OPINION

... and the only thing I feel is fear itself.

Speaking about the economy in Central Ohio today, Obama (as quoted on his own Website), said this:

We remember that some of the most famous words ever spoken by an American came from a President who took office in a time of turmoil - "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Obama sets my teeth on edge in trying to cast himself in the Roosevelt role.

When FDR entered the White House and tried to pull the country out of an economic abyss, he drew on political experience that Obama can only dream of. He had been elected to the New York state Senate twice, was assistant secretary of the Navy during WWI, was a candidate for U.S. Senate, was candidate for vice president on the Democratic ticket, was governor of New York.

Only then did he become the president to rescue the country from the Great Depression.

Obama has not been this kind of player. If he wins the White House, I'd wish him well and pray for the country. He'd be one of the luckiest guys in the world to get the job, and maybe some of that luck would rub off on the other 300 million of us Americans.

I'd rather have a mean old crust with scars on his ass -- someone who could stare holes through a Wall Street moneychanger and Vladimir Putin both.

John McCain for the first time today signaled that it's time for him and Sarah Palin to stop their lynch-mob tactics. He gave a speech today and, in response to a supporter urging him to take the gloves off and start fighting, he said he'll fight, but he's going to be respectful to Sen. Obama. The crowd booed. McCain stopped them and insisted, no, we will run a respectful campaign.

McCain, at least, recognizes that the emotions his campaign has stirred creates exactly the wrong image he wants Americans to have of his campaign. I'm hoping the backlash against him has resonated and shaken him severely. You don't win elections by encouraging your supporters to yell, "Kill him," in reference to Obama, and, "Sit down, boy," to a black TV soundman doing election coverage.

There's a limit to the value of negative campaigning, and McCain finally sees how truly damaging it is. I'm sorry it took him this long to put a stop to it. I hope it's not too late.

We know Sarah Palin had ties to the Alaska Independence Party. But I didn't know how radical her pals were. Here's the headline: Extremists Mark Chryson and Steve Stoll helped launch Palin's political career in Alaska, and in return had influence over policy. "Her door was open," says Chryson -- and still is.

And then there's Rolling Stone's profile of John McCain.

Everyone seems to have a Bill Ayers mistake or two in his/her life story.

This smacks of gallows humor, you know, whistling past the graveyard stuff. But ABC News and of course, everyone's 401(k) has discovered a tie between President Bush's reassuring remarks and Wall Street performance.

Hint: It's not pretty.

I'm looking for ideas for naming this newspaper's sixth annual recipient.

For better or for worse, this Texan (living here or abroad, even) has made a splash in arts, medicine, public service, sports, science, academia -- you name it. Don't forget religion -- ever.

Is there a hero from Hurricane Ike we need to consider?

I should be wondering if there is a hero out there who will save our miserable hides from this Wall Street meltdown. Maybe there's a Texan we can blame it on.

What do the Yahoo and Google search engines know that we don't?

I was looking for the Keep Dallas Beautiful web site.

So I typed in Keep Dallas, and before I could add the word Beauiful, the search engine added pretentious.

Ouch that hurts.
And according to the search engines, Austin is weird.

But no search engine can match these selections from an innovative blogger:

"Keep Houston Under Construction"

"Keep Waco In the News"

"Keep San Antonio Lame" (except for Spurs basketball and mexican food)

"Keep Wichita Falls Ugly"

"Keep Lubbock Far Away"

"Keep Corpus Christi Smelly"

"Keep Amarillo A pit-stop on the way to Colorado"

"Keep El Paso ???"

"Keep Beaumont Redneck"

"Keep San Marcos / New Braunfels Drunk"

It's increasingly worrying that John McCain and Sarah Palin are embracing the acceptability of campaign tactics that play to the most racist and intolerant tendencies among their supporters. John McCain knows that Barack Obama has no links whatsoever to terrorism, and yet he's doing everything he can to create that linkage. And he's unleashing Sarah Palin to do his dirty work while McCain claims to be above this condemnable form of negative campaigning.

This is unconscionable, and it shows how desperate John McCain has become. He promised repeatedly that he wouldn't campaign this way. And he said that when politicians campaign that way, it shows how little vision they have of the future. But most dangerous in this form of campaigning is that he and Sarah Palin are standing by, with smiles on their faces, while their supporters yell things like, "Kill him!" in reference to Obama. They have done nothing to calm down this lynch-mob mentality. Instead, they are doing everything they can to promote it. John McCain must make a full-court, public push to stop this "kill him" mentality now.

I'm not the only one who's worried. David Gergen told CNN's Anderson Cooper earlier this week: "The issue has been what's been going on at Sarah Palin's rallies. That's where the real trouble is because it's...it's the combination of her rhetoric -- which is whipping up these crowds -- and these ugly scenes that have occurred at these rallies. When Obama's name came up, has been used it not only brought these boos but, you know we have reports now of somebody yelling out "terrorist!" about Obama. At another rally, someone yelling out "kill him, kill him". And at another rally the...you have people shouting racial epithets.

