I watched an hour of this Al Gore - Bill Bradley debate. So the first thing is, and this is a bit nitpicky I suppose, but I'm not going to vote for Bradley. The only issue that captured me is that Bradley will try to reduce the military budget. Military budgets have already been reduced in the last few years, and I don't feel that the US Armed Forces are capable of sustained operations with- out using a lot of Reservists. There has been a gradual shift to putting more burden on the Reserves to fill in the gaps of military cutbacks. The problem with that is that Reservists have regular jobs and don't have the subsidized housing and living arrangements of regular militart personnel. When they get called up they have to stop working, stop getting paid, and possibly lose their jobs, because they're being called up for months at a time. Getting back to my point, a cutting edge military machine, one that is well trained and well moti- vated, is what we still need, now more than ever with the dissolution of the Soviet Threat.

Anyway, it's interesting to watch skillful politicians at work. Gore keeps bringing up that Bradley had to apologize for negative campaigning, and he keeps asking Bradley to agree to weekly debates. Meanwhile, Bradley points to Gore's special interest backing and Bradley's better health care initiatives. It's kind of weird to see each field a question by saying "we'll, yes [or no] but what's really important is my..." You do have to pay careful attention to the details to catch what the differences are between the two. A lot of the debate seems to be definitional: Gore calls this negative campaigning, Bradley says that Gore has done worse, Gore replies specifically how it's not the same. They can both answer a question without really answering the question asked, and I do think it's interesting to watch. You can't lie, so the candidates have to resort to other tactics and word games...

I'm watching Extra, for some reason. The first story was about police car chases and how 400 people die every year from the chases. And shouldn't police not do this since it endagers the public? I have never heard any police officer say that high speed chases are a policy, not that they would say that. On the con- trary, I always hear about how police officers have to stay back and call for backup, to protect the public. Don't panic the criminal and make him take off, and if he does just keep him in sight because you have a lot of help around. The police chases on television are rare exceptions that usually shouldn't have happened and were a bad call by the officer, rather than departmental policy.

Second story was about a couple of people who were arrested and put in jail for overdue library books. The story builds it up: how it's unfair and overkill. But then they have the head guy of the library system saying that they only put out warrants if the book is over a year overdue and the borrower hasn't responded to mail notices and a court summons. Book losses cost that library system $180k a year, and the measures have cut most of the losses. It just seems to me that if you borrow something, you're responsible for returning it.

The other thing is the argument against harsh punishments that don't fit the crime. Punishments -- jail time, fines, or whatever -- are there to make people not break the law, they're not designed to make people repay society or their victims for their losses, that's civil law. In criminal law, sentences are a deterrent, and if they're not deterring people they should be made harsher. But whatever I may feel about this subject, there is an Amendment to protect people against cruel and unusual punishment. Just what cruel and unusual means, I leave that to the Supreme Court...

Just got the new ICQ 2.0 beta. Finally in the Mac OS version I can filter out certain people, hide from other people, and have a message history. The bad part is that they added another row of two buttons to the interface, so now it's even harder to keep it small and the buttons are useless to me. I'm still waiting for a chat client that works with ICQ and AOL IM at the same time.