Steve McDonald working on an F/A-18 Super Hornet nose barrel at Boeing-St. Louis in 2003. (Post-Dispatch/Gabriel B. Tait)

Sen. John McCain said last week that expensive Pentagon weapons systems “are very much like vampires. You can kill one occasionally, but not…

Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky was on a roll.
“Nothing makes me more angry … than the suggestion that America does not already have the finest health care in the world,” the Senate minority leader said Monday at a forum in…

One slight problem: the F-22 requires 30 hours of maintenance for every hour in flight.

Congress this week is engaged in one of those debates that makes you want to throw up your hands in despair over the political process. At…

Congressional Democrats have seen the future of American health care. It looks a lot like Massachusetts, and a little like John McCain, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
House Democratic leaders spelled out their prescriptions for reform this week. Their colleagues in…

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin

Rasmussen is out with an interesting poll today. Check it out here.

In the poll, more than half of Republican respondents said the party should be more like Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Only 11 percent said the party…

A shot from the"Lobstercam," a project of Maine Lobster Institute, beneficiary of a $188,000 federal earmark.

As we have noted before, one person’s “wasteful earmark project” is another person’s “vital public investment.” Nonetheless, any time two U.S. senators of such vastly different…

Janet Napolitano

Partisan critics already are deriding possible cabinet-level appointees that President-elect Barack Obama is vetting as recycled Democratic politicos from the President Clinton administration.

One apparent appointee _ Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano for Homeland Security secretary as cable news station CNN…

Post-Dispatch photo by J.B. Forbes

canard
ca·nard (kə -NÄRD)
n. 1. An unfounded or false, deliberately misleading story.

Here in the editorial/commentary/letters area of the newspaper, our principal mission is to analyze issues and advocate positions that are consistent with the values and principles of…

Voters cast their ballots Tuesday morning at Twillman Elementary School in Spanish Lake. John L. White | Post-Dispatch

On Tuesday, for the 55th time in the nation’s history, the United States held a presidential election. America voted.

It was 55,395 days since the…

Photo: EPA

I don’t care what the advance polls say: Right now, neither I nor anyone else knows who our next president will be. Nor can anyone say for certain why those who vote for Barack Obama or John McCain will do…

Endorsements: a response.

For the last month or so, the Post-Dispatch editorial board has been offering its recommendations on candidates and issues on Tuesday’s ballot. Endorsements always generate a lot of comment and that is the case again this year. Human…

William Hogarth: The Election I: An election entertainment (1754)

As near as we can tell, the 2008 presidential election first was referenced in the Post-Dispatch on Sept. 23, 2003, when then-New York Times columnist William Safire threw out the first name:…

Photo by Emmanuel Dunand AFP/GettyImages

SO NOW, in the waning days of the campaign, here is the alleged storyline: Those polls that show Barack Obama leading in the race against John McCain for president? Even widening his lead? Those polls are warped.…

Congress traditionally avoids controversial issues in the weeks between a presidential election and the Christmas holidays. This year may be different.
Spooked by the economy’s slow response to the $700 billion Wall Street rescue package passed in September and the erratic…

THE FOLLOWING paragraphs are from an actual published newspaper story about problems with voter registrations. I’ve edited out certain identifying information, so as not to spoil the punchline:

“Investigators for [deleted] attorney general and secretary of state have launched an inquiry into…

Well, this has been a tough campaign. It’s been a very tough campaign. And I know from my experience in many campaigns that, if Sen. Obama had asked . . . responded to my urgent request to sit down and…

Debate site at Hofstra University

OK folks. No doubt the candidates are ready to rumble — and should be soon — on stage at Hoftra University in Hempstead, Long Island.

Bob Schieffer is moderating, and I’ll bet he’ll be tough on transgressors of…

Live blogging bird

Join the editorial page staff tonight at 8 p.m. for a live blog of the third and final presidential debate between John McCain and Barack Obama from New York’s Hofstra University in Hempstead, Long Island.

We are grateful to Platformista…

Photo by Scout Tufankjian, Polaris

I didn’t know that when Barack Obama was elected president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990, he named more student members of the ultra-conservative Federalist Society to top editor jobs at The Review than he named African-American law…

Post-Dispatch photo by Robert Cohen

Nine Days before the Feb. 5 presidential primaries in Missouri and Illinois, this editorial page endorsed Barack Obama and John McCain in their respective races.

We did so enthusiastically. We wrote that either Mr. Obama’s message of…