Cartoonists have no taste for accounting, but we budget plenty of time to analyze the numbers racket in Washington. Mike Luckovich pictured a pack of pachyderms while smelling a rodent in the rotunda. Tom Toles, sensing we're not being given a fair shot, took aim at budgetary blind spots. And Dan Wasserman looked past the short-term shortfalls to the bigger picture. Not fiscal, of course, but political, just a couple of short falls from now. That's our bottom line, right there in black ink.

-- Joel Pett

Editorial cartoon by Mike Luckovich / Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Editorial cartoon by Tom Toles / Washington Post

Editorial cartoon by Dan Wasserman / Boston Globe

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Joel Pett is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky. His cartoons also appear in USA Today.