COOPER: You can't control though what people say in a crowd, can you, David?

GERGEN: Yes. You can, and it's...Yes. It's up, it's up to the, Sarah Palin, at her rally and for John McCain to tell her if she doesn't start doing this to stop right there and take issue with what's been said and say this has no place in our campaign and we do not condone this and please let's show more respect. I think it's up to her."

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks thinks Sarah Palin is "not even close" to being ready for the vice presidency. And he believes she is a "fatal cancer to the Republican party."

Of course, you wouldn't know that from the columns he's written. After the VP debate, for instance, he wrote, in a glowing paean on Palin's performance: "She established debating parity with Joe Biden. ... By the end of the debate, most Republicans were not crouching behind the couch, but standing on it. The race has not been transformed, but few could have expected as vibrant and tactically clever a performance as the one Sarah Palin turned in Thursday night."

Brooks' quotes that were more critical of Palin came at a Q&A session at a party sponsored by The Atlantic and was reported by The Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar. Here's video proof:

So, why hasn't David Brooks written that he feels Palin is "not even close" to being ready? Do you think he, as a nationally syndicated columnist, owes it to his readers to square these views? Or is it fine to have one set of views for print and another for everywhere else?

Here are fact-driven responses to several of the accusations aimed at Obama in the past few days:

Regarding the accusation by McCain that he has never taken on his own party. Not true.

Regarding the constant innuendo-driven accusation by Palin, one that seriously crosses the line into inciting a riot, that Obama won't explain the Ayers connection. Here's Obama's answer. You can choose not to believe it, but don't fall prey to the Palin remarks that Obama won't talk about it.

What's eating at me most? What Andrew Sullivan calls the "Dangerous Panic on the Far Right."

Finally, I find it revolting that after his experiences in 2000 -- (this summary from Wikipedia) "McCain was the target of a whisper campaign in 2000 implying that he had fathered a black child out of wedlock. (McCain's adopted daughter is a naturally dark-skinned child from Bangladesh). Voters in South Carolina were reportedly asked, "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew that he fathered an illegitimate black child?". McCain would later lose the South Carolina primary, and the nomination, to George W. Bush."

In addition, on the week of the nomination vote, dozens of radio stations were called on the same day asking talk show hosts what they thought of McCain's having fathered a black child out of wedlock.

McCain later said of the incidents: "There were some pretty vile and hurtful things said during the South Carolina primary. It's a really nasty side of politics. We tried to ignore it and I think we shielded [our daughter] from it. It's just unfortunate that that sort of thing still exists. As you know she's Bengali, and very dark skinned. A lot of phone calls were made by people who said we should be very ashamed about her, about the color of her skin. Thousands and thousands of calls from people to voters saying, 'You know, the McCains have a black baby.' I believe that there is a special place in hell for people like those."

I contend that the McCain/Palin attacks of this week rate up there with that 2000 whisper campaign. What happened to that John McCain?

There are a few folks in Taylor, Texas, just outside of Austin, that have not yet caught the chicken train yet. The Taylor City Council passed an ordinance that says flock owners can't have chickens within 200 feet of buildings, and logically, poultry lovers don't feel this restriction is fair. In fact, many of them panicked at the thought of the city ticketing them for their fowl that they sold them or moved them outside city limits.

But Livie Gault, Gary Sherrell and Sharon Toups have gathered enough signatures to get the city to compromise. After all, more people are seeing the inherent benefits of having chickens, especially the fresh eggs, organic manure and excellent pest control.

Money quote: "I'd like to see it that if a person wants a chicken, you can get a chicken," [Livie] Gault said. With the nation's economic problems growing, he said, "it's going to get ugly, man, and you're going to need a chicken."

That's right. You're going to need a chicken!

If you read columns or even write them semi-professionally and semi-annually, as I do, you occasionally run across one that causes you to say out loud, "Exactly. Wish I'd written that."

Today's candidate is Jean-Jacques Taylor from our award-winning SportsDay staff. The subject is Adam "Pacman Again" Jones:

I'm sick and tired of hearing about how hard it is for a kid like Jones - who grew up in the projects, devoid of male role models - to put that life behind him. The NFL is full of players who grew up in similar situations, used it as motivation and became contributing members of society.

It ain't that hard.

The other day, Jacques had a very nice look at what has happened to former Ranger Rafael Palmeiro in the wake of his finger-wagging steroids lie to Congress.

If you want even more, Jacques has his own blog elsewhere on this site. But read these two columns first. This is what newspapers should do.

