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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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As the economy heaves, causes to give thanks persist, including a fact Americans can be forgiven for neglecting but one that evinces itself as crucial in the current hour: This is not Iceland.

As the bear roars and the economy reels, white horses gallop with politicians astride and taxpayers in tow.

As the bear roars and the economy reels, white horses gallop with politicians astride and taxpayers in tow.

Amid the economy’s floundering, several members of the Waynesboro City Council are contemplating economics of a more personal sort.

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In the howling din of government bureaucracy churning at full hum, noise ordinances tend to resound as sensibility shrinks quietly into City Hall’s dusky corners.

The library burns, and to the arsonist the poet turns: “Have you forgotten that your liberator is the book? The book is your wealth! It is knowledge.

Coal’s enemies, like Orcs bound for Gondor, are on the march.

If scientists – some of them – are to be believed, it took man 3.6 million years to advance from hirsute primate crawling about on hands and feet to walking sans the hands.