The plan led by local developer Bill Hausrath to bring a 12-screen cinema along with retail, offices and housing to the West End is a jolt of good news and a demonstration of the entrepreneurial spirit needed to kindle economic recovery.

Benjamin Franklin found many of his countrymen despicable but none quite so like the pretenders huddled in government halls: “A publick Hypocrite every day deceives his betters, and makes them Ignorant Trumpeters of his supposed Godliness.”

The Grim Reaper’s blade has been dulled, but not before making some bloody cuts.

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Few favored phrases in the political parlance can match frequency with the dread “unfunded mandate,” a cry that rises whenever government imposes with one hand while leaving closed the one clutching the money. Responses from school officials to the words “No Child Left Behind,” for example, are patellar: Utter the phrase, and the knee jerks with the bleat: “Unfunded mandate.” So now Republicans have picked up the linguistic hinge on which Democratic money reaches commonly swing.

God made the world in seven days, while Barack Obama has needed the better part of 100 to make over America, thus proving the existence of a stunning albeit slender gap between a deity and a president whose restive liberal spirit yet hovers over the deep. God help us, he’s still not finished.

Excitement these days in Waynesboro is rare and fleeting, which perhaps explains the recent mild euphoria generated by piffle. This takes vague shape in the decision to purchase a $7,000 modular trailer to house the Rockfish Gap Tourist Information Center in a new home to open this summer atop Afton Mountain.

Among the challenges public school administrators and faculty confront – helping young people to learn academic rudiments, complying with sometimes ridiculous state and federal testing standards and, a big one, keeping young minds focused for the better part of a day – none may be more difficult than discerning amid shifting sands the proper boundaries for a culture that forever pushes.

Herding sheep, gentle but recalcitrant sorts, generally requires the services of a dog with skills.

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A popular admonition in sports and combat is to keep one’s head on a swivel, meaning to watch in all directions. President Barack Obama’s recent application of the concept with regard to prosecuting Bush officials over terrorist interrogations means Americans might be wise to be on the lookout, too, for another attack. Terrorists who are perpetually watching surely have seen our weakness showing.

Among the maladies affecting politicians are deprivations of senses along with sense. Some are deaf to the cries of constituents. Some can’t feel others’ pain. Some can neither detect the foul aroma of a particular policy nor its bitter taste. Vision? Some detest the very word. So comes Tim Williams, mayor of Waynesboro, absent an evident sense of himself.

A year occasionally makes a difference, and none hope so more than those who march under the banner of the Republican Party, a group suddenly believing in change, so long as it means a return to power rather than more of the wilderness wandering that began here with the election of Mark Warner as governor in 2001.

Congress returns to work seeking to go where Hillary Clinton as first lady has gone before, to discuss universal health care.

Anglers will slip today into the South River to conclude an annual rite in Waynesboro, the Fly Fishing Festival, which serves as the prelude to another to follow at week’s end, the city’s Riverfest.

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A wave of unrest, which began unfurling last fall, washed across the country Wednesday, to the discernible notice of observers in the White House, where a lockdown was ordered, and the noticeable chagrin of the president’s compadres in Congress and his acolytes elsewhere.

Rice and cotton require proportionally more water to thrive than other crops, so naturally the federal government since the Depression has paid farmers taxpayer money by the bushelful to manufacture harvests in places where rain is stubbornly disinclined to fall, on land that was formerly desert.

Seeing that by Tax Day its flow of cash would turn from thin trickle to dust, Waynesboro’s Main Street organization a month ago pulled out budget knives, then held out hands.

On a memorable Easter Sunday, America’s 44th president shed an image he had carefully cultivated over the course of almost two years of campaigning for the job and in his first three months in office, as one disinclined to move past diplomacy’s muddle into the realm of swift action.

A societal proclivity: In calamity’s wake, officialdom scurries to prevent recurrence.

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As waves crash and the ship rolls, Waynesboro city staff heave crates over the rails and two councilwomen respond in kind, tossing coins into the sea, drawing applause, much of it their own, amid thunderclaps. Now to the real business: whether to cut $550,000 more from city spending or impose a tax increase with major local employers dispatching workers to the plank as the storm roars.

In the residual chill diffused in recent weeks by men bearing arms, the General Assembly gathers today to consider whether to override Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s decision to veto five gun rights bills passed from lawmakers’ hands to his.

North Korea defiantly marched back onto the world stage Sunday, aiming a long-range missile toward the heavens, depressing the flashing red button and therewith making a statement that reverberates still.

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Images that flicker to mind upon the utterance of the word boy have changed but a little from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s description of a “sturdy little urchin” in “The House of the Seven Gables:” with “cheeks as red as an apple ... he was clad rather shabbily ... [wearing] a chip hat with the frizzles of his curly hair sticking through its crevices.” Boys themselves since have slipped through crevices. Today, they are education’s urchins. Blame Carol Gilligan.

As the American auto industry zips toward oblivion with both feet planted firmly on the accelerator, solace can be found in the fact that while steering hybrids on a highway to nowhere, carmakers will get 41 miles to the gallon, or better. This soothes, like hearkening to the strains of “Nearer My God to Thee” aboard the Titanic while the Atlantic gushes over the rails: Hey, the band sounds great, pass the life preserver.

Amid the huff into which state Sen. Mark Obenshain has worked himself over plans to, among other things, close most of the 41 rest areas on Interstate 81, an idea has sprung: Why not privatize those spots? To which we say, why not?

Meet Barack Obama, president of the United States, savior of the universe, sheriff of Motown, automobile executive.