Look, it's not fair to blame Republicans alone for this bad economy. Democrats went along with all the stuff Wall Street wanted from Clinton forward, and have dirty hands on Fannie and Freddie. I have no use for either party, frankly, and am planning on withholding my vote in the presidential contest, and probably the Congressional races too. Nevertheless, as we all know, bad economic news always hurts whichever party holds the White House. Life isn't fair.

Because of the economy, Republicans are being set up for a major wipeout this fall. They might even lose Mitch McConnell, their Senate leader. To get an idea of how bad things are, the Dow Jones average today closed nearly 40 percent off where the market was one year ago. And take General Motors. When Bush became president, it was worth $52 billion. Today it's worth less than $4 billion.

George W. Bush doesn't run GM, of course. But you get my point.

I find it hard to believe that this downtown hotel project has any support, given the dire economic prospects, and the already weak convention business in Dallas. When the new convention center hotel fails, it will fall to Dallas taxpayers to pay for the thing. As a Dallas taxpayer, I anticipate that there's going to be a world of hurt in our city over the next few years, and I want the city government to be in a position to do the meat-and-potatoes things to keep the city and its people sustained in the crisis -- not devote, or potentially devote, resources to this elite vanity project.

"It's pretty hard to believe and disappointing that the other side has such a pessimistic attitude about Dallas," Mayor Leppert said today, in a press release. Oh, please. This sort of magical-thinking optimism is nonsense -- the idea that if you oppose this kooky plan, you hate Dallas.

In a must-read post, Trey Garrison reveals the results of a little sleuthing he did, showing that one of the citizens publicly complaining in the press release from the Build the Hotel people that the anti-hotel forces are playing dirty -- the citizen actually got paid to design Mayor Leppert's website. Trey calls b.s. Good for Trey.

Bill's Medicare column was eye-opening and insightful. Although it will be a loooooong time before I will need the help of Social Security or Medicare (if it's still solvent by then), I can't help but worry about the huge burden that these entitlement programs will weigh on my generation, and we'll be taxpayers for many years to come.

But this latest Wall Street bailout has made me ever-so-slightly jaded about Congress' ability to solve a problem without making things worse. Looks like letter writer Tom in Garland is in the same boat with me:

The Medicare bailout will be seriously contemplated when it becomes inescapable reality. So long as it is off in the future, and can be ignored by politicians now in office, it will be. There is always the possibility of a sudden increase in productivity, due to say, robotics. Even if the worst happens, it will be avoided until the bitter end, and then treated as an unpleasant surprise.

Deadline: Tomorrow.

I recently wrote about how we look for and select Community Voices volunteer columnists. We need your help. If you know someone who would like to write personal opinion columns from a local, community perspective, send them outr way. Here's how to apply:

It was inevitable, perhaps. The debt clock in Times Square has run out of digits. The $10 trillion in national debt has overwhelmed the clock, which was installed in 1989 to record $2.7 trillion in debt. Devilishly, I'll mention that another Republican was in office that year: Ronald Reagan.

My mom will be proud when she reads this about Dennis (we call him The Elf) Kucinich, who is her congressman on the west side of Cleveland.

He's in a federal appeals court to challenge the Texas Democratic Party's requirement that a candidate take a loyalty oath to get on the ballot.

Dennis has backup in his lawsuit from Willie Nelson.

Methinks they qualify as mavericks.

OK, Rodger, I'll challenge you to a Mom Report dual.

My mother is a lifelong Republican. Yet she, too, was dispirited by this week's debate, for many of the reasons others have already stated. I believe she probably roughly agrees with our editorial yesterday, which essentially said neither candidate soared but that overall Obama did better.

My mother isn't a fan of Obama, so that's a pretty dispassionate analysis.

She's particularly tired of McCain and Obama "quoting" something from their opponent that later turns out to be only half true. She notes that Biden was good at that same thing yesterday on the TODAY show....

Mom raised another point about McCain that hit me awhile back too, but I'd refrained from bringing it up. She's tired of McCain's "my friends." I agree. She thinks he overuses it. I think it sounds sarcastic, sour, patronizing.

Anybody agree?

North Texans sure are passionate about the State Fair of Texas, so we had no shortage of responses from our regular Sounding-Off-ers and our Community Voices.

(Friendly reminder: Tomorrow is the deadline to submit your application to be a Community Voice! Read more about how to apply here, and if you want to see what people in your community are doing with their voices, check out recent columns from Jeanna Mead of Fate, Greg Silva of Flower Mound and Elouise Plain of Plano.)

This week we asked: What would you change about the great State Fair of Texas?

Wondering what folks said? Check out a few responses after the jump...

Deadline: Friday.

I recently wrote about how we look for and select Community Voices volunteer columnists. We need your help. If you know someone who would like to write personal opinion columns from a local, community perspective, send them outr way. Here's how to apply: