One Hundred and Twenty Three

123 …One Hundred and Twenty Three

So today I pulled a criminal and credit background check on myself. I am up for a rather prestigious job and as one of the finalists they are going to do a criminal and credit background check on me.

Let’s set aside the ethical implications of this increasingly common practice and focus on what my background check showed….

123 parking tickets in the past 10 years.

What the fuck?

Everyone has their Achilles heal and mine are two things – returning movies late to the rental store and parking tickets. The former I solved with the miracle that is NetFlix. The latter problem has been a bit more difficult to address. For most of my 20’s I had this FU! attitude towards the parking cops. I dared them to catch me. I played games and stuffed meters and in general stuck my finger in the face of “The Man”. In the past several years I have relented. Maybe it was the invention of the smart park machine that takes credit cards, maybe it was the dreaded thing called maturity, maybe I have been beaten down by “The Man” to the point that I have stopped fighting or maybe it was because I no longer had a job requiring me to park in downtown Salem or Portland. Whatever it was I now pay for parking and pay my fines.

But today my history caught up with me in very stark terms.

I have known that the number of tickets I have gotten was substantial over the years but 123? Wow. Tickets for overtime meters in Portland. Tickets for parking too close to a curb in Ashland. Tickets for blocking a handicap ramp in Vancouver, Wa. Tickets for expired tags in Salem. If there is one thing you can say I was creative in procurring said offenses.

So let’s do the math. 123 parking tickets in 10 years. That is about 12 tickets a year. Let’s say $24 a fine (cause you know I didn’t pay them on time and the fines doubled). So I paid roughly $300 a year to illegally park my car totally $3,000 in the past 10 years.

Memo to 23 year old Finn: You will lose this fight against “The Man”.

Hillary, Lieberman and Bears, Oh My!

Well sorry regular blog readers of Finnegan’s Wake (all 3 of you) for my extended absence. I think like most of the nation, I needed a week or two off post election to recoup and get my head around what the hell just happened.

Well it’s officially real. Barack Obama is number 44.

While the media has been abuzz about everything from official first puppies to the bailout of the big three automakers I want to focus on two things today (or two people to be more accurate): Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton.

Let’s start with old traitor Joe. It is hard to believe I worked night and day to get this man elected vice-president in 2000. Was he always this much of a sanctimonious prick? Was I blind to it simply because of the fact it was a Presidential election against an ignorant jackass from Texas? I would like to think I have a pretty finely tuned “asshole-meter” but it was broken in 2000 when it came to Joe Lieberman. For that I apologize to America.

The exposing of his true colors can be traced to his role as cheerleader for the Iraq War and his full-throated support of the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war, death and destruction of all people who do not subscribe to the Judeo-Christianist philosophy. Lieberman threw his lot in early with the chicken-hawk caucus and whether it was sheer stubbornness or true ideological bent he refused to abandon that support even in the face of overwhelming evidence of the failure of the Iraq War and Bush/Cheney foreign policy.

So fast forward to the 2008 Presidential election where we witnessed the final conversion of the Senator from Connecticut into a turncoat that made Zell Miller look positively benign. He essentially “double-downed” on a John McCain presidency in order to rescue his reputation that was in tatters.

The JedReport compiled a video of some of his more odious moments this year campaigning on behalf of John McCain and the Republican ticket.

Got that? He went on national television in prime time at the REPUBLICAN National Convention and declared his fellow Democratic Senator unfit to lead the nation.

What an insufferable, pompous little shit.

So why does all this matter? Tomorrow the Senate Democratic caucus is going to vote to decide what sort of punishment Joe Lieberman deserves. The media is all atwitter about what they are going to do: Do they do nothing? Do they boot him out of the caucus? Do they strip him of his chairmanship of the powerful Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee?

Umm excuse me, and pardon my french, but WHAT THE FUCK?

Were our Democratic Senators NOT paying attention in the past election? Change is what the people voted for and change is what we want. Change is not allowing some turncoat Zell Miller on steroids to remain in charge of the catering budget for the Senate much less stay in the Caucus or have any say whatsoever in any committee deliberations. They need to strip him of everything and send him out to political Sahara. Elections have consequences.

I urge everyone to call your Senator(s) and tell them anything short of stripping him of his committee chairmanship is not acceptable at all.

Later today I will address the Hillary as Secretary of State idea.

Election Day 2008

“I just voted for Obama. Who thought this would ever be a possibility? let’s pray it happens.”

—Text Message I received this morning from a childhood friend back east, a man born to a white mother and a Nigerian father. A man who knows racism first hand.

To say that today is a historic moment is to minimize what is about to happen. As a child of a mixed family I remember going to my grandfather’s funeral in rural North Carolina in 1982 as a 9 year old. Our family was unusual even by Washington D.C. standards : two white kids, one black kid, one Vietnamese kid and two white parents. But that is all I knew. I knew we were different in some ways but our difference was my normality. My parents fiercely protected that innocence and made sure we lived and went to schools in a community that celebrated, embraced and in many ways looked like our family.

That all changed on that trip. I will never forget the stares and whispers at the gas stations as our happy band poured out to go to the bathroom. And then we went to eat in a diner off the interstate somewhere in the mountains of North Carolina. To this day I can remember how the entire place got quiet after we walked in. And then many turned around and simply stared at us while we ate. I remember feeling uncomfortable, but mainly because my parents were acting so weird. For the first time in ages us kids ate our food in silence, being stared at like exotic animals in the zoo.

I learned we were different that day. I learned the race mattered to alot of people. So much so that it permanently scarred my African-American brother and affected our family in ways the reverberate today.

So I never thought I would see the moment that I could fill out a ballot for a black man with a funny name for President. As I filled in the little oval next to Barack Obama’s name yesterday I thought to myself – “this is for those folks in the diner all those years ago that made my family feel so uncomfortable and taught a 9 year old all about racism without ever saying a word”.

Here is a picture of my family at my sister’s wedding. They didn’t win.

Vote Hope.

Keep Talking Dicky Boy Keep Talking

So the least popular man in America decides to endorse John McCain. I say the Obama campaign should buy him his own half hour to explain in great detail his reasons for support.