NBC and Fox News make their calls: Barack Obama is your 44th President of the United State of America.

Rupert Murdoch's pet Gotham tabloid may have endorsed John McCain and Murdoch's favorite lady politician, Sarah Palin, but the Post appears to be the first wing of the News Corporation empire to call the election for Barack Obama. The Post appears to have beaten even Murdoch's Fox News to the punch. It's a fast, scrappy call by a dead-trees publication. The paper's editorial page may declare McCain its true love, but the Post's front-page "wood" makes it clear Murdoch has plenty of love leftover for the Democrat (especially now that he's, uh, won). UPDATE: And after the jump, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal loudly puts Obama "on the verge:"

The Republican party is spreading the word "this thing is over," reported CNN, attributing its information to a "GOP insider." Ohio was the nail in the coffin, said correspondent Tara Wall, who got the scoop. We imagine dissections of the McCain campaign's mistakes and precious few moments of glory have already started on barstools throughout the nation. Video after the jump.

The saddest thing about the scene at John McCain's headquarters "party" in Columbus has to be the "Victory in Ohio" sign, captured in an near-poetic camera pan at the end of this video. The klieg lights probably aren't helping the McCain crew with its depression. Might we suggest bourbon?

Fox News has called Ohio (where Obama now leads, 57%-42%, with 8% of precincts reporting) for Obama, and CNN just teased a "big projection." Update: The news nets catch up with reality, after the jump. Updating our previous map, it is now inevitable that Barack Obama, noted author, law professor, community organizer, state Senator, convention keynoter, and US Senator, will be the 44th President of the United States, with a minimum of 284 electoral votes. Go wild kids!!! CNN makes their call So does Fox Click to view

This is looking pretty much over. McCain had few ways to win without Pennsylvania. He has nearly none without Ohio.

It appears we have the first media gaffe of the evening: Fox News called the swing state of Ohio, crucial to John McCain's hopes of an upset, for Barack Obama. It looks like a butterfingers on the graphics team got ahead of the network's decision desk, placing an all-important checkmark next to the picture of Obama and misleading anchor Brit Hume. UPDATE: And Karl Rove now says McCain needs a miracle, after Fox News officially called Ohio for Obama. Two videos are after the jump.

CNN has, as Barack Obama might put it, reshaped election night for the 21st Century, with holographic reporters and John King's famous, magical touchscreen. Over at Fox News, meanwhile, outgoing anchor Brit Hume is still coming to terms with basic "greenscreen" tech, the well-established technique in which a correspondent stands in front of a monochromatic background that is filled in later with special video equipment.

With states that have been called so far added to the obvious gimmes, Obama is a scant six electoral votes from victory. A victory in any of the gray states on this map will give him the presidency.

Here's Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, setting the mood for conservatives tonight on Fox News. He thinks it could be the worst election night for Republicans in 50 years, the second election in a row where the party loses seats in the Senate and House of Representatives, followed by a loss of the White House.

The above shot is from the swank party at Gawker Media overlord Nick Denton's SoHo loft. Obviously we can't all have elite LCD wall projectors and a fancy media crowd because some of us are stuck in John McCain's REAL America, or maybe Brooklyn. All the more reason to send us pictures of your electoral shindigs tonight. Help us diversify this post! Mail your shots (however blurry/explicit/incriminating) to tips@gawker.com or post in the comments. We'll keep your name out of it unless you tell us otherwise. (Elitist parties are OK too. Heck, encouraged, even.) After the jump, the exciting scene at Gawker HQ. UPDATE: And more! (Last new photo: 11:52 p.m.)

At 8:45, the news for Obama is more than decent:

In a call that suggests the Obama-blowout exit polls may be more right than wrong, MSNBC has called Pennsylvania for Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. Fox News is sticking with too-close-to-call.

We just knew CNN's magical holodeck was going to be hours of fun: Here's political correspondent Jessica Yellin delivering a report to election-night anchor Wolf Blitzer and looking, as Yellin herself pointed out, like no one so much as Star Wars' Princess Leia. The election may remain uncalled, but the future is now! Click the video icon to watch.

Here's what we know at 7:43:

The longest presidential campaign comes down to tonight. Here are your commenting hosts who will be dissecting the results, which you can follow on the handy-dandy map below.

[RETRACTION: Since posting these numbers, we've learned their original source and had we known at the time, they would not have gone up. We apologize for the error.] See, we told you not to get too excited. The first state exit polls have crossed our transom and they look like Obama's margins are tighter than recent polling in key states Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida. So hold your breath.

Before we tell you what we're hearing the exit poll numbers are saying, can we just remind you about Bob Shrum who famously asked John Kerry, after the 2004 early exit polls came out, "Can I be the first to call you Mr. President?" After the jump, the numbers we're hearing are floating around.

For once, the exit polling consortium seems to have kept a pretty tight lid on the exit poll numbers (so far!) that first raised and then dashed the hopes of so many John Kerry voters in 2004. But there's no reason that your vote can't be counted in an entirely unreliable tally. Below, tell us how you voted today, and be sure to come back at 7pm for our liveblog and coverage of the election results.

On this election day, the cold-blooded monsters like us whose business is our nation's flow of public information are thinking not about political hope, but about hope for continued high ratings; not about political change, but about people changing the channels. (Speechwriter-ly!). What it comes down to is this: once this election's over, will the public still care about all these media outlets who've been living it up thanks to public interest in politics? Let's round up the media's nervous take on the media's future!