Squeezing time between his gig as Democratic National Committee chairman and the day job to which voters elected him, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine ambled into town Thursday under the comic auspices of kicking off a sales tax holiday.

Having messed with the bulls and gotten the udders, dairy farmers trudge now buckets and stools in hand to the government barn where taxpayers stand waiting to be milked again.

Voters will have to fix the problem in the Waynesboro Treasurer’s Office.

Few among elections’ rituals are more tiresome than the one most central, that of what kids today might call political poseurs metaphorically galloping on ivory-white steeds to pluck the rest of us from the economic hellfires.

Cigarettes are foul things that send millions of their puffing and huffing legions to ghastly deaths, so tax tobacco to the hilt, rake in extra revenues and compel smokers by brute levying force to go smokeless. This is the flawed logic that fueled another addiction, that of states to cigarette taxes. Politicians, oblivious to contradiction and denouement, now wear a junkie’s daze, pining for their fix of smoke cash as it dwindles. So here comes Greg Marrow, asking for a light.

Those seeking a measure of the acrimony pervading the politics of the moment can find a heaping helping in the House District 25 race, where incumbent Republican Steve Landes and Democratic challenger Greg Marrow have taken to sniping over everything from White House e-mails to, of course, the economy. That will be the background noise tonight, when the candidates meet in The News Virginian District 25 Debate at the Kate Collins Middle School Auditorium in Waynesboro.

Replicating his great awakening in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, R. Creigh Deeds has arisen from slumber in his run for Richmond against Republican Robert F. McDonnell. In so doing, he’s demonstrated that a position in which he’d once appeared only casually interested he wants at almost any price. Honesty is precious, but like an heirloom for a family in sudden financial straits, it’s among the first things to go when a politician sees within grasp the seat he covets.

Falsehoods cling to Waynesboro like cobwebs in the corners of vacant buildings. Here’s one: so-called progressives are alone in thinking of downtown renewal and in their willingness to drive it. Here’s another: to be conservative is to shun a part for government in growth. Absolutes of this sort are easily enough shattered by the power of a few brain cells, but let’s wade deeper.

This week’s opinion marketplace

Pittsburgh is an anthropomorphism, the chain smoker with the hacking cough and the Swiss cheese lungs who wonders how it all turned out this way.

Something still stinks

Three weeks ago Friday, The News Virginian reported on the sorry, smelly state of things in the Waynesboro High School football locker room. The ventilation in the place is so bad urinal cakes are hung inside the joint to ward off the stench.

Tingles are racing up legs in that bristling sphere known as the left, this time over Virginia gubernatorial candidate Robert F. McDonnell’s utterance of the queen mother of dirty words. The dread term spilled from the same mouth McDonnell kisses his wife with during a radio interview last week. Fudge.

Too many books, too little time,” goes the saying. Well, Virginia inmates may have plenty of time — but now they have too few books.

Invective is a cheap commodity in politics, and so locals are buying the stuff by the barrel amid the gusher of controversy over Steve Landes drawing a thick black line from the White House to Soviet reds and Nazi fascists.

This week’s opinion marketplace

Invective is a cheap commodity in politics, and so locals are buying the stuff by the barrel amid the gusher of controversy over Steve Landes drawing a thick black line from the White House to Soviet reds and Nazi fascists.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine again has been compelled to slash money from his two-year, $77-billion budget, this time whacking away $1.35 billion.

Left to rot in that legislative tomb known as the House committee is a spindling thing whose low voice Nancy Pelosi has determined none should hear and whose existence Barack Obama is determined to deny. It’s an alternative to the health care reform the president sought to sell to a wary public Wednesday by way of prime-time speech before a joint session of Congress.

A man increasingly accustomed to striding through thickets, President Barack Obama cruised with ease through another one Tuesday, delivering to the considerable consternation of his opponents, and they are a swelling legion, a noontime address to the nation’s students. The American experiment has survived, the Constitution remains intact and schoolchildren have not begun reporting parents to the Proletariat. It was only a speech after all.

Slightly built, tirelessly energetic and topped by a meticulously styled ’do that could belong only to a politician or an anchorman, Robert F. McDonnell looks more marathoner than statesman, and in that sense hopes to run again after a week of staggering. Platforms for re-launching a gubernatorial bid that once sailed, but now drifts, arise this week, first on Monday with the traditional Labor Day campaign kickoff and later in the week when Gov. Timothy M. Kaine is expected to announce $1.5 billion in budget cuts.

This week’s opinion marketplace

Pressed between hard places, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine is setting about making choices made of similar texture, saw in hand, as he labors to bridge a $1.5-billion budget gap.

After the Democrat spent much of the summer throwing fists at the air, Robert F. McDonnell did what R. Creigh Deeds could not, planting a hard punch on the Republican’s jaw. McDonnell’s misfortune is that he happens to be that Republican.

A familiar bogeyman is bubbling to the surface again, the form of the thing definable by perspective. Stormwater in the eyes of those tilting left is the kid with the flu symptoms who refused to stay home, a carrier of foul pollutants. Stormwater in the eyes of those tilting right is at least small parts phantom, a mechanism for prying more money, taxes in the form of fees, from businesses already scratching for a different kind of green than environmentalists care to consider.

As the president of the United States spent the weekend wandering circles of hypocrisy and toting the stuff in book form, the place he momentarily left behind continued going to hell. The recession that he insists has all but ended persists, the health care reform he persists in pushing gasps and heaves and so too national security, which has been dropped by self-inflicted blows. On this, Barack Obama pleads powerlessness, a frightening thing.

Politics have the quality of the weather, which, according to weathered adage, can be counted upon to change.

This week’s opinion marketplace

On a hazy day in Vancouver, six weeks after having broken the mythic four-minute barrier in the mile, Roger Bannister clung desperately to the frantic pace set by an Australian rival.

Landing renovation money

Libraries are an essential element in the fabric of any community, and that’s certainly the case with the Augusta County Library in Fishersville. So it’s good news that bids on a proposed renovation there came in dramatically lower than the estimated cost of $2.4 million.

Well, there they go again. Purveyors of fear and hate and other really nasty stuff are persisting in clogging the heads of grannies and grandpas with tales of health care reform doom. Look at this: “Bills now in Congress would squeeze savings out of Medicare, a lifeline for the elderly.” And this: “I am finally scared of a White House administration ... [R]ationing is a basic part of Obama’s eventual master health care plan.” Pass the tea party placard and pack the concealed heat.