The people have spoken. President Obama has won a chance to move beyond the stunted progress of his first term and, perhaps, become a historic president. On the losing side, the Republican Party remains shut out of the White House and has blown a chance to take over the U.S. Senate, largely because it catered to the narrow concerns of tea party zealots and social conservatives who imagined themselves as the only authentic Americans but who are, in fact, way out of step with most of the people in this country.

If Republicans fail to learn the lesson of this election they are fools. If they continue to let Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity set the angry, extreme tone for their philosophy; if they continue to let anti-science religious fundamentalists dictate their social agenda; and if they think Mitt Romney fell short because he was not conservative enough when, in fact, he only began to catch on with moderate voters when he suddenly veered from his self-proclaimed “severe...

Here’s a big announcement to kick off election day: President Obama is winning by a landslide in the David Horsey Totally Skewed Facebook Poll.

Monday night, I posted the following question on my Facebook page: “So, just for the heck of it, who wants to make a prediction on the presidential race?” The response was about 10 to 1 for Obama, which is no surprise since my extended circle of “friends” leans predominantly to the left. If my predecessors – Andy Malcom, the previous writer of the Top of the Ticket blog, and Michael Ramirez, The Times’ last editorial cartoonist – put out a similar question to their friends, there is no doubt Mitt Romney would be seen as inevitable. That is because I know who their friends are. Malcolm and Ramirez are two very talented guys, but they make Attila the Hun look like a community organizer.

Whatever the political stripes of the questioner or questionees, though, such a query posed to any group of voters...

Tens of thousands of campaign ads have been purchased from television stations in the swing states this year. In Ohio, for the presidential race alone, spending on TV advertisements is at $181 million and mounting.

The majority of these ads are negative -- and not just the mildly critical attacks of yore. Whoever is putting together political ads in 2012 has dispensed with any regard for decency, honesty or truth. For the voters who must suffer through them as the ads fill their television screens, the best rule of thumb is to assume they are all lies. It may not be the case in every instance, but accuracy is so rare that it is not worth the effort of trying to sift through the distortions and deceit to find the few nuggets of truth.

As the 2012 presidential race heads into its last weekend, it would be nice to discover that the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on attack ads have been wasted -- that voters simply shut them out or shut them off and find their information about the...

On his Comedy Central show Wednesday night, Stephen Colbert charged that hurricanes have a liberal bias -- and who can disagree? Katrina sank President George W. Bush, Isaac knocked a day off the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., and now Sandy may be messing with Mitt.

Thanks to Hurricane Sandy, one of the Romney campaign's top surrogates has been standing before microphones and going on TV to rain praise on President Obama. Yes, Chris Christie, New Jersey's Republican governor, the guy who gave the keynote address in Tampa, has suddenly gotten all nonpartisan merely because his state has been devastated by a super storm. Where are his priorities?

Christie and the president toured the disaster scene together, looking and talking like a mutual admiration society and giving the distinct impression that they believe a national emergency is far more important than a presidential campaign. What’s a guy like Romney supposed to do with thatwith less than a week to go...

Hurricane Sandy's devastating intrusion into the final days of the presidential race would have at least one positive result if it inspired President Obama and Mitt Romney to finally address a huge issue they have ignored throughout the long campaign: climate change.

After the firestorms that swept the West amid a merciless drought and the killer tornadoes and freak storms that battered the Midwest, South and East Coast, Sandy is just 2012's latest screaming reminder that our weather is becoming a much more destructive force. Sandy is an example of a weather phenomenon we have not seen before -- a confluence of hurricane, cold air and an altered jet stream that created a monster storm stretching from the Caribbean to Canada and from the Atlantic to Chicago.

Until recently, climate scientists were careful not to attribute any single weather event to global climate change. But, in the last couple of days, a number of scientists have filed Twitter posts that essentially say, "We told you...

It is impossible to know if Mitt Romney would turn out to be a good, bad or a mediocre president, but one certain downside of a Romney victory is that it would reward the most venal forces in American politics.

It only starts with the kind of campaign Romney has run. He and his "super PAC" allies used a mountain of dollars to produce unending waves of attack ads that swamped the messages of his Republican primary rivals, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. In the general election, Romney cranked it up a notch. President Obama’s own money machine paid for a slew of hard-hitting attacks against Romney that employed exaggeration and selective facts, but none of the Obama ads reached the same low level of deception as those put up by Romney as he zeroed in on the president.

Of course, disgustingly misleading attack ads have become ubiquitous at all levels of politics this year. Whether Romney wins or loses, that is unlikely to change. Still, seeing a campaign for president propelled to...

Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, the tea party usurper who took down Sen. Richard Lugar in the Republican primary, created the biggest political buzz of the week by uttering the following sentence in a televised debate: “I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, it is something that God intended to happen.” 

In an exercise that is becoming repetitive this year, slightly more sane Republicans like Mitt Romney and John McCain were forced to disassociate themselves from the comments of one of their political compatriots – not that Romney put much distance between himself and Mourdock. Romney is maintaining his vigorous support of Mourdock, since keeping the Indiana seat in GOP hands is key to a Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate.

Besides, if he were to forsake Mourdock because the man does not favor an abortion exemption for women impregnated by rapists, he would also have to cut ties to as many as 11 other Republican Senate candidates...

If you live in Ohio, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are giving you a lot of love. But if you reside in California or Alabama, you may feel neglected and ignored by the candidates for president. Like parents in a big, noisy family, all their attention goes to the troublesome kids, not the compliant, quiet ones.

There has never been much doubt that states such as California, New York, Massachusetts and Washington would give their electoral votes to the president, and no doubt that Romney could depend on states such as Alabama, South Carolina, Texas and South Dakota to be solidly in his camp. All but about 10 states lined up months ago for one candidate or the other. Now it looks as if the number of states still up for grabs has dropped to seven.

As a result, there is really not a national campaign going on. All the effort and money for many weeks has been focused on voters in the swing states. Since, under the U.S. Constitution, the electoral vote, not the popular vote, determines who will...

Another debate brought out another version of Mitt Romney. This third time around, the chameleon candidate was not the hard-charging neo-con hawk of the primaries. Instead, he talked about peace, negotiations and using military power as a last resort. 

He also was not the pushy CEO who commandeered the first debate or the combative sparring partner of Debate 2. From the first minute in this discussion of foreign policy, President Obama tried to pick a fight, but Romney was just ducking punches. Heck, after the Romney smack-down Jim Lehrer suffered back in the first debate, Bob Schieffer, Monday night’s moderator, was barely even badgered by this kinder and gentler Mitt. 

Yes, Romney took shots at Obama's foreign policy, calling it weak and apologetic, but then he proceeded to agree with the nearly every aspect of what the president has done, from Libya to Iran. He abandoned his criticism of Obama's timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and said he would bring the...

The 2012 presidential campaign has largely been a nasty, uninspiring slog toward election day, but there have been moments of hilarity, wonderful absurdity and even a bit of hope – reminders that politics can be fun.

My cartoon today is in that spirit. When the starlet with the extra-messy life, Lindsay Lohan, announced she was likely voting for the ultra-straight-laced Mitt Romney, I just had to get the two together in a cartoon. And I could not resist tossing in a reference to women in binders. In the second presidential debate, Romney said that, in seeking more females for positions in his gubernatorial Cabinet in Massachusetts, he came up with “binders full of women.” It was the latest odd example of how the Republican nominee sometimes packages his thoughts, and it immediately went viral.

The funniest riffs on Romney’s comment came in a flurry of bogus product reviews on the Amazon Web page where binders and other office supplies are sold. Here is an excerpt...