Fourth-graders are not progressing in their capacity to perform rudimentary arithmetic, mirroring a malady that long has afflicted Democrats. The results for schoolkids came in Wednesday from federally funded achievement tests, and for Democrats a day earlier with the passage of a Senate Finance Committee health care bill to the sound of triumphant cries among the vacuous left.

Really? Now, Del. Landes?

Steve Landes clearly has noticed that he has a challenger in the House District 25 race, which presumably has something to do with the bill he announced Monday.

Prospects for a Republican sweep in the state’s marquee races brighten almost by the minute as Democrats struggle against drags at the top of the state and national parties. R. Creigh Deeds and President Barack Obama look like a dating service mismatch, each racing for the door as though fleeing an unwanted goodnight kiss.

Kimberly Watters gazes at PowerPoint images depicting her former city’s regeneration, and she is stirred to a kind of sunniness seen here with ecliptical irregularity, which is to say, not often. “It happened there,” Watters says, “it can happen here.”

This week’s opinion marketplace

Amid the gathering malaise of the post-euphoria era of Barack Obama’s presidency, trouble is afoot in Afghanistan. The commander of allied forces there wants more troops. Obama is disinclined to give them. Listen closely and one can hear echoes of the Soviet Union. Failure knocks and America opens the door.

Out come the defenders of Waynesboro’s treasurer candidates and in strides another runner, all while a puddle of muddle remains over who ought to manage the city’s books.

A man reared on a hog and cattle farm in Bath County, R. Creigh Deeds, and by implication, those weighing whether to side with him, confront a hound dog’s quandary, this one over what to do if the thing chased is caught.

Here’s the dilemma Waynesboro voters face: A month from today, they’ll vote for treasurer. Sophie’s choice was less murky.

Francis Chester, a Churchville lawyer and sheep farmer, returned to a favorite place this week.

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.