With the election over, here are The Guardian's Ana Marie Cox and Huffington Post political reporter Jason Linkins to sift through the latest photos from the White House's Flickr feed and help us anticipate what the Obama second term might have in store (spoiler: great jackets, Joe Biden hugs).

Jason: I was gonna start by pointing out that if there's one picture that encapsulates why we have gotten four more years of scrutinizing the Obama/Biden/Souza administration, it's this one.

Ana Marie: Oh. My. God.

Jason: This is like, the purest distillation of the Romney campaign.

Ana Marie: Mitt waving at people through a chain-link [...]

"I’m a tattoo guy, and it was something fun. I was trying to make politics fun. I didn't change no lives; I’m no hero. But I shed blood for this campaign, and I’m glad to know that I did all that I could." —The Indiana man who got a 5-inch-long Mitt Romney logo tattooed on the side of his face has no regrets.

Ten days ago, in Nashua, New Hampshire, Barack Obama gave what had become his standard, sluggish 2012 appeal to a passive crowd of 8,000 voters. A week later, up the road in Concord, though, the confidence of 2008 was back. The crowd of 14,000 had that old Hopey and Changey buzz. Standing stage left were the Davids Axelrod and Plouffe looking very happy to be on the verge of another victory. He closed the campaign with Jay Z, who is obviously now a socialist. What had changed in the interceding week? Had Sandy jolted Barack Obama back in line, even as it had, to borrow Nate Silver's observation, "[...]

In just a few hours, most every functioning television screen on the Eastern Seaboard will be showing NBC's new mid-season replacement reality series, Hurricane Sandy: Coming Together. And we aren't the only ones who smell an entire river of dead rats. Fox News, for example, has an interesting take that is mostly "interesting" for its picture of Kanye at the top of the story. (Kanye West isn't scheduled to do the benefit tonight, but he did say something about George W. Bush at another hurricane benefit, seven years ago. And Kanye is also black … much like Obama.)

The Annotated White House Flickr Feed continues with another special Election 2012 edition (you'll find the previous installment here). Here are The Guardian's Ana Marie Cox and Huffington Post political reporter Jason Linkins to compare the campaigns. When did the Romney team learn about Instagram? How long till they also hear about "autofocus"? How many windbreakers does Paul Ryan own? And who does John Sununu hate more: Barack Obama or Lena Dunham?

ANA MARIE: So, they're INSTAGRAMMING or something now.

JASON: This image, is like at Ahmadinejad levels of obvious Photoshop fakeness.

ANA MARIE: Sort of like Romney's tan.

JASON: [...]

Legendary maniac Larry King will emcee the third presidential debate. Think about this. Our grand 2012 debate season began with a confused shark-eyed zombie, moved up to a cool and serious lady for the Biden-Ryan thing, and then got all ethical and fact-checky with Candy Crowley. The only possible "big finish" is to bring in a hundred-year-old Vaudeville/CNN star from the Golden Age of Radio for the final debate. Will David Lynch direct? It will be the most historical moment in Larry King's career since he found something weird in his slipper this morning and also thought he heard the great Walter Matthau speaking through a poinsettia in [...]

Are you tired of gimmicky livebloggers who care more about their gimmicks than the substance of the presidential debates? Tonight, at The Awl, put all that cheap trash aside and join your night typists Choire Sicha and Ken Layne for basically a deadly earnest typewritten version of "Talk of the Nation." JK, it will be a lot of outrage about Romney's sideburns and Obama's inner sadness and Candy Crowley's journamalism. DO NOT MISS IT, and please join our "Countdown To Democracy" beginning at 7 p.m., with actual debate liveblogging commencing with the actual debate, at 9 p.m.

"Gone are the minute-by-minute schedules and the swarm of Secret Service agents. There’s no aide to make his peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches. Romney hangs around the house, sometimes alone, pecking away at his iPad and e-mailing his CEO buddies who have been swooping in and out of La Jolla to visit. He wrote to one who’s having a liver transplant soon: 'I’ll change your bedpan, take you back and forth to treatment.'" —"A detached Romney tends wounds in seclusion after failed White House bid," Washington Post

No one at the homeless shelter in downtown Los Angeles recognized the man serving them soup on a post-Thanksgiving weekend. Disheveled and dressed down, [...]

Congratulations to Pres Obama and his team on their terrific victory..

— Jack Welch (@jack_welch) November 7, 2012

One of the weirdest words to infiltrate Election 2012 wasn't "binders" or "rape." It was "classy," as in some guy in sweatpants surveying the omelet bar at an Embassy Suites buffet and saying to his wife, "This is a classy joint, they got shrimps in the eggs and everything."

