Senator McCain has his inconsistent and deeply personal conceptions of "honor" and "justice," which means that occasionally he fights for completely symbolic things that we nonetheless approve of wholeheartedly, like this. Free Jack Johnson! McCain is a huge boxing fan, of course, and he's teaming up with Peter King and Ken Burns today to urge President Obama to pardon Johnson for his 1913 violation of the Mann Act.

Burns has been fighting for Johnson's pardon since 2004, but he ran into trouble with the last administration:

Burns said he spoke about the petition a couple of times with Bush, who as governor of Johnson's home state of Texas proclaimed Johnson's birthday as "Jack Johnson Day" for five straight years.

Bush gave Burns a phone number which led to adviser Karl Rove, Burns said, but Rove told him a pardon "ain't gonna fly."

Yes, right, of course.

Anyway let's all listen to Miles Davis (with Sonny Sharrock, right, jazz nerds?) and root for Johnson's century-late justice!

Winters, an Irish protestant who flew a B-17 bomber across the Atlantic for Israel and helped sell the fledgling nation two other planes, served 18 months in jail for violating the 1939 Neutrality Act and a then-active arms embargo on Israel. He became only the second person ever to be granted a posthumous pardon after quite a bit of lobbying from the likes of Steven Spielberg and other friends of Israel.

But a tipster, who claims to have info from the Israeli prime minister's office, says all that pleading wasn't the reason Winters name was cleared: Bush didn't want to pardon Jonathan Pollard, a former intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy who's serving a life sentence for spying for Israel. "Israel wanted Jonathan Pollard released from prison. So Bush threw them a bone and pardoned a Zionist hero," says the tipster. Israel acknowledged that he was a spy in 1998, and has since been actively lobbying for his release. At this rate, he may get pardoned in 2046.

First up, Robert Truman Reece, who was convicted, in 1949, of "unauthorized absence" and "unauthorized absence; missing ship's movement." And he paid his dues:

Sentence: 1: Oct. 12, 1949; 15 days of confinement, 30 days of extra police duties and forfeiture of $15 pay per month for six months. 2: Nov. 28, 1949; six months of probation. 3: Sept. 21, 1950; forfeiture of $30 pay per month for two months and a bad conduct discharge. 1, 2 and 3: U.S. Navy court-martial.

Well. now Mr. Reece's record is clean. Among the others pardoned include Charles Winters, who was also arrested in 1949 (!?) for trying to ship arms to Zionists in Palestine. He served 18 months in prison and died in 1980. But now he's exonerated! Hero!

The rest? A motley assortment of drug-distributors, defrauders, counterfeiters, and this guy:

Eric Charles Blanke - Parker, Colo.

Offense: Making impressions of obligations of the United States; 18 U.S.C. § 474.

Sentence: July 21, 1995; Southern District of California; three years of probation conditioned on performance of 50 hours of community service.

How did Bush select these people? And why? He drunkenly paged through "the big book of random people who briefly served time in the '90s," that's how.

There was one commutation of sentence. It went to a guy facing life in prison for possession of meth.

Step One: John Forte goes to Exeter, makes friends with Carly Simon's kid, then makes friends with Carly Simon.
Step Two: John Forte goes to jail.
Step Three: Carly Simon records one of Orrin Hatch's soulful ballads and then is like "Okay now you owe me, old man."

Hatch - who wrote the country ballad "Are You Lonely Here With Me?" which Simon recorded - quickly got on board.

In 2005, the senator convinced the Justice Department to move Forté from a Pennsylvania prison to one at Fort Dix, NJ, just 25 minutes from his mom's home in New Brunswick.

Hatch also arranged for Forté to have his guitar with him in prison, a perk not afforded many inmates.

USA! Justice! [NYP, pic via]

Well! According to an anti-American "natural history" site hosted on Canadian servers, the Bald Eagle is not so much of a majestic predator, swooping down and pecking to death our nation's many enemies, but really more of a lazy scavenger, subsisting mainly on "what it finds cast onto the shore." So the Bald Eagle is the Original Lazy Welfare Queen of the Skies, which is why Bush pardoned this brave hero.

[Carly] Simon and Ben Taylor, her son by singer James Taylor, had lobbied the feds to commute Forte's sentence, arguing he was a first-time offender.

Ben Taylor and Forte had become friends at the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Taylor often took him to visit his family, and Forte once worked as a backup singer for Simon.

There you have it: rappers will be considered for pardons as long as they made friends with the children of celebrities while attending pricey private schools. Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch also lobbied Bush to let him go! That is simply too awesome to be critical about. Welcome home, John. Kick these verses for Orrin:

[NYP; pic via RS]

Lawyers for the deposed press baron, who is serving a 6½-year prison sentence in Florida for fraud and obstruction of justice, recently submitted legal bills to Sun-Times Media Group, Inc., some of which referred to work done in pursuit of a clemency plea, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The sources said the company is balking at shouldering the payments, even though it has been forced by the courts to pay $117-million (U.S.) on the defence of Lord Black and other former company officials.

"We try to draw the line at outrageous things, and this is sort of one of them," said one person close to the company, once a sprawling Chicago-based newspaper empire known as Hollinger International Inc.

Isn't it great that they merely try to draw the line at outrageous things? It's that kind of discipline that could've kept Lord Black out of jail.

Anyway Bush probably won't pardon him because he's not even from Texas and he didn't go to prison for carrying out the President's illegal policies or even really doing anything directly in support of the Republican Party.

Marc Rich founded Glencore, a commodities supplier that does lots of business with "rogue states" and so on, back in the wild 1970s. Rich was a fantastically wealthy commodities trader and decided one day to evade some taxes and also to do some illegal business with Iran, during the oil crisis. He bought some cheap oil, from Iran, and sold it in the US for double the price. Some of this oil dealing happened while Iran was holding a couple Americans hostage. Whoops! Then Rudy Giuliani indicted him and Marc forgot to come back to America from Switzerland and he ended up on the Most Wanted List for a while.

Some time later, Marc's lovely wife Denise donated millions of dollars to Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, and she ponied up $450k for the Clinton library. One day, as his presidency ended, Bill pardoned Marc. Denise was thrilled!

Some mean Republicans wanted to indict Bill, because honestly they'd just had a lot of fun hounding him for bullshit and were sad to see that wonderful time come to a close. But, you know, the president can pretty much pardon anyone he wants for any reason he wants. Pardoning an asshole millionaire because his socialite wife gave you money is probably more defensible than pardoning Nixon so the nation can heal or whatever.

Still, it was gross and dumb, because no one liked Marc Rich besides his wife and some Israeli charities he donated to and the King of Spain. Not even his old lawyer, noted asshole Scooter Libby, actually liked him that much, though he defended the tax evasion, which was, oddly, the thing Bill didn't pardon him for.

Anyway! Bill didn't seriously ask anyone in his Justice Department about whether or not he should pardon Marc Rich, but he did ask then-deputy AG Holder for his opinion, and Holder said he was "neutral, leaning towards favorable." So it's all his fault and he will be the worst Attorney General ever, as long as you pretend not to notice that the last three guys to do it have probably been the worst in history, or at least since Ed Meese.

The Clinton scandals were fun because no one actually got hurt or was tortured and most American cities survived more or less intact.