John McCain finally faces the challenge that loomed during six months of opposition party primaries: How to best a foe whose rhetorical
skills and ability to energize contrast sharply with his stoically delivered straight talk.

Confronting a perceived apocalypse, ecological messiahs John Warner and Joe Lieberman might achieve a crisis.

It is as bad as this for Barack Obama: hopes of injecting a flagging campaign with new energy and muscle have shifted to his selection of a running mate.

Lurking in the shadows of inconvenient truths is the familiar form of an erstwhile president whose heart seems to warm to the precise extent that his wife’s anticipation of oval glory cools.

A thumbs-up, thumbs-down assessment of newsmakers here and beyond:

The flickering light of comity on the Waynesboro City Council has been snuffed by a familiar gust of dysfunction, which is neither remarkable nor pernicious except for one whose title has become suddenly transitory.

In advance of this weekend’s annual whir of wheels, the discordant hum of selected merchants’ wrath wafts from the economic dust bowl popularly known as downtown. The Blue Ridge Soapbox Derby Classic will take place Saturday in Waynesboro.

In the wee-hour darkness, the stocky young colonel stood on an earthen mound gazing into the faces of the 750 warriors before him.
“Men,” he said, “I am not a religious man and I don’t know your feelings in this matter, but I am going to ask you to pray with me for the success of the mission before us.

His legacy nibbled to bits by the perpetual occupation of Iraq, President Bush advances toward the respite of political oblivion with the ghosts of obscure but fateful failures on his trail.

A thumbs-up, thumbs-down assessment of newsmakers here and beyond:

I’m not a travel, engineering or financial expert but I do quite a bit of thinking and, I hope, reasoning.

Payoffs for taxpayers are rare. Waynesboro’s get one starting tonight, and there is sufficient cause for hope that it will be the first of many.

Amid persistent drought in the Shenandoah Valley last week, Washington received a torrential soaking. Faux tears fell from the eyes of politicians moved to the point of appeasement over the conceptual plight of that maudlin anachronism popularly known as the family farm.

Drilling into the sophistic strata that pass for rationale in the dimly lit celestial space occupied by environmentalists, one discovers veins pulsing with myth, contradiction and, of course, mercury.

Having correctly decided against increasing taxes, the Waynesboro City Council now must play the part of budgetary mercenary, wading through the numeric jungle in search of $600,000 wanted for dead, at least until next year.

Check your pots for chickens. If no cluckers are found, it is only because the Straight Talk Express has not yet rumbled onto Pennsylvania Avenue and deposited its contents, an Arizona senator foremost among them, on the White House lawn.

A thumbs-up, thumbs-down assessment of newsmakers here and beyond:

A thumbs-up, thumbs-down assessment of newsmakers here and beyond:

Affected by a level of delirium suggestive of a Stephen King short story, Augusta County Republicans have taken to feeding on their own flesh in desperate hope of sustaining starving ambitions. Worse, the loss of mind is spreading.

Employing a tactic of leftist politicos and street hustlers, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine pointed to a looming transportation apocalypse while extending government’s sticky mitts toward taxpayers’ back pockets Monday.

When the law, families and education intersect, as they do in America with increased frequency, ugly collisions are inevitable.

Beware government’s helping hand, poised to plunge into the mortgage crisis and sweep to the floor a wounded market rising, feebly but resolutely, to recover.

Spectral figures and troubling alliances form the silhouettes behind the gleaming light of Barack Obama’s resurgence from the political darkness.

Banished to the ideological wilderness, conservatives want to know who sent them and why.

A thumbs-up, thumbs-down assessment of newsmakers here and beyond:

The product of an intense campaign that culminated with Tuesday’s election is a shift in power on the Waynesboro City Council. One thing has not changed: Factions and the dread terms, majority and minority, remain entrenched in City Hall lingo.

Straining like the Israelites under the Pharaoh’s burdens, colonial America turned on the Empire and cast it into the Atlantic.

Questions continue to be raised locally about the Wayne Theatre project.

Beyond the swell of prices at local gas pumps surges untapped sanity and increased independence in the form of domestic crude.

The influence of former trial lawyer and twice-failed presidential aspirant John Edwards radiates still like a noxious gas, the fumes extending beyond his native North Carolina, and his home covering 40,000 square feet of that state, to, of all places, Waynesboro.