THIS WEEK’S OPINION MARKETPLACE

Absent in the apocalyptical buildup to Jan. 20 has been the sound of ordinary cacophony accompanying presidential inaugurals - that of clamor over costs.

Ideology is to holders of elected office a useful extravagance, a thing to which to cling until political imperatives, irresistible in their allure, beckon.

Blue Ridge Community College President Jim Perkins leaves an impressive legacy as he prepares to step down later this year.

Like other forms of abuse, cold slaps first startle, then rile.

Still are the voices that once rang in cacophonous accord over America’s bloody foray in Iraq.

THIS WEEK’S OPINION MARKETPLACE

A new year dawns in shadows.

Hats off to Invista for signing off on the easement for the city’s Greenway project.

Among other things expected to occupy Congress and Barack Obama next year will be legislation known as the Employee Free Choice Act, a name that strikes some, including Del. Chris Saxman, R-Staunton, as oxymoronic.

Presumably, Barack Obama would have preferred socks or a tie he could toss into a drawer and forget.

Men wearing wigs say strange things, and so one said this: “[L]et us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. ... Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

THIS WEEK’S OPINION MARKETPLACE

A local twist on a popular holiday poem.

Feeling a tightening budget’s stabs, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine sloshes ax in hands into the rising red tides.

Shielded in the embrace of the Blue Ridge, Waynesboro has felt only the brush of cool economic breezes while elsewhere the winds of Depression, industrial collapse, housing downturns and recession have howled.

A recession rears and, with it, a homelier head, that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a man of ill repute and wild hair. He is remembered for an image of him – looking like he’d awakened from a three-day bender – published from his capture in 2003.

As nylon production lines at Invista go idle, the ground moves beneath Waynesboro city leaders’ feet, which move but a little.

THIS WEEK’S OPINION MARKETPLACE

Having served for almost six months as Waynesboro mayor, a distinction most parts ceremonial, Tim Williams has distinguished himself in ways that his friends wish he had not.

Other shoes fell to the floor with disheartening thuds Wednesday morning as workers at the plant that has been Waynesboro’s lifeblood for almost 80 years learned that part of the facility will be idled and 210 workers laid off.

Corruption throbs in the veins of Chicago in the steady rhythm of a heartbeat.

As America combats a recession’s widening effects, China sinks teeth deeper into the flesh of Africa, a place where hope flickers and horrors persist.

Among companies staggered by a recession’s withering blows is Invista, which operates from a Waynesboro plant that has stood on the shores of the South River since 1929, an earlier bleak year.

THIS WEEK’S OPINION MARKETPLACE

As money drains from the state funding trough, the feeders jostle.

A symbol of a community and a generation drifted quietly from this world five days ago, but his 87 years here linger, a reflection of the economic vigor that once drove Waynesboro and the character that once embodied America.

Removed from the broken houses of Fallujah and other realities, Deepak Chopra, the New Age healer, has transported himself back into public view, the aroma of his faux wisdom puncturing and fouling the electronic air.

Conservatism everywhere has been bloodied, at the hands of a president who wore the label but lacked its spirit and lawmakers complicit in his ideological wanderings, proving a truth that blows aimed at one’s own chin are bound eventually to land, crushingly.

A country whose attention has been devoted to an economy in the throes of recession received a jolting reminder on Thanksgiving eve of terrorism’s abiding threat.