The oil-spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico while a global disaster by any measure, does provide a tiny sliver of a silver lining. By all rights, it should squash the widening assumption that government is a bad thing that needs to get out of the way.

But don't hold your breath. When Wall Street, the banking industry and the housing market collapsed a year and a half ago, as a direct result of lax government oversight, the lesson should have been obvious: We need more government, not less, in order to make sure this doesn't happen again.

With all the bad behavior being displayed by Ohio University students this spring, it's becoming obvious that nobody ever bothered to instruct many of these young whippersnappers on the proper rules and protocol of drinking and partying.

So far this spring, we've had chanting mobs in the streets of Athens, furniture set afire, aggressive riot control by local police, dozens and dozens of students arrested for public inebriation and other alcohol-related crimes, a massive drunk-fest in a muddy field, and allegations of a sorority-gone-wild party that even if only partly true, would have caused Emperor Caligula to blanche in embarrassment.

Like a lot of people in Athens, I'm weary of this fest, that fest, fests all over the damn place.

However, I do have a brief blurb about the troubled student fest season this year in Athens.

Occasionally, believe it or not, I grow weary of lecturing you folks about politics. The Tea Partiers of America can relax this week, though I'll continue to send them negative brain waves.

Please sit back now, close your eyes and count to 30 while I do that.

OK, all done"¦

Ten assorted thoughts about Palmer Fest:

1) My guess is that Palmer Fest as it has existed for OU students since the early '90s is finished. I just can't imagine the city and university will allow an event that's become so predictably violent to continue without major restrictions. City Council, at its Monday meeting, apparently confirmed this, using the term "zero tolerance"� as the city's strategy for moving ahead. The university is making the same sort of noises. (Interestingly, though, when I asked my news-writing class at OU Tuesday night whether they thought an out-of-control Palmer Fest would happen again, 16 out of 16 raised their hands.)

Editor's note: Our original copy of this article has a defective format and on some browsers the text continues past the right-hand margins. So we reposted the article here. However upon doing that, the comments don't come along with the new, "good" version of the story. So if you would like to read the many comments to this story or post new ones, please link to the old version. Sorry for the confusion. We have no idea why this occurred with this particular story. TS

I admit a bias in the immigration debate.

Some of the people Arizona and others are persecuting are friends of mine. I see them as people, not criminals, and don't care what the law says about it.

But it's a perspective that's influenced by my own gilded memories of people I got to know while working blue-collar and newspaper jobs in the American Southwest between 1978 and 1983. It also dates back to a lifelong fondness for the Mexican heritage of the West and Southwest, perhaps sealed that sunny day in 1961 Denver when my best pal Ricky Herrera's mom fed two hungry 6-year-old   boys freshly cooked, butter-topped homemade tortillas in her kitchen.

Editor's note: On some browsers this story has a defective format, with the text extending past the margins. If you would like to view a correctly formatted version, please go to this link. The comments for this story, as of noon on May 6 appear in this version. They could not be migrated to the new version. TS

I admit a bias in the immigration debate.

Some of the people Arizona and others are persecuting are friends of mine. I see them as people, not criminals, and don't care what the law says about it.

No "Editor's Notes"� columns in quite a while, but here's one with mini-editorials about a few minor, non-controversial issues "” gun rights, rowdy OU students and immigration craziness.

Angry, drunken gun-packers?

In today's issue, we're running a story that outlines in detail the conflicting loyalties that have compromised Bill Bias' role as Athens City Council president over the past several years.

In his roles as administrator/director for a retirement/nursing home corporation and president of City Council, Bias has been in a position to further the interests of his private employer, by helping to foil the plans of competing retirement center developers.

It's amazing how waiting around all day in a crowded, metropolitan hospital emergency waiting room can focus the mind about health-care in America.

That sort of experience can blow away all the high and mighty abstractions that Republicans and other opponents of the health-care bill passed earlier this week have been trumpeting.