy.

I'm not sure that's actually even true. But this fine-grained distinction was the moment of the interview I enjoyed most.

You can see the moment I'm talking about at about 3:10 into the preview clip below ...

I thought the rumblings about Hillary being barred from serving as Secretary of State by the Constitution's Emoluments Clause was some half-baked right-wing theory on par with Obama's supposedly fake U.S. birth certificate. But apparently Congress is taking the matter seriously enough to reduce the Secretary of State's salary to get around the problem, and Nancy Pelosi supports the move.

The topsy-turvy Minnesota Senate race just took another twist when the Al Franken camp announced on a conference call with reporters that it believes Franken is now ahead of Sen. Norman Coleman in the recount -- by less than two dozen votes.

This is predicated on the Franken camp's methodology for counting challenged ballots, which is not unreasonable but also not foolproof.

Election Central has the details.

We recently got a chance to gab with notorious political operative Roger Stone about his history in Republican politics, looking back on the Bush years, and his visions of the future. In this first installment Stone discusses his role in the 2000 Florida recount. Much more of our interview to come later...

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

We're still tracking down which senator put the secret hold on the nomination of Neil Barofsky as special inspector general overseeing the bailout. As we mentioned before, there are indications that the culprit is Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY), and now his press secretary, who wouldn't return our calls, is refusing to comment to the AP.

Walks like a duck ...

The other President holds another press conference this morning to announce he will be nominating New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson as Commerce Secretary. That and the day's other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

The AP and most of the major networks have called the Georgia Senate race for Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss.

That leaves the Democrats at least one seat and, depending on the outcome of the Minnesota recount, maybe two seats short of a filibuster-busting 60-vote majority in the Senate.

We'll be bringing you the results from the runoff in the Georgia Senate race tonight starting at 7 ET over there on the right in the TPM Election Scoreboard.

Stay tuned ...

Those uncounted ballots in the Minnesota Senate race have now been counted and Al Franken has netted an additional 37 votes.

An interesting comment from Defense Secretary Bob Gates a little while ago during a press conference. He was asked about the Mumbai attacks and suggested that the attackers were targeting Americans and Britons. Here's the exchange:

Reporter: Mr. Secretary, can you confirm that Admiral Mullen is on his way to India, can you outline the purpose his mission, and more broadly, can you talk about the Mumbai attacks and who you believe was responsible?

Gates: Well, I think -- y'know, I don't want to get into the intelligence that we have. I would like to commend the Indians for their restraint at this point. Admiral Mullen is in the area, as is Secretary Rice, as you know, and frankly, because the situation's fairly delicate, I don't want to say too much about it. It clearly was the action of an extremist group that apparently was targeting Americans and Britons, and -- but the truth is most of the people who were killed were Indians, and so it's important that we find out who did it and try and prevent it from ever happening again.

It's certainly possible that Gates has intelligence that backs up this claim about the targets being Brits and Yankees. But as Jeff Stein reported yesterday for CQ, the nature and manner of the attacks really don't lead to the conclusion that Westerners were the targets, despite initial press reports that claimed as much. Fareed Zakaria has made a similar observation, noting that the hotels attacked are Indian-owned and now attract the local elite, more so than the Western hotels in Mumbai where foreigners congregate.

If Americans and Brits were the targets of these attacks and Indians merely innocent bystanders, that would and should dramatically shift the U.S. response. But I need to see more. There's plenty of bad blood between India and Pakistan, and especially between extremists in both countries, without the U.S. inserting itself in the middle as the intended victim here.

The GAO has just released an initial report on how the Treasury Department is handling the $700 billion TARP program. As you might expect, things are a bit rough around the edges, to put it politely. For example, Treasury has not yet decided whether it will make participating banks report back on how they are using the bailout monies. Zachary Roth is blogging the report at TPMmuckraker.

Remember the primaries? When it was all Mittens and varmints, Kucinich and UFOs, and Terry McAuliffe with a bottle of rum on Morning Joe? Oh, those were the days. Join TPMtv for a special stroll down memory lane.

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

Nearly 200 ballots that somehow managed not to get counted since Election Day have turned up in a Minnesota precinct that went for Al Franken.

More here.

Here's a very illuminating episode of PBS's 'Now' about the ratings agencies and their role in the crisis, sent along by TPM Reader JW.

I've already mentioned that we're trying to redeploy some of our resources to focus on the financial crisis, particularly the potential muckraking angles. And as we do so I keep coming back to the ratings agencies. Bubbles are an inherent and recurrent feature of financial markets. And there are plenty of roots to this crisis. But at a basic level we're talking about lots of big players paying wildly inflated prices for crap and then having investors running up the stock prices of the big players because they didn't realize that there was so much crap on the books. And that sounds like a systemic failure of the role rating agencies are supposed to play in well functioning markets.

As we've looked into this I was surprised to learn that the major rating agencies are paid by the companies they rate, which certainly creates perverse incentives.

