Jokers don’t get any wilder than the one draped on the wall of a Shockoe Bottom strip club. A banner of President Barack Obama as The Joker hangs across Main Street from the Slave Trade Reconciliation Triangle, where human figures lock in a melting embrace. Reconciliation is not what MICHAEL
PAUL
WILLIAMS
comes to mind when you see Obama’s powder-white face grotesquely smeared with lipstick.

Michael Paul Williams’ column will resume Thursday.

For R. Creigh Deeds, the latest setback in his campaign for governor wasn’t so much a plot twist as a rerun. Four years ago in his bid for attorney general, Deeds failed to receive an endorsement from fellow Democrat L. Douglas Wilder. He eventually lost to Republican Bob McDonnell by a mere 360 votes. Now comes Act II of Deeds-McDonnell, and you’d think Deeds would have spent the past four years rehabbing his relationship with Wilder. But Thursday, Wilder again declined to back him.

The public housing resident received a letter in May saying she’d been picked to receive a rent-subsidy voucher. She’d been on the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority’s voucher waiting list since at least 2000 and was living with her mom. “I was glad to receive it so I could have my own place, finally,“ said the woman, who did not want her name published for fear of retaliation.

“I’m thinking this guy could be a big creep,“ said Pappas, who uses MySpace and Facebook. That didn’t turn out to be the case, and they dated for a year. But Pappas, like many Longwood students interviewed yesterday, is rethinking her relationship with the Internet in the aftermath of a quadruple slaying in the home of a Longwood professor that has been tied to a MySpace relationship between the suspect and the professor’s daughter.

It’s clear that Del. Phil Hamilton badly wanted a job at Old Dominion University. Less clear is whether he actually performed it. The Newport News Republican sent or replied to 11 e-mails discussing possible employment at the then-proposed Center for Teaching Quality and Educational Leadership. Problem is, Hamilton sent these e-mails before, during and after a 2007 General Assembly session in which he secured $500,000 in startup funding for the center.

The Chinese-food deliveryman zipped out of Oak Hill Plaza on Tuesday night carrying two orders from Hunan Gourmet on Mechanicsville Turnpike. Heading east, his first stop was Bolling Court in eastern Henrico County. He sprinted to the door step of a town house, where he handed the waiting customer chicken wings, shrimp-fried rice, rib tips, french fries and a shrimp egg roll.

The Quest Institute of Charlottesville has distributed more than a million books to 11,000 inmates during the 20-year history of its Books Behind Bars program. The Virginia Department of Corrections should be giving the nonprofit program’s founder a medal. Instead, it kicked Kay Allison and her program out of the prison system. “Quest Bookshop is no longer [an] approved vendor . . . allowed to send books directly to inmates,“ said Department of Corrections spokesman Larry Traylor, adding that the decision was reached after contraband was discovered in some books. The corrections department said it wants people to donate books to prison libraries, but inmates have limited access to those books.

Hope, once again, abounds on Sixth Street. Richmond CenterStage, whose grand opening is tonight, rises above the ashes of the demolished Sixth Street Marketplace, hailed 24 years ago as downtown’s savior. “Today Richmond has the exhilaration of watching a dream turn into a reality,“ then-Richmond Renaissance Chairman T. Justin Moore Jr. said in 1985, before “Sixth Street” became a code phrase for coffer-consuming civic projects.

Becky Lee, chief program officer at the YWCA of Richmond, recalled her reaction upon learning that entertainer Chris Brown’s punishment for assaulting his girlfriend would be removing trash and graffiti in Richmond. “I was undone,“ she said. “The truth is, I sort of rolled my eyes. It just was hard to see the relevance. There wasn’t any.“

But on the 20th anniversary of a Labor Day weekend of notorious unrest here in Virginia Beach, the oceanfront of this resort city could hardly have been more placid. Time seems to have salved the wounds of Greekfest, a festive gathering of black sorority and fraternity members that erupted into violence, looting, arrests and damage totaling about $1.4 million in 1989.

What? Parents are protesting an American president’s message that their children study hard and stay in school? Some school systems, cowed by grumbling parents or perhaps politically simpatico, are refusing to broadcast President Barack Obama’s back-to-school address? A pro-education message by our president is being suppressed by educators. Goals that should be universally embraced are being treated as if they emerged from “The Manchurian Candidate.“

“Man’s basic nature is inclined towards evil, and when the exercise of liberty takes the shape of pornography, drug abuse, or homosexuality, the government must restrain, punish, and deter.“ With that sentence in his 1989 Regent University law school thesis, Bob McDonnell laid bare his distaste for gays and lesbians. Yes, people can change their views over time, as McDonnell, the Republican candidate for governor, has argued since his thesis became public in a Washington Post story Sunday. But his record as an elected official does not suggest he has experienced an epiphany regarding his views of gays and lesbians.

Roadside fruit and vegetable stands stocked with plump, juicy tomatoes? Check. Cornfields, horse farms and rural vistas? Check. Panhandlers standing in medians? Not exactly what comes to mind when you think of Han over County. “I’ve lived out here all my life, and I’ve never seen anything like that,“ said Scott Miller, who operates Computer M.D. with his wife, Becky, near the intersection of Atlee Road and Mechanicsville Turnpike.

As dog killer Michael Vick resumed his pigskin career amid cheers this week, the animal-welfare advocate who stridently opposed his return is under siege. Irony abounds in the heat-related death of a dog belonging to Robin Starr, the CEO of the Richmond SPCA. Her deaf and blind cocker spaniel/poodle mix, Louie, died Aug. 19 after being left in Starr’s Volvo for four hours. Ed Starr said he put the dog in his wife’s car before she drove to work but forgot to tell her.