Will Blagojevich be one of President Trump’s holiday season clemencies?

The name “Rod Blagojevich” has been all over the place this weekend – what with the fact that Sunday was the 10^th anniversary of the day that FBI agents showed up at the governor’s Ravenswood Manor neighborhood home to arrest him.

40892-424: From days when he was gov

Thereby beginning the saga that resulted with the governor’s impeachment and removal from office, followed with his incarceration at a federal correctional center in Colorado – where he remains to this day.

THERE ARE THOSE who would prefer to forget that Rod ever existed, and would probably hope there is some way his incarceration can be extended beyond his prison term that currently has a 2024 scheduled release date.

But I couldn’t help but notice a Chicago Sun-Times story, quoting one-time Illinois first lady Patti saying she’s holding out hope that her husband will be free and back home with the family for this year’s Christmas holiday.

Which ties into that freakish statement made back by Trump earlier this year where he hinted that he’s inclined to grant some form of presidential clemency on Blagojevich’s behalf.

Remember how much of a stink that stirred up? It was seen as more evidence of how unfit Trump was to be president that he would think Blagojevich was worthy of any form of early release from prison.

ADMITTEDLY, WHEN TRUMP made the statement, he had just done a few other clemencies and pardons – and the feeling then was that Blagojevich could be released from prison any day now.

That part didn’t come true. Blagojevich remains in the suburbs of Denver incarcerated. No one has said or done anything to indicate that activity on Blagojevich’s part is imminent.

At least not publicly. Patti Blagojevich claims she’s heard some things privately. But those could be vague tidbits that her wishful thinking is exaggerating into word of his imminent release.

TRUMP: Is he preparing a pardon?

My gut feeling? Back then, it was that Trump was making outlandish statements related to Blagojevich because he sensed it would “tick off” the Chicago political establishment that dumped all over the former governor and was glad to see him pushed out of the way.

WHY SHOULD ANYTHING have changed?

It may well be that Trump is waiting for a moment when he needs to distract attention from himself and his own activities – something so bad that he needs everybody to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” and think about someone else, instead.

Someone such as Blagojevich, whose actions are going to forevermore be pondered by our political establishment as to just how venal they truly were.

Did he really try to solicit bribes in exchange for political appointments? Was it all just the realities of politicking – extended to a higher level? Or was it just the usual petty political poop; performed by a man who had managed to alienate those who should have been his political allies.

WHICH IS WHY they were more than willing to see him carted off to prison!

All of that is now a decade in our past, although some of us are determined to want to see eternal punishment. I’m not kidding when I say there will be those who will get all upset some six years from now when Blagojevich’s prison term expires. They’ll want to see it extended for whatever excuse possible. Some people are just overly bitter.

BLAGOJEVICH: Wants her husband for Christmas

Patti Blagojevich may well be the only person who cares personally about her husband’s fate. If she led a larger group capable of offering support to Trump to guide him through all the upcoming calamities he’s going to endure, he probably would rush to grant clemency.

But she’s only one. The idea of messing with the minds of Chicago by granting clemency may turn out to be not worth the hassle Trump would get from taking such actions.

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Trump only capable of helping people after it no longer really matters?

Perhaps Donald Trump thinks he’s a boxer – the “Great White Hope” of our society who’s using his political authority for what he thinks is the common good.

Was appearing with Stallone the real reason for the president granting a pardon to Jack Johnson?

Either that, or he’s just like many other political people who get all ga-ga when in the presence of professional athletes and likes to do things that bring him into their world.

I CAN’T HELP but come to that conclusion after Trump’s actions of recent weeks – one in which he granted an outright pardon to the one-time heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson.

And another on Friday where he said he’s inclined to grant another pardon to a more recent vintage heavyweight champ – Muhammed Ali (a.k.a., Cassius Clay).

Trump did the Johnson pardon last month, literally holding an Oval Office ceremony to publicly sign the clemency into law. He was surrounded by Johnson family members (Jack is long deceased), professional boxers and actor Sylvester Stallone.

Who has portrayed boxer Rocky Balboa in countless films throughout the decades.

Does Trump want to share in Ali glory?

I SUSPECT THAT for Trump, the real reason for doing the pardon was that he got to appear in news photos with Stallone – and Stallone can claim he’s involved in the real world of boxing. Similar to how in 2016, actor Charlie Sheen tried to get to throw out the first ball at a World Series game because he once played a Cleveland Indians pitcher in a movie.

Now that he got positive press for the Johnson pardon, he’s seeking out another boxer to grant clemency to. Hence, Ali. Does this mean he’ll try to find reasons to someday grant clemency to boxer Mike Tyson, or any other boxer who got into legal troubles?

If you get the impression that I think these legal actions by Trump are pointless, you’d be correct. Specifically because I don’t doubt some people will try to use the Johnson pardon or similar acts as evidence that Trump is somehow sympathetic to the concerns of black people.

Johnson pardon -- better late than never?

They’re meant to counter the impression held by many that Trump is the president of choice for the bigoted segment of our society. Without him actually having to do something that would make a difference in the lives of non-white people.

