By JOHN M. CRISP, Scripps Howard News Service

Down here in Texas, legislators are casting a covetous eye toward adjacent states like Oklahoma and Louisiana, where, according to proponents of the gaming industry, the parking lots of their casinos are filled with cars bearing Texas license plates. And those states' coffers are generously augmented by a cut of the gambling proceeds, money that might have stayed in Texas.

Americans with mental retardation have been in the news recently.
First, President Obama committed a regrettable indiscretion on the Jay Leno Show by comparing his own bowling ineptitude with the level of skill on display -- so the joke goes -- at the Special Olympics.

The television news in a hotel in El Paso, Texas last week was disarming: just across the border, Mexico was uncomfortably close to becoming a "failed state," defeated by poverty, corruption, and drug wars.
Assassinations and kidnappings were threatening to wash over the Rio Grande. Cross the border at your own risk.

In an address to the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce last week, President Barack Obama revealed his plan for improving education in our nation. Along with health care and energy, education represents the so-called third leg of the stool upon which will rest a transformation of our country wrought during a time of extreme economic crisis.

In light of concerns about President Obama's budget -- in particular, that it will lead us down a slippery slope toward European-style, nanny-state socialism -- I considered the ways in which American citizens of a certain age were systematically trained to hate Soviet-style communism, as well as socialism and most ideas that lie toward the left end of the political spectrum.

It's difficult to find a noun or adjective related to the circumstance of disaster that hasn't been used to describe our current economic dilemma.
It's been called a "crisis" many times. Sometimes the crisis "deepens." Other times it "cascades." President Obama warns that inaction could turn "crisis into a catastrophe."

I was thinking about Black History Month a few days ago, as I considered paying a visit to a scheduled celebration of the event on the campus of the college where I work. Some of my black colleagues had chosen Abraham Lincoln's birthday to commemorate the long African-American legacy in our country.

The Tom Daschle episode has this peculiar capacity: it manages to shock us, but not to surprise us. The shock is only momentary. How could a seasoned public official or his accountant -- surely Daschle doesn't do his own taxes -- overlook owed taxes in an amount that represents several years' pay for most of us?

In a column a few weeks ago I expressed some wistful nostalgia over the plight of newspapers in a world dominated by around-the-clock electronic media that depend primarily on images and talk.

Everyone will have her own way of thinking about the remarkable events centered on January 20, 2009. Some probably thought the over-sized bow on Aretha Franklin's hat was outrageously over the top, but when she began to sing, everything about her -- including the bow -- was perfect.