THIS WEEK’S OPINION MARKETPLACE

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.

THIS WEEK’S OPINION MARKETPLACE

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.

Rest assured, taxpayers and parents of college-bound kids, your tax dollars likely will not be required to bail out universities generally and their fat-cat CEOs specifically.

In this space we seldom shrink from doling out criticism when we consider it due.

THIS WEEK’S OPINION MARKETPLACE

A slender Santa approaches, and Big Oil producers stand on notice: they’ve been profitable and therefore naughty, and now they must pay.

Red ink is trickling on the verge of spilling in gushers from municipal budgets as Gov. Timothy M. Kaine sharpens his scalpel for deeper incisions into a state spending plan starved for revenue.

On the occasion of Barack Obama’s historic ascension to the presidency, fueled in small part (as it turned out) by the turn of Virginia’s political hue from red to blue, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine took occasion to hoist a banner of racism already tossed to the trash heap.

Here they come, wrists lined by starched white cuffs replete with gleaming links.

THIS WEEK’S OPINION MARKETPLACE

The logo for the Wounded Warrior Project, a Jacksonville, Fla.-based initiative to heighten awareness about the plight of veterans, is a silhouette of soldiers, one carried on the shoulder of another. It appears on the project’s Web site beneath a slogan and an admonition: “The greatest casualty is being forgotten.” The danger of that is real as America’s attention shifts from war in Iraq, where victory is at hand, to the economy, where battles are being lost.

Americans awakened Wednesday – some still under euphoria’s sway, others in gloomy resignation – to the end of almost two years of running, culminating in a single burst of emotion and expression.

So ends a campaign that feels as though it began before the candidates were born, well, at least one of them.

An election is under way, which means initially and perhaps principally that Americans’ necks have been freed from the iron grip of the polls.

Cries of bias long have rung in the ears of those who make their living in the business of news.

History, mobile and under revision, is scheduled today to roll into the River City.

Support of abortion is the vow Democrats keep when forsaking all others. For the opposition party, the issue is a charm carried in a pocket, an assurance grasped when needed but otherwise forgotten.

At a time when they will have been driven to delirium either by Barack Obama’s looming migration from the ordinary air on which he walks to the sublime air of Pennsylvania Avenue or by the wrenching horror of his defeat, Democrats apparently will gather with the other party a fortnight from election day for a special session and routine plundering in extraordinary times.

Once the practice of statesmen, politics has evolved into an art of all things banal — schmoozing principal among them.

Ears ache and heads throb over election clichés, which pulse as voting day finally draws near.

Only a glance is needed to view the contrasts between Bob Goodlatte and Sam Rasoul.

From a vantage point somewhere near the top of the world, or at least that section of it where Afton Mountain touches the sky, Phil Dulaney can gaze in one direction across nine acres of cracked asphalt running beneath ramshackle structures, and in another across a lush valley stretching to the eye’s limits.