IN THE CASE of the Johnson pardon, there’s no doubt that his conviction on violations of the Mann Act were a crock – that law was the way prosecutors criminalized interracial relationships. Johnson wound up serving prison time and went through the rest of his life with a criminal record. Will Trump someday consider a pardon for rock ‘n’ roller Chuck Berry (who died last year) for his Mann Act conviction?

To do something now all these years later (at 72 years, he’s been dead longer than he lived) truly fits the definition of the absolute least Trump could do for Johnson, whose life ended with the taint of a racist-motivated conviction.

Although a part of me thinks that his talk related to Ali qualifies as even less action.

Ali, who died in 2016 at age 74, was found guilty for refusing to comply with the military draft during the Vietnam War and got a five-year prison sentence.

HE APPEALED THE case, and in 1971 the Supreme Court of the United States overturned it. Sparing him prison time. The fact that he had a conviction was the reason his boxing career was stalled for a few years, until he won back the Heavyweight Champion title in 1974.

BERRY: Another Mann Act conviction to address?

In short, the legal system dealt with Ali’s conviction while he was alive and gave him back his career. He also had a post-boxing life that saw him rise to exalted levels in society. Which is why attorneys representing Ali’s interests are saying Trump’s actions are “unnecessary.”

They reek of Trump being a political opportunist, trying to bring some of the modern-day Ali glory to himself. While doing nothing that would impact Ali’s actual life.

All of which strikes me as Trump making gestures he thinks will appease people without upsetting the sensibilities of those who think these past racial injustices are actually evidence of the “America” that Trump wants us to go back to as his vision of “Making it Great Again.”

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Is Trump’s word worth anything?

Just a thought that has been bopping about my brain quite a bit in recent days; what if President Donald J. Trump is just toying with the mindset of 40892-424?

TRUMP: What will he do with Rod?

That number, of course, being of federal Bureau of Prisons inmate Rod Blagojevich, whom Trump last week started up a public stink about by suggesting he’s inclined to consider clemency for the one-time Illinois governor.

FOR WHAT IT’S worth, Blagojevich this week formally filed the request to the president seeking some form of pardon from the 14-year prison term he’s now serving – and of which he has completed about half.

Now, it’s truly in the hands of Trump as to what will happen.

Trump may have spewed a lot of trash talk last week about how Blagojevich was merely guilty of saying stupid things and how he thinks the prison term is excessive – even though the legal system all the way up through the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled in ways to uphold the conviction and sentence.

But from the three-plus decades of time I have spent writing about government, politics and the legal system, one thing I have learned is that some people truly are evidence of the cliché “talk is cheap.”

AND IF YOU look at this objectively, Trump has already gained everything he would expect to get out of granting any form of clemency to Blagojevich.

If he were to decide to do nothing and leave Blagojevich in the Colorado-based prison where he has been held since 2011, I don’t think he’d suffer a thing.

If anything, he’d probably gain a bit in the public estimation of the people who are inclined to want Rod to rot in prison for the full 14 years of his sentence (they’re probably offended that his scheduled release in May 2014 means he gets one year, four months of time off for good behavior).

BLAGOJEVICH:Pondering his fate

As for the idea that Trump went back on his word, the majority of people already think Donald is an untrustworthy character (remember the 3 million more in 2016 who wanted “President Hillary R. Clinton?”). His reputation wouldn’t suffer in the least.

THE THOUGHT THAT Trump is merely trying to stir up trouble, particularly amongst those in the Chicago political establishment who would have a personal interest in the Blagojevich case’s eventual outcome, has been bopping about my brain ever since Trump opened his mouth on the issue.

It stepped up even further this week when White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporter-type people the president hasn’t made up his mind about what to do with Blagojevich – no matter what he said the week before.

“The president hasn’t made a final decision on that,” she said. “But as you know, the president doesn’t base his decisions off the criticism of others, but on what he thinks is the right decision to make, and that’s what he’ll base it on.”

So was last week just an effort to stir up rage and anger amongst Chicago Democrats – almost none of whom actually voted for him two years ago?

BECAUSE THE THING that consistently has had me wondering is, “What does Trump think he gains from granting any form of clemency (even a commutation of a prison sentence to ‘time served’) to Blagojevich.

The one trend that has cropped up in seeing the way Trump uses presidential pardon power is that he uses it to reward his allies. Granting a pardon to one-time Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio so he could avoid serving jail time allowed Trump to protect a person who shared his extremist attitudes on immigration – while also offending the people whom Trump has been trying to demonize since ‘Day One’ of his campaigning.

What high  court thought no longer really matters

Even though Blagojevich was far from anything resembling a social liberal on issues, to the ideologues inclined to like Trump, that makes not one bit of difference.

Although if Trump really wanted to perform some form of “justice,” he’d let the Blagojevich request for clemency sit idly by and do nothing with it. Just like Blagojevich was the guy who, as governor, rejected 93 percent of the just over 1,000 clemency requests he acted on – while doing nothing with another 2,800 requests from people whose last chance at relief was gubernatorial consideration.

