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?

Perhaps inspired by fallen pop stars, Robert F. McDonnell has a drum and he’s going to beat it.

Dude, somebody, like, forgot to tell car buyers that the Camaro, General Motors’ classic muscle car, is so not cool.

The fear is that somewhere lurks Danny Padgitt, or a facsimile of him. Padgitt is a product of rough fiction from the smooth mind of John Grisham. A member of a Mississippi bootlegger family, Padgitt rapes and kills a pretty widow, then threatens to hunt down jurors if they convict him. The scenario in “The Last Juror” made for intriguing reading and another big seller for Grisham, but is rare in the nonfiction realm. As legal premise, it stinks.

Something else Sarah Palin can see from her house: The end of her 15 minutes. Since announcing that she would resign later this month as Alaska governor, a move that will keep her resume as trim as her figure, Palin has learned anew how rapidly political sheen can turn to dusk.

A crowd gathered to remember a man, and among the memories arose one of the fallen, life pulsing through him, brought to his feet by the sound of a band playing to dance as only he could.

There being 118 days between this one and the one when an election happens, Robert F. McDonnell is of the mind that R. Creigh Deeds ought to have 10 to spare for a bit of rhetorical scrapping.

Step carefully along the trail, where myths slither and sometimes bite.

THE FOURTH OF JULY EDITION

It’s good to be Timothy M. Kaine these days principally because he’s not Mark Sanford. Virginia’s governor, like his counterpart in South Carolina, gets around, but Kaine, in senses platonic and political. So while South Carolina proceeds with inquiries to determine whether Sanford, the skunk, spent taxpayer cash to pursue l’amour in Argentina, Virginia Republicans have halted nosing into the possible use of state tax money to aid Kaine’s cross-country politicking as Democratic National Committee chairman. C’est la vie.

As time goes about healing wounds, the City Council’s so-called Three Amigos brandish pleasant public faces. This is a product of necessity: Majorities require their constituent parts to remain whole. But whatever the fellas might say when notebooks are open and tapes are rolling, this is plainly not the same trio who assumed power, and apparently other things, a year ago this morning.

President Barack Obama promised transparency but has delivered murk, stirred by votes cast in a blur.

Whatever compromise it might engender, politics is more artful than art, evidenced by the ritual whir of campaign spin and a resulting diffusion of rhetorical miasma thick enough to slice. This explains the scenario that has Republican gubernatorial contender Bob McDonnell and Democratic foe R. Creigh Deeds drifting toward that gooey locus known as the center, chanting om and drawing near one another, philosophically now and maybe at the polls later, like last time.

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Distant are the days when Gov. Timothy M. Kaine whisked across the commonwealth in the empyreal embrace of Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, or what may be called America’s Third Great Awakening, a time, like the second, when women swooned, spirits waxed euphoric and reason rested. His hopes of landing on the ticket with Obama cast into a state budget chasm, Kaine today plays out strings while muddy water seeps under the door. Now he hopes only to avoid getting wet.

Amid the fading furor over the killing of Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday upheld a state ban on a procedure in which he specialized, partial-birth abortion. Tiller’s slaying was heinous and deserves full punishment under the law. The acts in which Tiller practiced were legal in Kansas, but barbaric. Virginia lawmakers were right to outlaw partial-birth abortion, and the Fourth Circuit to affirm them. One wicked act cannot make others just.

The absence of federal mandates be damned, Virginia third-graders will continue an annual rite, searching global maps for regions explored by Juan Ponce de Leon, describing trade in early West Africa and explaining representative democracy’s origins in ancient Greece, among other tasks.

The air was thick with anger.

For a glimpse of what ails, tickle a keyboard.

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