So, we're actively in the hunt for our Finance Blogger to help us dig further into these stories. And our own reporting continues here today. But our readers are always our best resource, our competitive advantage as a news operation. And I know we've got a lot of TPM Readers in the financial services industry and the financial press. So help us come up to speed. Send me your thoughts and insights. Point us to the best articles on the topic. It seems obvious to me that there's a big story here. I've got a sense of the structural issues involved. But I'm interested in getting a better grasp of what happened over the last few years, what's been different. I'm looking for the details.

Not terribly surprising. But for those looking for my insight or reassurance on the decision to retain Gates at DOD, this article in today's Post explains that virtually all of his deputies will be given their walking papers. What I'd be curious about in the case of Gates is whether he's even sorry to see them go.

As you probably know, subsequent history and reporting has not been kind to the claim that Russia, not Georgia, instigated the hostilities between the two countries last August. And now Georgia's President Saakashvili has repaired to the Oped page of the Wall Street Journal to insist that he's getting a bad rap.

After that great run as chairman of the RNC, Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL) is reportedly not running for re-election in 2010. Presser shortly ....

Late Update: It's official.

Big news orgs help Bush whitewash history of Iraq War.

A Texas judge has thrown out those indictments of Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzalez that we thought, correctly it turned out, were little more than a publicity stunt by a run-amok South Texas prosecutor.

Upon dismissing the indictments, the judge admonished the prosecutor: "I suggest on behalf of the law that you not present any cases to the grand jury involving these defendants."

It's election day in Georgia, where Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R) is trying to hold off Jim Martin (D) in the Senate runoff. Polls close at 7 p.m. ET, and we'll have results here on the front page. That and the rest of the day's political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

I'm reading an interesting article at the Journal about the second-try presentations the big three are planning to make to Congress. A very interesting read. But as much as we hear about executive compensation I was still a little struck by this line: Ford CEO Alan Mullaly "has earned close to $50 million in total compensation since taking the helm of Ford in 2006."

It was Mullaly who, when asked at that hearing whether he'd be willing to take a $1 salary in exchange for federal aid said: "I think I'm OK where I am."

A Reader who knows the intersection of US and Israeli politics checks in on Netanyahu ...

Love the Bibi post. You are spot on - I think everyone has stories that will back up your characterization of him. I also think that if he doesn't play ball with the Obama team and their desire to reach an agreement, then he will end up being persona non-grata in DC like he was with the Clinton administration. And that's the last place an Israeli PM can find himself. That was one of the factors that led to his loss to Barak in '99. it'll be interesting to see how this potential relationship plays out...

TPM Reader DR updates us on the Tory trainwreck up North ...

Nice of you to notice, given the amount of time I've spent reading TPM for the last year...the best source ever for US election politics.

Anyway, the answer up here is Hell, yeah!

Stephen Harper didn't so much win enough seats to form a minority government in October; the Liberals simply lost dozens of seats because of a terrible campaign and a weak leader. Now that leader is poised to become prime minister of a coalition government.

Harper, who admires Bush's politics and tactics, is actually smarter than Bush. But he's much nastier, and chose a poor time to try to stick a machete into the opposition parties by cutting off their public funding for election campaigns (can you imagine Obama, upon assuming office, trying to eliminate public campaign financing?) and the entire civil service by banning their right to strike. That, and being the only G8 country to not initiate any financial stimulus for the economy.

Like Bush, Harper has contempt for government. Unlike Bush, that contempt extends to public spending: he hates it and would be delighted to see government as little more than a placid flow through mechanism for the private sector as it does whatever it wants.

Look north for the next few days...it's going to be fun!

I really can't think of another political leader of late whose hubris has had such immediate consequences.

Did Canadian PM Stephen Harper (attempted tamperer in the Dem primary election) manage to bumble his way out of a job? Looking more likely.

Late Update: Needless to say, a lot of people have been noticing and watching this. My question above was addressing the almost complete lack of comment on these developments in the US press. Ian Walsh at Firedoglake has been on the case. As is this diarist at Kos.

What a pro ... Joan Walsh administers a nice smackdown to Christopher Hitchens on Hardball. We'll grab the video.

Late Update: Here's the video:

Is Sen. Bunning (R-KY) the Republican senator who secretly blocked the confirmation of an Inspector General to oversee the $700 billion we've forked over to stabilize the financial sector?

Our readers have gotten hard or soft 'no's from Sens. Coburn, Dole, Allard, Coleman, Warner, Hatch, Corker, Shelby, Sessions, Inhofe and Bond saying it's not them. But there's some reason to think the culprit is Sen. Bunning and he won't answer our request for comment about whether he's the guy.

I hate Obama for nominating so many people who've served in government before.

Late Update: I think it's a telling sign of the moment that the sarcasm of this remark was lost on more than a few readers.

Later Update: Even more telling that even after the last late update people are still writing in saying it's going too far to actually 'hate' Obama for his cabinet appointees? Newsflash: I was being facetious. Sheesh ...