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Political arrogance from our presidents! or, Who’s the bigger boob?

It’s got the potential to be the ultimate loaded politically partisan question – who is the bigger nitwit these days; Bill Clinton, or Donald Trump?

TRUMP: Finds self 'not guilty'

Both men, it would appear, have something of a disconnect with the real world, what with the way they are trying to dismiss the criticisms they often get hit with from the public.

IN THE CASE of the incumbent president, Trump is attacking those people who want to see the special counsel Russia probe into his conduct take him down. Which isn’t the least bit surprising.

But Trump is tying this issue in with the concept of all the pardons he has talked about issuing, saying that if conditions really became dire for him, he could easily issue a pardon for himself.

“As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong.” Or so wrote Trump on his Twitter account (and people seriously wonder why I think of the president as the ‘Twit who Tweets’).

For it seems that our president truly thinks he can run the nation (and possibly, the world) in the same way he ran The Trump Organization – barking out orders and expecting minions to carry them out, unquestioned.

OF COURSE, BACK in those days, Trump was running a company that erected gaudy buildings and garish casinos – meaning Trump’s reckless behavior really didn’t impact anybody.

Now, Trump is in a position to do great harm – and he wants to have the right to wave away any moments when he chooses to cut through the red tape in inappropriate ways.

Hence, he thinks he can pardon himself. Even though one of his attorneys (former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani) himself publicly questioned whether Trump should think in terms of using such authority.

CLINTON: Tired of talking about Monica

Think of it this way. Former President Richard Nixon, who had to resign the presidency to avoid impeachment by Congress, had to count on his successor to grant him a pardon to avoid any conviction and incarceration – whom his biggest critics desperately wanted to see happen.

EVEN NIXON DIDN’T think he had a right to pardon himself to make his “Watergate” critics shut up. Even he realized that such an overbearing act would backfire ever so badly.

Think of the presidential clemency authority in these terms. How outraged would the people who are now Trump’s biggest backers have been if former President Bill Clinton had tried to avoid the whole impeachment debacle of 1998 by issuing himself a pre-emptive pardon.

Impeachment was definitely an ideologue act back then, and the people who pushed for his removal from office were doing so for the wrong reasons. But listening to Clinton now get upset when people bring up his behavior with a White House intern and compare it to actions of sexual harassment against other women sounds as ridiculously self-righteous as anything Trump has ever said.

“I dealt with it 20 years ago,” Clinton said during an interview with NBC and “The Today Show,” adding, “I’ve tried to do a good job since then, and with my life and with my work.”

PERSONALLY, I’VE ALWAYS thought that the appropriate judge for Clinton’s behavior back then was his wife. If Hillary had wanted to take it out on him publicly and ruin him, she should have been granted permission to do so.

NIXON: Pardoning self for Watergate?

The fact that she is able to get past this ought to be a sign for the rest of us. Except for those ideologues whose real hang-up is that Clinton ever got elected in the first place, and that they were unable to defeat him at the polling place.

Just as it kind of seems like Trump wants to erase the fact that some 3 million more people in this country wanted a Hillary Clinton presidency instead of him.

So does Bill Clinton owe an apology to Monica Lewinsky? Maybe! Although I’d say that Trump owes the nation a greater apology for his gaudy behavior that embarrasses the nation as a whole.

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Trump already gave Arpaio clemency, Blagojevich shouldn’t be a shock

President Donald J. Trump is the man who felt compelled to grant a pardon to the Arizona sheriff who symbolically flipped the bird to federal prosecutors who were trying to make sure he didn’t violate the civil rights of the inmates in his jails, particularly those who were of Latin American ethnic origins.

BLAGOJEVICH: Does he have president's ear?

By comparison, granting some form of clemency to one-time Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich is a no-brainer. Relatively speaking, that is.

FOR AN ARGUMENT can be made that the 14-year prison sentence that Blagojevich currently is serving at a federal facility in Colorado is far harsher than the prison terms other political people have received for their government corruption convictions.

I know many people are so offended at the memory of Blagojevich’s six years in charge of Illinois government that they don’t care if he’s getting punished overly harsh.

But if Trump were to follow through with his talk (which, admittedly, can be cheap) and grant Blagojevich some relief that allows him out of prison prior to the 2024 date upon which he’s currently scheduled for release, I don’t think we should be all that surprised.

For what it’s worth, Trump used that ever-present Twitter account of his on Thursday to say he plans to grant a full pardon to Dinesh D’Souza – an ideologue commentator who back in 2014 pleaded guilty to charges he violated federal campaign finance laws.

TRUMP: Does he like idea of ticking people off?

HE SUPPOSEDLY GOT people to donate money to a Republican challenging Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., by promising he’d reimburse them. Meaning he’d be able to exceed laws limiting the amount of money he’d be able to contribute.

Then, while riding on board Air Force One following a presidential appearance in Texas, Trump told reporter-types that he also was considering action to benefit Martha Stewart (who already has served her time in federal prison) and Blagojevich (who remains incarcerated).

