Snide references to Barack Obama as the messiah cheat the man.

Americans seeking comfort amid the economy’s convulsions might find it in knowing the steadiness of hand at the tiller of global relations.

Perspiration on the brow of Gov. Timothy M. Kaine dried Tuesday along with the ink on President Barack Obama’s spending behemoth, popularly known as the economic stimulus package.

Eyeing black clouds, Gerald Celente predicts a storm of cataclysmic ferocity.

Had Frank Sinatra suddenly been possessed of the notion that he wanted to wake up in a city that always sleeps, he could hardly have done better than Des Moines, Iowa.

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It is fortuitous for Augusta County taxpayers that among noggins of granite, Tracy Pyles’ is made of thicker stuff than most.

Political harlotry, part of the natural evolution of the art of compromise, spreads like the scent of cheap perfume across partisan boundaries

Turn down the music and tell Rover to shut his yap. The Waynesboro City Council has wearied of sounds that break the silence of a desolate downtown and the vicinity.

It is popular though hardly comforting to talk of recession these days, so let us talk and be comforted, and vexed.

Steering hurtling metal absent engines, pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger advises that the plane is bound for the Hudson with the casual aplomb of a man ordering a cheeseburger at a drive-through.

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Amusing only for a few sketches even in the heyday of Belushi and Akroyd, “Saturday Night Live” managed to inspire rare chuckles with a bit after the 2004 presidential election.

On the horizon, utopians march, seeking this time to cleanse the planet, or Virginia’s section of it, of the foul scent of cigarette smoke.

Last week, the House of Representatives considered the so-called “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.”

Undaunted by crisis, the gloom of which leftists and other political panderers breathe as though it were the mint-fresh air of spring, lawmakers in the House of Misrepresentatives are scurrying like rats in the city dump to gorge on heaping piles of wonted waste, all under the guise of reviving the economy.

Pity the poor Republicans, not the politicians but their constituents, who like the Democrats opposite them are fixed in the certitude of certain principles but who these days might look upon their representatives with a literary lament: “[W]hat chance was there of peace? Were there not, on the contrary, new grounds for hatred and hostility in their family?” Such questions, posed by Dostoevsky’s Alyosha Karamazov, linger in the GOP like mist in the aftermath of last fall’s election devastation.

Undaunted by crisis, the gloom of which leftists and other political panderers breathe as though it were the mint-fresh air of spring, lawmakers in the House of Misrepresentatives are scurrying like rats in the city dump to gorge on heaping piles of wonted waste, all under the guise of reviving the economy.

In the weary business of beating the same drums along with clichés, there prevails the feeling among the proprietors of this space that in some cases a few thumps or a half-dozen is not quite enough.

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Dead men say nothing, even when a suspect now gone has said much, and so arises anew the shroud of mystery in Staunton, this time about the late Davie Bocock, the city detective who investigated the crime that haunted a town for more than 40 years.

Wading through more than 38,000 residential reassessments in Augusta County is bound to reveal figures that displease, none perhaps more fittingly than the $20,000 that startled Sherri McCambridge.

A prominent local figure with whom this newspaper and its readers are well acquainted recently left for our perusal a clipping of a column appearing in The Wall Street Journal discussing downtown development, a topic frequently addressed in this space.

Where 1.8 million enraptured souls stood hearkening to the stylish cadence of President Barack Obama saying little but waxing hypnotic, others marched Thursday, their footsteps landing silently in the relative desolation of the National Mall and their cries for a cause that divides and discomfits reduced from scarcely audible whisper to fading gasp.

Heard faintly but distinctly beneath the wheezing of real estate markets and the grinding of credit’s splintered gears are pension funds percolating on the brink of eruption.

So ends the interregnum, the period during which one man occupied the throne given by the people to another.

Supervisor Tracy Pyles has chafed at Augusta County’s reassessment since learning last fall that values would increase dramatically.

History ends as it is made today, when Barack Obama is to be sworn in as the nation’s 44th president.

Absent Texas swagger, President George W. Bush limps from the world stage, the shadows of wars won and half-finished and an economy reeling and broken extending over and beyond him.

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