Times like these drove Rod Serling to a career of chain-smoking and penning screenplays about such things as mysterious furry monsters lurking on airplane wings.

Their feet firmly entrenched in a mire of red ink, Virginia lawmakers led by Del. Steven Landes, R-Augusta, stand ready to respond to the latest advances of their well-heeled bully suitor, the federal government, with a suitable cuff to the cheek.

Forgive Gov. Timothy M. Kaine for stealing occasional glances at the exit signs inside the Executive Mansion in Richmond. Recent months have borne him all the kindness of a late-night mugging.

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An air of sanctimony and hypocrisy as dense as the wee-hour fog on Afton Mountain hovered about Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s decision last fall to yank state money for abstinence education. Abortion peddlers such as Planned Parenthood hailed the move. Kaine championed it as an act of fiscal prudence, as if trimming $275,000 in state spending might somehow bridge a $641 million budget gap, the financial equivalent of dancing on water.

President Bush has his economic stimulus package and Augusta County supervisors have theirs. Bush sends checks to taxpayers. Supervisors ship money to consultants, some so far away they think Old Dominion is a mixed drink.

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Like Valley foliage in the fall, the capacity of government to exacerbate predicaments of its own devising by exercising precisely the same malformed logic that produced the problem in the first place is always remarkable. Shaken down once more by frivolous feds, taxpayers are the ones who change colors, from healthy hues to a battered black and blue.

Bursting the expanding balloon of euphoria over the ascension of Barack Obama should not be so difficult as Hillary Clinton makes it appear. All that is required is the gentle, but decisive pinprick of reality.

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Stealing a glimpse at much that is wrong in America most frequently requires only a turn of the head toward the Capitol.

Striding into the neighborhood watering hole toting a hidden firearm sounds like a dandy idea, provided you’re the fellow strapping the firearm, you’re figuring on trouble or you’re just hankering for a good John Wayne analogy. The idea also is easy on the ears if you’re a Republican looking for a healthy helping of conservative support after having been taken out to the political woodshed as a no-good tax-and-spender, which resembles more than slightly the predicament of our own Sen. Emmett Hanger, R-Mount

A divided Federal Communications Commission approved what could be the biggest change in the country’s media-ownership rules in more than a decade, allowing newspapers and broadcasters in a market to buy each other.

Partisan fissures crackled through Richmond last week as revenue holes continued popping open in the state budget, pushing deficit estimates from $641 million to $2 billion.

By this time next week, members of the Virginia National Guard should have returned home to their base in Staunton from a tour in Iraq. The sight of returning soldiers embracing families and children clinging to fathers and mothers still clad in military fatigues is among the sweetest of wartime. Their joy is a community’s joy.

Many of the exercises of modern, bloated government are foolish, futile and just plain inane, but none more so than government’s attempts to fix problems it created.

These are sobering times for right-minded folk in the Republican-rich Shenandoah Valley, and not just because their party’s presidential nominee will be straight-talking leftie Sen. John McCain. As Virginians march off to the primary this morning, it’s dusk in America for the GOP. The numbers that tell us so: Turnout.

Another chapter is completed in what is rapidly emerging as a presidential campaign unlike any other in modern political history. Hillary Clinton, long the presumed Democratic nominee, absorbed another loss Tuesday, this time in our own Virginia, putting Barack Obama in position to seal his spot atop his party’s ticket with victories March 4 in Texas and Ohio.

Is the two-party system on the verge of breathing its last-

The plans unveiled last week by Waynesboro’s land-use consultant to transform the city’s downtown core and riverfront district offers a level of vision that long has been lacking in the River City.

Letters to the editor

Whatever might be said about the effect of a divided General Assembly, it cannot be said based upon the early results that this is a do-nothing body. Unlike their counterparts in Washington, who spent more than a year doing mostly nothing after Democrats reclaimed the House, state lawmakers have been cranking out legislation the way a Detroit assembly line does cars, in a constant, steady flow.

Southern Living magazine last month published readers’ picks for the best scenic driving routes in the South. The roads at the top of the list were predictable and familiar: No. 1, the Blue Ridge Parkway, and No. 3, Skyline Drive.

The giddiness over Barack Obama’s candidacy has stretched even into the Shenandoah Valley.

The giddiness over Barack Obama’s candidacy has stretched even into the Shenandoah Valley. Political reporter Bob Stuart gives us a slice of Obama mania today in a story about a local debate party (there’s an oxymoron if ever there was one) staged for the Democratic senator, who’s nipping at presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s high heels.

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Two stories in Tuesday’s edition of The News Virginian point to opportunity for Waynesboro. One detailed the state’s renewal of the city’s Enterprise Zone status. The other reported the council’s approval of a performance agreement between the city and the Wayne Theatre Alliance.

President Bush’s latest lament as he delivered his final State of the Union speech Monday was fitting. For much of his presidency, his staff complained that as the economy steadily chugged ahead, attention was mostly devoted to failings in Iraq.