According to the Associated Press, Trump told reporters on board the presidential plane that he thinks Blagojevich did dumb things while serving as Illinois governor, but added that “lots of politicians do.” And he believes a 14-year prison term is too long.

BLAGOJEVICH: Will she become a very happy woman?

For what it’s worth, Trump’s expression of sympathy for Blagojevich comes just days after the Wall Street Journal published a Blagojevich-written commentary that expressed the thought federal prosecutors were behaving in ways too harsh and trying to criminalize behavior that is part of the way government operates.

WITH HIMSELF AS “Case No. One” as evidence (“I’m in prison for practicing politics, Rod wrote) for his argument.

I know some argued Blagojevich was wasting his time with such a commentary – Trump doesn’t read! He’s certainly NOT going to be swayed by such an argument.

But the Blagojevich commentary did get more than its share of Twitter attention – which means Trump most likely is aware of it. And considering the two men have a tie (Blagojevich was on one of the Trump television programs back when Rod was still a free man trying to build a sympathetic image for himself), I’m sure he’s aware of the case.

I also don’t doubt that Trump is enough of a smart-aleck personality that he figures the kind of people who will be offended by him showing sympathy for Blagojevich are the ones who routinely deride him for everything else – and that he has nothing to lose!

SO WILL TRUMP make Patti Blagojevich the happiest woman on Earth by allowing her to have a husband back? Will Trump figure he has nothing to lose by ticking off his enemies?

ARPAIO: Trump's truly offensive pardon

Does Trump figure that pardoning D’Souza is his offense to New York Democrats, so that sympathy for Blagojevich is his idea of “equal time” that will tick off Chicago Dems?

Does the man just have a screw or two loose that he’s willing to take such an action for Blagojevich? Which would be ironic, because when Rod was Illinois governor, he was notorious for ignoring requests for clemency to the point where his successors (Pat Quinn and Bruce Rauner) had a serious backlog to address when they took office.

All I know is, like I already stated, the idea of giving one-time Phoenix-area Sheriff Joe Arpaio clemency to spare him prison time after he’d already been found guilty of criminal contempt of court for deliberately ignoring various orders restricting his harassment of people just because they’re Latino makes anything he does for Blagojevich petty politics by comparison.

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Pardoned Arpaio cheats ‘justice,’ yet someone must pay. Will it be Trump?

It wasn’t surprising to learn that President Donald J. Trump would feel compelled to grant a pardon (his first act of clemency) toward one of the most repulsive characters ever to wear a law enforcement badge.
 

TRUMP: President of the xenophobes?

Offensive? Yes. Immoral? Of course!

BUT IT IS totally in character when one considers Trump would not want to be a guy who would want one-time Maricopa, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio punished. He probably thinks it wrong that a law enforcement officer would wind up having to do jail time – even the miniscule sentence that Arpaio was facing.

So the president went ahead and used his power of clemency to undermine the federal prosecutors who got a criminal conviction earlier this year against Arpaio, and were seeking his sentencing come October – when he was likely to face up to six months in jail (probably at a minimum-security facility where extra effort would be made to ensure he was not attacked by other inmates).

Arpaio will never have to face that moment of standing before a judge and hearing that he’s now just another convict. He’ll never have to sit in a cell as punishment for his crimes.

Which, in all honesty, was a moment that a segment of our society was eager to see happen. I suspect that Trump feeling nothing but spite for those people most repulsed by Arpaio were his strongest motivations for issuing a pardon.

FOR ALL I know, Trump may not even truly comprehend what it was that Arpaio did wrong that brought his time as the Phoenix area’s sheriff before prosecutors to begin with.

Arpaio is the guy who likes to think he’s the rough-and-tough lawman who cracks down on criminals. He’s the guy who ran his jail under overly harsh conditions, and he was the one whose deputies often conducted raids of Latino neighborhoods in search of people without valid visas to live in this country.

I’m sure some nitwits will claim that Arpaio is merely the guy who made jail inmates wear pink underwear. But he was the guy who was calling for harassment of people with no real probable cause. Unless you believe being Latino is criminal?

ARPAIO: Won't do the time for his crime

What ultimately got Arpaio into legal trouble is when the courts ruled that the sheriff’s tactics exceeded the limits of the law, yet he persisted with them anyway.

BECAUSE HARASSING PEOPLE whose ethnic origins lie within Mexico was more important to him than actually following the letter of the law to which he was supposed to uphold. Particularly ironic considering that Arizona’s origins lie within Mexico and the Spanish colonies, and one could argue that the people Arpaio was protecting were the real “foreigners.”

But with Trump’s desire to rely solely on the xenophobes with particularly irrational hang-ups with regards to Mexico, it’s no wonder he’d seek to protect Arpaio.

Particularly since his campaign promise of erecting a wall along the U.S./Mexico border is one likely never to come true, he has to be able to claim to have done something that the nativist element of our society. Does protecting Arpaio from having to do laundry detail while serving time in a minimum-security prison facility make up for it? I’m sure Trump is hoping so.

