Midweek briefing

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.

We opined in this space at the time that something needed to be done. Listen now, 18 days later, for a perpetual sound in Waynesboro, that of crickets chirping. Is this thing on?

It’s an inopportune time to be discussing spending with revenues of every sort in the tank. But we can’t imagine the school would have to empty the checking account to pay for a solution sufficient to eliminate the need for hanging cakes.

Something else still stinks

Speaking of silence, it abides on other city subjects — the greenway, the streetscape and, of course, The Wall.

Last we knew, the greenway project was inching forward, a dramatic acceleration from the rate of speed over the course of the idea’s existence, stretching all the way back to Bill Clinton’s first term in the White House. We didn’t even know who Monica was back then, for crying out loud.

The streetscape, another languishing project, surfaced in a council discussion several weeks ago. We asked for more details on how to pay for the next phase of the project and for the council to set a deadline for completion. Again, silence.

Then there’s The Wall, the brick slab at 327 West Main St. It’s stood there since, gulp, 1971, even before Richard M. Nixon’s burglars started fumbling around at Watergate. Everyone says it needs to come down. Now the city’s negotiating a plan. So do it already.

Some perspective: The Berlin Wall stood for 28 years, from 1961 to 1989. The Wall in Waynesboro has stood for 38 years, from 1971 to 2009. OK, so the geopolitical complexities of dismantling the physical manifestation of Soviet totalitarianism were nothing next to knocking down a wall in Waynesboro, but really, 38 years? C’mon. Council, tear down that wall.

Phew, this reeks, too

Well, howdy do. The left-leaning Senate thinks there’s trouble at Acorn.

Outing the community organization has been a fave cause of radio and TV talker Glenn Beck, pilloried by the New York Times for his right-wing lunacy. Except on this. Beck just happened to be right. The NYT, a.k.a. the old gray bitty, calls Acorn an antipoverty group. Now that’s rich. How about an antiethics group. Antimoral? Antibrains?

Whatever, the damning evidence against the knuckleheads at Acorn finally came from a source lesser known than Beck, young filmmaker James O’Keefe. He caught Acorn workers on video advising him on how to evade taxes on a brothel. That soon made the rounds on YouTube.

Big Media sniffed. Acorn eventually had to can two staffers. And the Senate took notice, voting 83-7 Monday to cut off federal housing money to the, uh, antipoverty group. Right on.