It may be observed that the Wayne Theatre, that epicenter of local political unease, persists in standing, its shiny new façade overlooking West Main Street in Waynesboro. This evidently is the product of something otherworldly, since by now the old brick edifice should have crumbled to mortar and dust.

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Through summer’s sleepy days, the Waynesboro City Council has been an island of languor in a sea of monotony. Blades of grass are more restive than most council officials. But ennui has lifted. Once-familiar acrimony has been roused over the absence of activity on the streets outside the stretch of West Main running between the Wayne Theatre and the aging building formerly known as the home of The News Virginian.

No signs of intelligent life

Terrors lurk on the Queen City’s streets in the ostensibly innocuous form of sandwich boards, set up on downtown sidewalks by infidel merchants and restaurateurs to advertise such subversive stuff as the dread lunch special.

Amid the sighs of apprehensive or relieved parents and plaintive students, school buses are rumbling through the central Shenandoah Valley this morning signaling the start of classes in Augusta County.

Extremism, a popular term in the reactionary tinderbox of politics, is definable empirically only in circumstances stretching far into extremes.

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A trio of Democrats seeking office huddled Wednesday to talk among themselves about education, providing an evening’s respite from the health care wars but not from rhetoric beaten to a pulp by the raw might of partisan twaddle. The federal No Child Left Behind law is damnable (kind of), public schools are positively starved for cash, student-teacher ratios must be kept low and hang those accursed unfunded mandates.

The president is telling the truth: Nowhere in the 615 pages making up proposed legislation in the Senate, nor in the 1,017 pages of the dread H.R. 3200, the House health care reform bill, are there references to death panels, killing grandmas or pulling plugs. Nor are there references to government takeovers, care rationing or bankrupting the federal budget. And, by the way, he still doesn’t want to run the car industry and the recession is over.

Here’s how weird the health-care debate has become: President Barack Obama and his leftist chums are linking hands with the pharmaceutical industry and Wal-Mart to push through nationalized health care.

Explaining the strategy unveiled over the weekend by R. Creigh Deeds to his pals at The Washington Post requires desperation similar to that indicated by his tactics.

In the increasingly uncomfortable realm occupied by President Barack Obama, the deepening of the economic malaise has abated, and the great plunge over the precipice has been averted.

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Contrasts continue to strike. The Golden Corral soon will open its gates in the West End, another indicator that development will not soon abate in that section of Waynesboro where pulses still can be detected. Eastward, Roses, the discount clothing and retail store, is venturing back into Willow Oak Plaza. A smattering of small shops has opened in the vicinity.

Washington is the sort of place only Victor Hugo and a character of his crafting, the bumbling policeman Javert, could understand fully.

An especially notable distinction has emerged in Virginia’s gubernatorial race, one being watched with panting anticipation by a Republican Party desperate to pull itself off the skids.

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As the president of the United States drifted from the heavens to Blountville, Tenn., and then a Kroger grocery store in Bristol, resisters wilted, deals bloomed and a path opened to a dream and a nightmare, that of nationalized heath care. The form of it is surely far more diluted than Barack Obama prefers, but systematically dismantling an economic system is no easy thing, not even for a fellow whose gifts are a mix of Chicago and the celestial.

Having been ridded of an opponent openly carrying three deadly political weapons – skill, reputation and incumbency – Erik Curren can resume meditation on something familiar to his kind, dim prospects in the state House 20th District race. He faces an authentic foe, rather than the faux brand formed by his forays into Buddhism and brandished against him by the sort of partisan friend who makes one relish enemies.

Ronald Reagan being unavailable, the time perhaps has come to call upon Roger Waters to sort out this business of The Wall.

Astronomers say that somewhere in the great beyond is a great void the breadth of which measures almost 1 billion light years and the existence of which scientific theory cannot explain. In another realm, in that strange place outside our door, there are voids which logic cannot explain. Politics, through which light seldom travels, perhaps provides answers, all of them cavernous and unsatisfying.

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Health care reform as he knows it having fallen deathly ill, President Barack Obama rushed (STAT!) to the White House briefing room Wednesday, donning rhetorical mask and gown, scrubbing truth like a foul germ from his hands and flicking on the Teleprompter for a rescue operation in prime time. The patient’s condition is unchanged, something Obama can scarcely believe.

Audits, like nights, are cold and lonely, but Leonard M. “Len” Pomata and his boss, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, are standing by Northrop Grumman even though the company’s missed deadlines and overbilling are hard to understand. This either demonstrates naiveté sufficient to draw cynical sniffs from Tammy Wynette or something else the country star never considered, that $205,250 buys more love than $545 million.

As Chris Saxman makes way for the pasture, Tracy Pyles demonstrates anew a proclivity, like that of James Ellroy, the noir novelist famous for venturing to places others dare not go.

Louisville, Colo., is many things Waynesboro is not. Most recently, Louisville is No. 1 on Money magazine’s latest list of America’s best small towns. A presumption that prevails unspoken is that Waynesboro cannot be this. That’s false for those of the mind to keep driving.

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More than 40 years after her death, Margaret Sanger has evolved from heroine to embarrassment to topic of historical revisionism. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg might advance to the final stage while still living.

That staunch defender of ordinary folk, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, continues rushing, heart aflutter, to wrap loving arms around poor Northrop Grumman, the world’s fourth largest defense contractor with its piddling $32 billion in annual revenues. Some bid Kaine sit still. Meanwhile, an aroma stirs.

Will another round of regulatory salvos succeed in cleansing the Chesapeake Bay more than nominally, if at all, or will they merely drive bullets into the heart of development?