What is going to make this particular pardon stand it is that Arpaio really didn’t fit the usual guidelines for clemency. Usually, someone has to wait a few years before they can even apply for a pardon.

THE POINT BEING that the person in question must actually serve the time. The point of a pardon being to ease the level of shame they must go through during the rest of their lives because of their actions that put them in prison for a stint.

Wonder what he thinks of pink shorts now?

In that regard, Arpaio is likely to go through his life as an unapologetic ass who will “get away” with his actions that brought great harm to people. He’ll probably die thinking he did nothing wrong – even though the Supreme Court of the United States itself has said that accepting a pardon IS an admission of guilt.

But karma has a way of biting back; someone is going to have to suffer for this act of clemency being issued.

Which could wind up being Trump himself, since he has now besmirched his legacy in ways that he likely will never fully appreciate as the xenophobic president, but which the Trump name will have a hard time living down for generations to come.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: A poll last week by OH Predictive Insights said only 21 percent of Arizona residents wanted the president to offer clemency to Joe Arpaio – who ceased being sheriff last year after losing a re-election bid. It will be interesting to see how big a plummet Trump takes in his own approval ratings; as he had only 35 percent support in the Gallup Organization’s presidential approval poll taken just before he issued his clemency Friday night – likely hoping people would be focused on Hurricane Harvey’s devastation in Texas to pay any attention to Arpaio.

Countdown to Obama presidency means one thing – “It’s pardon time”

Perhaps it was only appropriate that Chicago Cubs baseball executive Theo Epstein made the joke this week about giving Barack Obama a "midnight pardon" for being a White Sox fan.

President gets pardon for offense ...

For since we’re in the final days of the Obama presidency, about the only thing we should be expecting is to see what signs of clemency the president chooses to give.

FOR IT IS one of the perks of being a government chief executive – you get to grant pardons and other assorted types of clemency, usually based on whatever guidelines you decide are worthy.

... of wearing this in public

Which means some presidents are tougher than others, and some will choose to reward their political allies who managed to screw up and go afoul of the law during their times in public life.

I have no doubt that once Donald Trump actually takes the oath of office on Friday and becomes president, one of the first statements he’ll make will be to publicly denounce Obama as being weak and indecisive because of the amount of clemency he chose to dish out.

For a guy who likes the public image of going on television and telling people “You’re Fired!” probably is also the kind of guy who dreams of being able to tell people they’re “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!” and can rot in a prison cell somewhere.

WHEREAS OUR DEPARTING president is someone who has shown some sense of compassion and impartiality – to the point where he sometimes has not dealt harshly enough with people who were his political enemies.

 

Some upset with Obama action

Anyway, the official list of pardons and other sentence commutations came out on Tuesday – although there’s always the chance Obama could slip in a final move or two in the hours leading up to 11:59 a.m. Friday – which is when the alarm goes off, Obama ceases to have authority and the Secret Service would no longer have to tackle Trump if he tried to assert any presidential powers of his own.

The clemency move that got the most public attention was that of Chelsea Manning, who got a military court martial and a lengthy prison term because of her disclosure of information considered classified.

For some, Obama action long overdue

Manning’s case drew attention because he is undergoing the process of becoming a woman, and some felt that fact was the reason for an overly harsh prison term that Obama commuted. She’ll be free come May and get on with her life.

EVEN THOUGH HOUSE Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., made it clear he thought Manning deserved continued incarceration. He probably likes the idea of a “freak” being abused by fellow inmates – regardless of specific circumstances.

There also was the clemency granted to Oscar Lopez Rivera, the Puerto Rican revolutionary who has spent the past 35 years in prison even though all of his counterparts who argue they’re fighting for a free and independent Caribbean nation (instead of its current Commonwealth status) had long been set free.

I have no doubt some will be grossly offended, yet freeing Lopez is merely acknowledging reality that there’d be nothing accomplished by requiring him to serve the 20 remaining years of his federal prison sentence.

In fact, that is the case with many of the pardons, commutations and other clemency actions that Obama granted – even though the ideologues amongst us are determined to point out that he granted more clemency than any other president!

MOST OF THE people who got clemency this week were people who got caught up under old federal drug laws that have since been lessened or eliminated – meaning most have already served more time than they would have if they were to commit the same offense now.

 

Karmic payback to baseball?

Personally, I found the pardon given to one-time San Francisco Giants slugger Willie McCovey to be the most intriguing. McCovey, who also played ball for San Diego and Oakland, got caught up in income tax violations a few decades ago.

He didn’t report all the income he received from participating in sports memorabilia shows, which is the same thing that got Pete Rose sent to prison for a few months at Marion, Ill.

McCovey has had to live the past couple of decades with a federal conviction on his record, one that perhaps now he can move forward from. Obama pardoning a ballplayer was probably the least he could do after receiving that “midnight pardon” from a collection of ballplayers themselves.

