Since this is the time of year to count our blessings, we should give thanks for what clearly is a safer city. There’s a Richmond listed among the 10 most dangerous cities in the country, but it isn’t ours. Richmond, Calif., was the ninth most-dangerous city in 2007.

As Ashland celebrates its 150th anniversary, which portrait best reflects this quaint little town with the immodest slogan? The portrait of NBC travel writer and editor Peter Greenberg, who ridicules the town that touts itself as “The Center of the Universe”?

Green is the new black. Fifty is the new 30. And Henrico County, in an unwelcome trend, appears to be the new Chesterfield. Once upon a time, Chesterfield County made an accommodating whipping boy for local media. We chronicled the county’s growing pains and its at-times absurd isolationism, typified by a former supervisor who expressed terror at the idea of going to The Diamond for a ballgame.

Beginning in the early 1990s, area delegations flew to the Twin Cities, Cincinnati, Portland, Ore., and Jacksonville, Fla., as part of an effort to make the Richmond region greater than the sum of its parts.

Forty-one years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law unconstitutional and ended race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States. Can you imagine if voters were later allowed to overturn Loving v. Virginia? On the same day Barack Obama’s historic election married hope and his tory, California voted to override a state Supreme Court decision recognizing same-sex marriage as a fundamental right.

If the tangled vote tally holds up, Dwight Clinton Jones appears poised to become the Richmond rarity: a mayor from south of the James River. Jones won largely on his political strength on the city’s South Side, where he took the 6th, 8th and 9th districts handily. No one’s ready to say the balance of political power in Richmond has shifted from Main Street to Hull Street, but Jones’ victory strikes a blow for an area that has seldom received its proper share of care.

Adecade ago, the prospect of a white mayor in Richmond caused a major controversy. At the time, the Richmond City Council chose a mayor from within its ranks, amid back-room dealing. Tim Kaine was the clear frontrunner. Councilman Sa’ad El-Amin openly opposed the idea of a white mayor. If others weren’t as outspoken, they were at least sympathetic to the notion that hard-won black political power shouldn’t be surrendered.

Chesterfield County is poised to fire the second shot in what is either a regional tax revolt, an assertion of identity or an “Anything but Richmond” movement. Following Henrico County’s lead, Chesterfield is making plans to change the mailing addresses of county homes and businesses that contain “Richmond,“ “Colonial Heights” or “Petersburg.“

It’s sad enough that the Navy Hill neighborhood was first decimated by Interstate 95 and later eradicated by the Virginia BioTechnology Research Park. Progress has its price, but Richmond’s black enclaves paid a disproportionate toll. Whole neighborhoods should not vanish without a trace, particularly one with the rich history of Navy Hill.

After Iowa and Florida took actions to restore voting rights to tens of thousands of ex-offend ers, folks in Virginia began to ask, “Why not here?“ To be sure, Govs. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine have relaxed Virginia’s voter-restoration laws, which along with Kentucky’s are deemed the most restrictive in the U.S. As a result, about 6,000 nonviolent felons have had their voting rights restored under those two Democrats. But that represents a trickle compared with the splash that Republican Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida created last spring when he restored voting rights to some 115,000 ex-offenders. In 2005, Democratic Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa issued an executive order restoring voting rights to 50,000 ex-offenders.

The Petersburg school district and Superintendent James M. Victory need some wins—and quickly. The school district is being left behind by its peers statewide. Once again, Petersburg has the only five schools in Virginia denied accreditation. In a year in which 95 percent of Virginia’s public schools achieved full accreditation, Petersburg lost ground. Only one of its schools—Robert E. Lee Elementary—achieved full accreditation.

There comes a time when even a community as clueless as ours must stop piling desecration upon desecration. Such is the case with the resurrection of a proposal to build a ballpark in historic Shockoe Bottom for whatever team replaces the Richmond Braves. Mayor L. Douglas Wilder said Mon day that developers might want to build a ballpark near Main Street Station, as opposed to the current site of the faded Diamond.

While his fellow “Jeopardy!“ contestants were hit-and-miss, David Hudson Jr. was unerring in providing the questions to 11 answers. “Actually, I was lucky enough not to get any wrong, except for the Final Jeopardy! question, but everyone got it wrong,“ he recalled yesterday morning at a Starbucks near the University of Virginia campus.

Evergreen Cemetery, intended as a burial ground for Richmond’s black aristocracy, is the scene of a horror story. Grave sites choked by weeds, shrouded by woods and carpeted with kudzu have left many of the deceased lost in perpetuity.