Jim Cole / AP Photo

It’s a bit shocking to hear one of the major players in the White House’s effort to curb gun violence encouraging his own wife to arm herself, but that’s our Joe. And, honestly, among all of the arguments for banning assault weapons, Vice President Biden’s advice to his wife, Jill, may be the most persuasive.

Phil Gingrey sympathized with Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. Read more inflammatory comments on rape.

Robert Kozloff, Courtesy of The University of Chicago / AP Photo

President Obama’s top reelection strategist conceded surprise Monday that Republican super PACS didn’t attack Obama far earlier, Mitt Romney didn’t invest much more in ground operations, and that the Republican nominee played narrowly to the party base in picking Rep.

(L) Larry D. Moore (R) @Timothy-P-Carney / Facebook

In the weeks following the presidential election, a number of prominent conservatives, stunned by the scale of Mitt Romney’s loss, took to the cable-news circuit, offering heterodoxies and heresies designed to save a wounded party.

Toby Jorrin, AFP / Getty Images ; Steve Pope / Getty Images

So here is the Republican Party reinventing itself. The GOP majority in the Ohio legislature rushes to defund Planned Parenthood in its post-election session. The orange-tinted speaker of the House proposes to undo Obamacare through “oversight” in the name of “solving our debt and restoring prosperity.

Much has already been written about the influence of outside spending on this election cycle. One could make a compelling argument that in 2010 super PACs were undervalued, especially by Democrats. Conversely, one could argue that in 2012 the impact of these groups was overestimated, this time to the detriment of Republicans.

AP Photo (2); Boston Globe / Getty Images (bottom, left)

Remember 2008? The race when Tucker Carlson said he involuntarily crossed his legs whenever he caught sight of Hillary Clinton on television. When hecklers screamed “iron my shirt!” at her during a campaign stop. When her clothes and hairstyles were chronicled obsessively in the media.

David Goldman; Eric Gay / AP Photo

To paraphrase the traditional Passover formulation honored in Jewish homes: why was this election different from all other elections? What makes 2012 stand out in recent political history, either as a temporary anomaly or a significant, long-term shift in the electorate?The most striking change in the results this year involved a precipitous and alarming decline in voter participation, a drop-off that stemmed from a deliberate strategy by the Obama campaign and almost certainly provided the president with his margin of victory.

Nam Y. Huh / AP Photo

I had the idea for FiveThirtyEight (which refers to the number of votes in the Electoral College) while waiting out a delayed flight at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport in February 2008. For some reason—possibly the Cajun martinis had stirred something up—it suddenly seemed obvious that someone needed to build a website that predicted how well Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, then still in heated contention for the Democratic nomination, would fare against John McCain.

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Early Wednesday morning, Barack Obama appeared before thousands of cheering supporters in Chicago and for the first time in a long time sounded like a president. The victory speech lingered on a little too long, but hey—after an all-but-miraculous reelection, I’ll cut him a little slack.

Photo Illustration by Newsweek

For the TV pundit ART: The pundits have been talking for months about the candidates duking it out, so now it’s time for them to witness some real fighting. They’ll be able to do that in the George Bellows show about to open at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where the best works are the stunning, bloody boxing pictures that the artist painted just before World War I.

Emmanuel Dunand / AFP / Getty Images

When Republican fundraisers solicited the party’s big donors on behalf of Mitt Romney this year, the centerpiece of the pitch was a state-of-the-art campaign to identify the party’s likely voters and make sure they came to the polls on Election Day.

Geographers have put together an unsettling interactive map of the racist states of America, tracking a slew of bigoted speech on Twitter following President Obama’s reelection. Hate speech and tweets calling the president a monkey came primarily from the Southeast, according to the map, and were heavily concentrated in Mississippi and Alabama.

DON EMMERT

Nobody likes to be called a loser. And nobody likes to be at fault. So after losing the White House to a supposedly socialist, secret Muslim for the second time in four years, the Grand Old Party started its latest finger-pointing campaign: assigning others the blame for losing the presidential election.

Olivier Douliery / Corbis

Speculating on a team for President Obama’s second term is like working a jigsaw puzzle. Move Chief of Staff Jacob Lew to Treasury, which is widely anticipated, and you have to find the right person to fill Lew’s demanding job.