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EXTRA: Blagojevich inactivity on clemency lingers into Rauner years

One of the quirks of the time that Rod Blagojevich was governor of Illinois was that, while he had the perk of being able to grant clemency as he saw fit, he chose not to use it that often.

BLAGOJEVICH: Slacked off on clemency

Gov. Bruce Rauner on Friday granted clemency to seven people with criminal records, while also rejecting the requests for another 144 people. The seven who had their requests approved can now file legal actions that could have their criminal records expunged.

A CHANCE AT a clean slate.

It is one of the powers that governors get.

Yet it was one that Blagojevich didn’t think much of using. Rauner says there are some 3,000 clemency petitions pending from previous administrations, and some of them date back to Blagojevich’s final year in office.

I suppose with all the legal hassles that Blagojevich endured during the end of his gubernatorial stint, it could be excused. Then again, maybe he was just someone who didn’t care about fulfilling his full duties – which included being a final check in the legal system.

WHEN ALL ELSE fails, there’s always the chance that a governor can fix a mistake. It’s the reason that clemency is a legitimate power for a governor to have.

RAUNER: Still working on Blagojevich mess

For the record, Pat Quinn had to work his way through the Blagojevich inactivity. He made decisions on 3,358 cases, approving pardons for 1,239 people.

But there’s still quite a few cases that still need to be addressed.

It will be interesting to see how frequently Rauner chooses to act on closing the backlog. This is the second time in his five months as governor that Rauner has made a decision, and his office says it has developed a process to ensure the issue does not continue to linger.

QUINN: Worked his way thru backlog

IT WILL BE nice when there isn’t any backlog to process.

Although the ultimate sense of justice may come if Blagojevich himself has to wind up seeking clemency – although his case being in the federal court system, he has to rely on the president himself to decide whether there’s a need for sympathy.

Which could mean that Barack Obama winds up having to decide whether to bother deciding on the case, or just deciding to pass it off to a future president while Blagojevich continues to rot in that federal correctional center in Colorado.

  -30-

Is it proper to pardon the “criminal” amongst our political people?

Back when I covered the General Assembly on a full-time basis, there was a member of the Illinois House of Representatives named Coy Pugh.

PUGH: No better, or worse, than colleagues

He served about a decade representing assorted West Side neighborhoods in the Legislature, and probably wouldn’t have stood out in my mind at all except for one fact.

PUGH HAS A criminal record. He served stints in both federal and state prisons, and also knows what the inside of the Cook County Jail is like. But in his early 30s, he “found religion” and managed to clean up his act, getting himself an education and getting off the drugs that had led him into many improper acts.

Now I’m not trying to offer up any apologies for Pugh – whom I haven’t seen since the day that then-Gov. George Ryan commuted all those death row sentences and Pugh happened to be in attendance for the announcement at Northwestern University.

But the memories I have of Pugh as a legislator are that he wasn’t any more, or less, competent than anyone else who served in the General Assembly at the time.

There were those who had hang-ups about his presence at the Statehouse. But it always seemed motivated more by partisan politics and ideological concerns than anything legitimate.

PERHAPS IT IS because of this factor that I don’t get as worked up over a set of stories that have cropped up in recent weeks concerning people with criminal records who have managed to get themselves elected to office. I wouldn’t want a Legislature or City Council full of felons (insert your tacky joke here about the politicos being felons-in-training).

But there may be a few who have learned from their experience and are capable of serving in the representative bodies of government. Particularly if the voters in their respective districts are willing to put them there.

QUINN: Complaints about pardons

Just on Monday, the Chicago Sun-Times published a recent study by the Better Government Association concerning Juan Elias. He works for 1^st Ward Alderman Proco “Joe” Moreno, had criminal convictions and was less-than-upfront about them when he first applied for a city payroll job.

There are those who’d like to see him fired just for that factor. But Gov. Pat Quinn threw a wrench into those works when he approved a pardon for Elias. Which means his criminal convictions aren’t supposed to be held against him any longer.

THIS ISN’T EVEN a new move.

For in suburban Harvey, there is District 152 school board President Janet Rogers with a pair of felony convictions – which has the Illinois attorney general’s office trying to figure out how she can be removed from office. But Quinn gave her a pardon as well.

In her case, one of her convictions related to her providing false information about her finances when her son tried to get a financial aid package to go to college.

But she was able to get into political office (school boards are as political an animal as any other) first through appointment, then through election. Part of what allowed her to slip through is that her conviction was done under her maiden name.

SO SOMEWHERE ALONG the line, people didn’t realize at first that she had a record. Although considering that she keeps getting re-elected, they don’t seem to care (although it should be acknowledged that in many suburban boards, there are barely enough candidates to fill them. People often run un-opposed).

At the time of the pardon for Rogers, Quinn aides did not offer specific explanations for her case – preferring to talk in generalities about the pardon process.

ROGERS: Keeping her school board post

It may well be that Quinn believes in a second chance, or saw that these officials weren’t any less inept than the non-felons who got elected to office. Or that it is questionable to dump someone from office whom the voters put there – which is Rogers’ case. Or in the case of Elias, not forcing someone out just because the critics might be offended at his superior (Moreno is the alderman who previously got into the public spat with the Chick-fil-A people when they wanted to locate in his ward over his objections).

