More on the Bates restitution. It's not stingy. $250 fine to the DA. $500 to the Daily Cal, which well covers any purely financial loss the paper suffered. On the ethical level, he'll be pushing for legislation to codify the consequences of newspaper thefts.

In response to the recent theft and a request by Lin, Bates agreed to propose a city ordinance and support state legislation specifically making the theft of free newspapers a crime.

And speaking to schoolchildren about it, although no one will care about that one.

Furthermore, Bates said he plans to speak to Berkeley public school students to help them understand that "impulsive actions have lasting consequences that can profoundly affect the rest of their lives."

"I want to help students understand the importance of their decisions, and that they are responsible for their actions," Bates said in a statement Thursday.

If this was just Bates throwing the papers away, this would probably do it for me in terms of restitution. But now there's a much more serious charge levelled against him: that he conspired with political allies to spin this story several weeks before the police confronted him. That's worse then the actual thefts. If you want to be conspiratorial, you could say that these restitutions are designed to pull attention away from that other charge. So I'm still a skeptic.

I think I'm going to ask Bates for an interview for next semester's Kevin-column.

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