There's a lot of speculation about what Obama's foreign policy picks mean. But what was and remains clear to me is that Obama, like most but by no means all Democrats, believes that settling the mess of interconnected messes in the Middle East starts with a negotiated settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Progress on virtually every other front can likely only be tentative at best until that issue is resolved.

Note, for instance, that Gen. Jones, Obama's National Security Advisor (remember, he doesn't need to be confirmed) made his post-military reputation as the US envoy helping to create the beginnings of possible Israeli-Palestinian coexistence in Jenin. Brent Scowcroft, who is I believe the key force behind the retention of Bob Gates, believes as a cardinal matter that you can't really solve anything in the Middle East before you get the Israeli-Palestinian problem settled.

And yet in Israel it's not at all unlikely that by February Bibi Netanyahu could be the Prime Minister again in Israel. I guess there's always the argument that you need a Nixon to go to China, that you need someone with impeccable security credentials on the Israeli side to make a lasting peace. That's one of abiding tragedies of Ariel Sharon's stroke. (It's ironic that Netanyahu, who's got a thin national security resume by Israeli standards, should be seen in that light since verbal and policy aggression are his only real calling cards. But that's another story ...) But Netanyahu is not only the voice of Israeli territorial maximalism, albeit in its current more limited form, he's also fundamentally unreliable person -- a charlatan.

For those of us who are heartened to finally have an administration that realizes this issue is as critical as it is, it's a very disheartening prospect on the horizon.

Just after the November election, I told you how we were expanding our original reporting capacity in Washington by hiring two new reporter-bloggers, one to focus on Capitol Hill and another on the White House and executive branch.

I'm extremely pleased to announce that we've now hired the first of the two. Elana Schor will start at TPM the beginning of next month. She's covered Capitol Hill for The Guardian for the last year and before that she covered the senate for The Hill newspaper for three years.

(We hope to hire the second DC reporter-blogger in the next few weeks, in time for them to hit the ground running with the new administration.)

To date, our original reporting has been mainly, though not exclusively, old-fashioned phone reporting from our offices here in NY or from our Muckraker reporters' home offices in DC. But as we expand our operation to chronicle the unfolding story of the new Democratic Ascendancy (of unknown duration) in Washington, DC we felt like a more on-the-ground, in-person dimension to our blog reporting was required. And with that in mind, our plan is to have our Capitol Hill reporter-blogger reporting from Capitol Hill every day. So this will be, among other things, an experiment in mobile blogging.

We're excited, both about the story that's before us and the chance to keep innovating in the field of digital news reporting and aggregation. So a big welcome to Elana and a thanks to you, our regular readers, who've made our continued expansion possible.

More on the Mumbai attacks and on the group emerging as most likely responsible for them:

I thought it was an article of faith that they would have done it anyway.

From ABC ...

"A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein," Bush said. "It wasn't just people in my administration. A lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington, D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence.

"I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess," Bush added.

When pressed by Gibson, Bush declined to "speculate" on whether he would still have gone to war if he knew Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction.

"That is a do-over that I can't do," Bush said.

You may not know this. But an anonymous Republican senator has put a hold on the nomination of the nomination of Neil Barofsky, President Bush's appointee to serve as the Treasury Department's Inspector General for the $700+ of bailout money. Having some idea of how we're spending that money and whether crooks or fraudsters are getting a big chunk of it is a pretty big deal.

So who is it? Who's preventing the IG's confirmation? The senate has some very hoary traditions about keeping this stuff secret. But with your help we can at least narrow down the possibilities. Basically, as we've done before, if you're in one of these states, call up your senator and ask them? Some will give a clear no, others will refuse to say one way or another. And from there we'll start narrowing down the possibilities. We're organizing the process over at TPMmuckraker.com. Come by and check it out.

It's being called India's own 9/11. After a 3-day terrorist siege in Mumbai resulting in nearly 200 people dead, the question now is who is responsible and what are the challenges for the international community to prevent a further escalation of regional tensions?

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

Obama rolls out his national security team this morning at a Chicago press conference, while Sarah Palin campaigns for Sen. Saxby Chambliss in Georgia. That and the other transition and political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

I shudder to think that the charlatan Netanyahu could soon again be Prime Minister of Israel.

Barack Obama is set to announce his whole national-security team tomorrow, most notably including Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State. That and other political news in today's Election Central Sunday Roundup.

Neal Gabler in the LAT ...

But there is another rendition of the story of modern conservatism, one that doesn't begin with Goldwater and doesn't celebrate his libertarian orientation. It is a less heroic story, and one that may go a much longer way toward really explaining the Republican Party's past electoral fortunes and its future. In this tale, the real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn't run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn't likely to be expunged any time soon.

It's really, really official: Hillary will be named Obama's Secretary of State tomorrow in Chicago, a person close to Hillary confirms.