Or maybe he just saw how ridiculously absurd the pardon and clemency process had become in Illinois.

BECAUSE QUINN HAS a backlog of cases from the days of Rod Blagojevich – who appeared to want to NOT grant pardons, but also wasn’t terribly interested in rejecting them either.

Which will make any future apathy with regards to his own legal appeals or pardon requests all the more ironic.

He preferred to ignore the cases. I’ll credit Quinn for at least having the nerve to address the issue. Or for realizing that dumping these people from office just because of decades-old criminal cases would seem like a technicality that goes against the will of the people.

Get the courts to dump them, on account of the fact that they couldn’t be beat at the ballot box.

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Clemency depends on political official

One of the perks of being a chief executive of government is the ability to issue clemency. Governors are just like presidents – they can give pardons and commute sentences for those people convicted of crimes within their states.

Now I know there are those people who have an ideological problem with the concept of clemency. Too many of them place so much faith in the ability of prosecutors that they seem to think they never make mistakes.

THEY WANT TO believe that there never are criminal cases whose circumstances are so unique that they can’t be crammed into some set of guidelines for sentencing.

For that is the reason for allowing a governor to be able to commute a sentence. It is the easiest way for mistakes or legal flukes to be resolved – all-powerful ability to impose a change.

Of course, the problem with such power being put into one man’s hands is that clemency winds up getting defined by that particular government official’s ideology. The presidency of George W. Bush is going to be remembered in part because of Bush the younger’s reluctance to take any action that went counter to the courts.

Illinois, it turns out, is an excellent example of how the differing mentalities of the chief executives affect who gets a show of compassion for their legal troubles.

AS REPORTED RECENTLY in the Chicago newspapers, one of Rod Blagojevich’s acts during his six years as Illinois governor was to grant a pardon to a suburban Chicago man who had been convicted on a tax law violation.

By comparison, one of Pat Quinn’s most recent actions was to commute the prison sentence of a woman who killed her son and daughter some two decades ago.

Debra Gindorf was given a life prison term for the March 1985 incident where she smothered her children, then tried unsuccessfully to kill herself.

Quinn is siding with the medical professionals who claim that Gindorf was suffering from post-partum depression at the time. In short, she could have been medicated and treated, rather than incarcerated.

WITH PROPER TREATMENT, she poses no threat to society, and likely should not be taking up space at the Dwight Correctional Center, the state’s prison for women.

Gindorf has had her bid for clemency pending for years. This was a case that Blagojevich was asked to act upon. Yet he never did. In fact, it was a part of the backlog of hundreds of clemency and commutation applications that were never dealt with by the would-be reality TV star who was impeached and removed from office in Illinois.

Blagojevich never made any public comment about Gindorf’s case, but it would appear he was less-than-willing to show sympathy for a woman who was in prison because of the death of her children.

Don’t underestimate the strength of that image. There are some conservative activists who now are criticizing Quinn for being willing to overlook the concept of dead kids. They don’t want to care about mental illness, and instead want to focus on the act as though that somehow makes Illinois a more secure place for people to live.

BY COMPARISON, WE get the Chicago Sun-Times report this week about Blagojevich’s willingness to give a pardon to Anan Abu-Taleb, who owns a restaurant in Oak Park and had a tax fraud conviction on his record.

Blagojevich gave him the pardon in 2006, which goes as far as anyone can in terms of erasing the incident from Abu-Taleb’s record.

But as the Sun-Times reported, Blagojevich received campaign contributions from a law firm whose partners include an Abu-Taleb cousin by marriage.

Now I’m not saying Abu-Taleb didn’t deserve the pardon. Perhaps there are circumstances about his incident that make it reasonable to quit bringing the conviction up against him for the rest of his life.

BUT I CAN’T help but think that somebody on his staff must have realized that the appearance of an impropriety was being created because of the campaign contributions to the fund that Blagojevich would now want to use to pay his legal bills as he faces government corruption charges in U.S. District Court. The fact that no one on the gubernatorial staff was willing to question this particular pardon from being granted is a scary concept.

What makes it particularly bad is that Blagojevich as governor developed a reputation almost as stringent as that of Bush. Neither one liked the idea of signing their names to a clemency petition or pardon request.

But because of the circumstances, we get the impression that the way to get Blagojevich’s attention for a possible pardon was to crack open the checkbook. That is a sad impression to give.

When compared with Quinn’s willingness to show sympathy for a woman even though there will be some people who will demand his scalp for it (personally, I think commutation is justified – she still spent about two decades in prison), it makes him seem all the more noble.

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A DAY IN THE LIFE (as seen from Chicago): To the Right, Oh Be Quiet!

A part of me would like to think that the “Festivus Pole” erected at the Statehouse in Springpatch is just a stupid idea concocted by someone who watches too much television.

