Thanks for the explanation. 
Without having already read the linked article, I think that bondsmen are another variety of credit sharks?
Yep. With the legal ability to recover their money in the form of your broken bones if they want. It’s positively medieval
Couple more details. If you pay the bail, when you show up for court you get it all back. If you pay the bondsman, you don’t get any back, but you have to come up with a lot less cash.
With the bondsman, if you don’t show for court, he will be very upset (as he’s on the hook for the full bail amount) and is empowered to find you and bring you to court, and he isn’t likely to be nice about it.
This.
I’m willing to believe that he didn’t know when he got it. But tattoos can be removed, or done over; or at the least kept covered.
ETA: if you’re running for office, “kept covered” won’t be enough. Get it removed or x’d out. And do that before you announce the run, don’t wait tlll somebody catches you.
There was a fairly popular reality-TV show here in the U.S. for a while, Dog the Bounty Hunter – the title character and his family hunted down people who had violated the terms of their bail bonds.
Thanks for the laugh. Putting “getting a tattoo” and “due diligence” in the same paragraph is comedy GOLD!
ETA: My Portland is in Oregon, but if it were in Maine, and he won the primary, I’d still vote for him. It’s a sin to vote for a Republican.
Remind your friends (especially if you’re in Maine).
I got my first tattoo last year, at 50. The artist and I discussed it in depth, sending designs and changes back and forth via IM, for several weeks before I actually had it done. So yes, due diligence is very much an option with tattoos.
So, did you go with drinking tequila or vodka or something more exotic when getting it done?
Okay, my bad. Please mentally amend the statement to “getting a tattoo while on liberty.”
Neither, although my wife bought us vanilla milkshakes when I was finished.
When you’re nineteen and there’s alcohol involved this doesn’t happen as often.
I don’t know the reason
Stayed up all season
With nothing to show but a brand-new tattoo
But it’s a real beauty
A Mexican cutie
How it got here, I haven’t a clue
– Jimmy Buffett
Still, even without the due diligence he’s had years for someone to say in the locker room, “WTF do you have on your chest!”
It may be an odd way to phrase it, but I think the idea is still valid. This is someone who made a decision that he probably expected to last a lifetime, and he seemed to think about it for all of five seconds. And that’s the story he wants us to believe. I want some a little more thoughtful passing my laws and spending my money.
How is Portland these days; is Powell’s still around?
I’ve only been here for three years, but if you’re asking about the bookstore, YES. Three locations (but none on Powell. Interestingly, there IS a strip club on Powell, named Hawthorne Strip, while Powell’s flagship is on Hawthorne. Go figure).
I went up to Portland a couple years back (and was disappointed by the lack of roving street gangs and bomb craters the more influenced elders around me warned of) and the Powell’s on Burnside was undersold as a must-see for tourists. That’s a bibliophile’s wet dream given tangible form
If you want to see undersold to tourists, check out Pip’s Donuts. Especially if you’re there on your birthday. Free half dozen donuts!
It might be a dozen. They’re really small, but OH, SO GOOD!
ETA: I don’t have a T-shirt from Powell’s (yet). But I have one from Pip’s,
I work about two blocks from Powell’s. The Pearl district is pretty damn hip these days. Weekends are always crowded with people on the streets. I live not too far away as well. Trust me, Portland isn’t burning.
But you’re not going to get that unless the guy in the locker room is also a Nazi, and his response is going to be “Seig Heil!” The average person (myself included) isn’t going to see that and say “Oh, he’s a Nazi”; they’re going to see a skull and cross bones and say “Oh, he’s a pirate.” I didn’t know the SS used a specific skull and crossbones.
If he got it in his 20s, there just aren’t going to be many strangers who see it casually.
Which leads to the question of who he hangs around with, since they didn’t have an issue with it, either…
Yes I do appreciate the Día de los Muertos skull art. It is cheerful and colourful. Although obviously it is still related to death, it has nothing to do with badassery from what I can tell. I suppose same with Grateful Dead iconography, and there is certainly a genre of whimsical goofy stuff skate culture type stuff.
Nazi death skulls and similar fantasy cock flinging bad dude iconography is fucking stupid though. My opinion.
Any reason to believe he isn’t a Republican?
And yeah, I could hypothetically buy that it was a drunken mistake at the time, and I’m not inclined to punish someone for a drunken mistake decades ago… but in the decades since then, he absolutely had to have found out what it was. And once he found out what it was, he still chose to keep it. I mean, even if he couldn’t afford laser removal or whatever, he could have done something like get a big black blotch tattooed over it to hide it.