But now, in this glorious second term of Barack Obama's imperial socialist presidency, "classy" is used to describe a powerful plutocrat when he briefly controls his vulgarian outbursts for long enough to express basic good manners. The right-wing wealthy [...]

With the election tomorrow, the Annotated White House Flickr Feed takes one last fond look at the campaign photos streaming out from Election 2012. Here to make sense of the images are The Guardian's Ana Marie Cox and Huffington Post political reporter Jason Linkins. This week's important discoveries: The Romney team's love affair with Instagram is flourishing; Paul Ryan may have a good reason for always wearing that windbreaker; if Barack's going out, he's going out his way; and meet Joe Biden, HUG MACHINE.

ANA MARIE: This looks really apocalyptic to me, for some reason.

JASON: Ahh, yes, Red Rocks, where the white people [...]

With 11 complicated ballot measures—all of them state constitutional amendments, all of them far-reaching and bizarre—the ballot for election day in Florida runs to ten pages. Already several days before election day, lines are running long at voting places in Miami Beach—so long that candidates for local office can work the voting lines, reports a local spy, because the voters lined up are well over 100 feet from the actual polling place. Among other measures, the ballot gives voters the opportunity to amend the constitution to:

• Not use public funds for abortion

• A crazy Tea Party judge selection amendment, which is basically an attempt to get [...]

"It has been one of the running mysteries of the 2012 campaign trail: How Mitt Romney maintains the ruddy, glowing, and occasionally changing skin tone that helps him project an image of 65-year-old vigor." —Yes, that's been the mystery. Anyway, two reporters crack the case.

Americans watch presidential debates to serve many different goals. Older people need shameless pandering, because they are lonely. Corporate ladder-climbers need "water cooler talk." And the nation's much-maligned "undecided voters" want to put a face to a name, so they can vote for the white person.

For a certain small but social-media-savvy demographic of needy political fanatics, debates are an opportunity to quickly identify memes and catch phrases and then recycle these memorable bits into short-lived Internet destinations. Time is of the essence, because this stuff is utterly forgotten within 48 hours—by the time Saturday Night Live gets to it on the weekend, it's all over.

If you didn't [...]

"A Republican familiar with Romney’s internal polling and focus groups told us: 'What women saw in Obama is kind of the interesting but arrogant guy that turns them off.. … What they saw in Mitt was a reliable father. He showed women that he’s a listener. Obama in the first debate was the husband who says: ‘That’s your problem? Here’s the solution.’ Mitt was the husband who says: ‘Well, you, know I’ve been thinking about this. I’ve got some ideas. You wanna talk about them?’ Women want to know that you listen to them.'"

"You can’t expect to be a leader of all the people and be divisive. Someone asked me, Why did Mitt Romney lose? And I said because he got less votes than Barack Obama, that's why." —New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has decided to keep his new, post-Sandy personality.

I'm relieved that the parties are less racially polarized than some polling suggested.

— Franklin Foer (@FranklinFoer) November 7, 2012

Oh yes? You don't want to buy the argument that white people are tribally clinging to a raft built by rich fellow white people, in part as an attempt to float away from the scary brown gay immigrants?

So then what happened last night? "Mr. Obama won despite losing the support of white voters by wide margins. Overall, he lost this group by 19 percentage points, even larger than his 12-point loss in 2008," says the New York Times. Now American politics has an [...]

Election Day is … not quite over, is it? But it's close enough to finally read those liberal Electoral College projections that have predicted a solid Obama win since forever. If it turns out that Mitt Romney already lost, as John Ziegler wrote in the Huffington Post today, then the most important thing is to find something (or someone) to blame. Oh, look, there's a $100-million punching bag right over there! His name is Mittens, and he's not even a real Christian, so have at him!

It's Hurricane Sandy's Fault

GOP caricature Haley Barbour was sent out to tell CNN viewers that Hurricane Sandy killed Mitt's longshot chance. [...]

My 8 year old trick or treated as Artemis Fowl, but people in Brooklyn thought he was Mitt Romney and were actually kind of mean to him :(

— Ben Smith (@BuzzFeedBen) November 1, 2012

":(" indeed.

That chill in the air tonight is not just a real alive Halloween monster crawling up your leg. It's actually Josh Romney, helping the Halloween monster, because there is a chance you are a liberal who "offended Dad" by thinking maybe Barack Obama sort of won the second debate? Whatever happens tonight, during this third and final human-hybrid death wrangle, consider this live blog a "safe house" that Chris Matthews can never enter, because of the voodoo amulets we've hung from all the windows and doors. And yet we enjoy the online video from MSNBC, because it works so well … and Brian Williams is being super [...]

You can join us here! And by join us, we mean actually join in this time! (There's a button! It says "Ask to Join.") Here we are, it's America's COUNTDOWN TO DEMOCRACY.