After all, the whole gag of the “Seinfeld” episode in which Frank Costanza tells us of his Festivus holiday was that it reinforced the notion that he was a blowhard who got worked up over stupid things. The idea that anybody took seriously such a parody of a holiday is a sad sign.

BUT I CAN’T just dismiss this stunt because of the way in which at least one conservative activist is taking it so seriously, while also reinforcing the concept that what some religious types are really interested in is not promoting their own beliefs for public debate, but ramming them down the throats of everybody else.

For those of you who are wondering what I’m talking about, it is the “Festivus Pole” erected at the Statehouse, at the request of a Springfield teenager who thought it ridiculous that a nativity scene, a giant menorah and a display promoting atheism all were set up inside the rotunda of the state capitol for this holiday season.

So he went ahead and got a pole, then got permission from the Illinois Secretary of State’s office (which manages the capitol grounds) to erect it.

His stunt got national attention when it became known that the group of religious activists who fought for permission to set up their nativity scene were offended, saying it was disrespectful to their own project, and also promoted a holiday that “is nothing.”

THOSE WERE THE words as reported by the Chicago Tribune and St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspapers of Daniel Zanoza, an activist who used to live in the Chicago area, but has since moved to rural Illinois because he feels his conservative beliefs on many social issues fit in more comfortably there.

He’s probably right, and it wouldn’t shock me to learn many of the locals like the idea of a nativity scene erected in the capitol. But I still have a problem with many of these public displays of religious beliefs, just because I think many of them are tacky looking and wind up being disrespectful to the religious beliefs that are supposed to be acknowledged.

I’m not just talking about the Statehouse. Who really thinks the giant menorah outside of Daley Center serves a purpose, other than to provide the impression of religious “balance’ to the Christmas tree, while really doing nothing more than cluttering the Daley Plaza grounds?

What other news nuggets are worthy of public attention on this Day After Christmas/sixth night of Hanukkah/first Day of Kwanzaa?

GEORGE RYAN IS TOO HOT FOR GEORGE BUSH TO HANDLE: Anybody who thinks I’m exaggerating the unlikelihood that President George W. Bush will do nothing to help former Gov. George Ryan ought to look at the way the outgoing president handled the case of Isaac Toussie.

He was a real estate developer prosecuted by “the feds” for a real estate scam. Bush granted him a pardon on Tuesday, then rescinded it on Wednesday. Officially, presidential aides claim Bush was not given a proper understanding of what it was Toussie had done, thereby making any form of presidential forgiveness inappropriate.

Political cynics would say it is Bush trying to eliminate the taint his legacy would suffer by giving a pardon to a man whose father donated just over $28,000 to the Republican National Committee, thereby creating the perception that Toussie’s pardon was purchased.

If Bush wouldn’t take some political heat in this case, why should anyone think he would be willing to do much of anything to help Ryan get out of serving five more years at the federal facility in Terre Haute, Ind.? Ryan will likely have to wait until Independence Day 2013 before he can get out of prison.

GETTING AWAY FROM THE WEATHER: Many people are getting all worked up these days over the photographs emanating from Honolulu – the ones that show President-elect Barack Obama to be in good physical shape for a man two decades younger than himself, let alone his real age (48).

But what intrigues me is the idea that this country now has a president who can legitimately vacation in Hawaii. If any past chief executive had tried to do so, it would have been used as evidence of a trivial mentality.

But the Honolulu-born Obama can claim he’s merely visiting his sister, although being able to stake a claim to a portion of the beachfront as his own (and have the Secret Service enforce that claim) shows that this is no mere Hawaii vacation.

If anything, this trip shows that Obama has a certain amount of sense. I’d be more concerned if he had insisted on spending his Christmas holidays at the “homestead” in Hyde Park. As much as I enjoy the area in and around Chicago, I wish I could be some other place right now – somewhere where the temperatures aren’t being driven below 0 degrees by wind chill and where ice on the roads doesn’t cause my car to go slip, slidin’ away (with apologies to Paul Simon the singer) off the road and into a bank of snow.

SULTRY, AND NOW SAD: “Santa Baby” (the song, not the made-for-cable-TV film starring one-time Sout’ Sider Jenny McCarthy as Santa Claus' daughter) always had that sexy, sultry sound to it, making the idea of a fat guy in a bright red suit sound downright erotic.

But now, it’s going to take on a sad tone. For Eartha Kitt, the singer whose version of the song will always be THE version, died on Christmas Day. She was 81, and had been treated for colon cancer.

In fact, in my mind, the coincidence of her death date will cause the song to erase what many people want to believe was Kitt’s greatest entertainment accomplishment – being one of several women to play “the Catwoman” opposite Adam West in the 1960s campy (but still classic)version of “Batman.”

But what the woman named for a prime cotton harvest in the year of her berth (the Earth was fertile that year, her parents thought) really ought to be remembered for was rising from what could have been a life working the fields or in factories to instead being an actress in several films who could be in a position to upset then-first lady Lady Bird Johnson by saying the youth of America had a legitimate gripe in opposing U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

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