Program Note: See CNN Senior Analyst Jeffrey Toobin’s analysis of President Bush’s pardon today of more than a dozen convicts on AC360 tonight at 10pm.

Terry Frieden
CNN Justice Department Producer

The President has such total absolute power in granting clemency that he does not even have to receive a request for a pardon or commutation to grant one.

Most clemency applications are made to the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney where an elaborate and detailed process is followed. After checks which include consultation with the FBI and prosecutors and judges and corrections officials, a recommendation for granting or denying clemency eventually goes to the Deputy Attorney General who may change it, or send it back, or forward it to the White House General Counsel. And finally it goes to the President.

That’s the normal procedure. That’s how most pardons and commutations are screened and ultimately approved. But none of the reasons for granting a pardon or commutation are ever made public, so we don’t know WHY a President and his administration officials approve the applications. We do know most applications received are ultimately rejected because the Justice Department annually lists the number of petitions received, granted, and denied.

And every time a list of pardons comes out, once or twice or three times a year, it prompts puzzled looks, because so many of the crimes seem to be garden variety drug or fraud cases, and it remains a mystery what exactly prompts Presidential intervention.

A pardon is a forgiveness for the commission of a federal crime. It cannot be filed until five years after an individual has finished serving his sentence and parole, or until five years after a conviction if there was no sentence. A commutation is a shortened sentenced for someone serving time. It does not forgive the crime, or wipe it off the books, but simply shortens or immediately ends the prison sentence.
Keep reading

Hail to the Chief…Labradoodle?

Jack Gray
AC360 Associate Producer

Not since Friday night – when the woman dining at the table next to me, a woman who had not blinked in at least 30 minutes, loudly announced in between shovelfuls of chicken parmagian that her parents liked to make love on Sunday mornings – has there been a more ridiculous moment than that which is unfolding at The White House today.

President-elect Obama is taking a break from making cracks about elderly, widowed, broken-pelvis suffering former First Ladies to visit President Bush, who is taking a break from throwing tennis balls to his dog, Cujo…I mean, Barney.

It’s the time-honored tradition where the outgoing president of one party hosts the incoming president of the opposing party and the two pretend they don’t loathe each other. Then, afterwards, their staffs release predictable statements along the lines of “President Bush and President-elect Obama had a frank and productive discussion about the challenges facing the Nation.” When, in reality, everyone knows Obama was trying to decide where he’d install his arugula crisper and Bush kept challenging him to an arm wrestling tournament.

Meantime, upstairs in the First Family’s Residence, Mrs. Obama will be complimenting Mrs. Bush on her exquisite taste, adding that she “can’t imagine changing a thing.” Which translates to “I’m immediately dispatching the Secret Service to Crate & Barrel.”

Elsewhere, animal shelters all over the country are no doubt contacting the president-elect’s office to offer up the perfect hypoallergenic puppy. In this era of instant celebrity, the new First Dog is certain to become the center of a veritable cottage industry. Even my dog, Sammy, is trying to cash in. Her new memoir, “I’ve Never Met a Labradoodle Who Didn’t Try to Sleep with Me” is now in bookstores everywhere.

Believe it or not, though, there are matters more pressing than pets with which the president-elect must prepare to deal. Take, for example, the issue of a nuclear-armed Iran. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is fuming after President-elect Obama called such a scenario “unacceptable.”

Personally, all of this nuclear talk seems a bit surreal considering the President of Iran wears the same L.L. Bean windbreaker as my grandfather.

By the way, did you hear there are websites that are offering up tickets to the Obama Inauguration for as much as $21,000? Which is fascinating considering tickets to the inauguration are actually free and have not yet been released. Though apparently with that $21,000 ticket you get a sub-prime mortgage and an AIG beer can cozy.

And, yes, to those of you who were watching the AC360 webcast Thursday night. That beautiful and charming woman whom Erica pulled onto the set to chat with her and Anderson was indeed my mother. She was in town for her annual visit to make sure I’m stocked up on Windex and anxiety.

Because, my fellow Americans, mothers know no term limits.

Melinda Henneberger
Slate

Marlene Turnbach is a pro-life Democrat from Hazelton, Pa., who twice voted for George W. Bush over abortion. As she told me a couple of years ago when I interviewed her for a book on women voters, “Bush won because all my friends who are Democrats voted for him and put abortion over everything else.”

Though only about 13 percent of those likely to turn out at the polls are true single-issue pro-life voters, I met a surprising number of women, most of them Catholic, who said that they did not expect the Democratic Party to switch its basic position on Roe v. Wade but nonetheless felt increasingly marginalized and unwelcome in the party as dissenters from party orthodoxy on that one issue.

And now? Not so much. With the economy in freefall, abortion opponents afraid even to peek at their third-quarter 401(k) statements suddenly see their way around this obstacle on their road home to the Democrats. In Turnbach’s state, where one-third of all voters are Catholic (and six in 10 Catholics describe themselves as pro-life), pro-choice Barack Obama is nonetheless ahead of John McCain, who opposes abortion rights, by 12 points in one poll and 14 in another.

At a rally in Johnstown, Pa., on Saturday, Sarah Palin all but pleaded with pro-life voters to give her party one more chance to deliver on 35 years of pro-life promises: “In times like these with wars and financial crisis, I know that it may be easy to forget even as deep and abiding a concern as the right to life, and it seems that our opponent kind of hopes you will forget that.” Yet when I checked back in with Turnbach and others, it was clear that for them social issues are off the table, at least for now.

It isn’t that Turnbach’s stand on abortion has shifted any, she says. But her view of the Republican Party’s commitment to seeing Roe overturned has: “Even if McCain does get in, he’s not going to do anything” that would lead to a reversal of Roe. The legality of abortion “is not going to change,” she’s concluded, “and I really don’t think it should be an issue” in this presidential race.

Read more…

Editor’s note: Tara Wall, deputy editorial page editor and columnist for The Washington Times, serves as a political contributor to CNN. Before joining the newspaper, she was a senior adviser for the Republican National Committee and was appointed a public affairs director in the Department of Health and Human Services by President Bush. Read her columns here.

Tara Wall
CNN Contributor

Since Barack Obama incessantly makes the case that a John McCain administration would equate to another Bush term, it’s worth looking at just how much Sen. Obama himself is in agreement with the unpopular president.

Does that mean that he, too, would be a repeat of President Bush? If one were to apply his logic, maybe so.

Here are 20 reasons why:

1. Abstinence: Bush expanded community-based abstinence education during his term, including a $28 million budget increase for 2009 in an effort to “Teach both abstinence and contraception to teens.” Obama concurred in April when he said: “We want to make sure that, even as we are teaching responsible sexuality and we are teaching abstinence to children, that we are also making sure that they’ve got enough understanding about contraception.”

2. Affirmative action: Bush said of the 2003 University of Michigan affirmative action case: “I strongly support diversity of all kinds, including racial diversity in higher education. But the method used by the University of Michigan to achieve this important goal is fundamentally flawed” — because it depended solely on race. Bush has said other factors, such as socioeconomic status, should be considered, which would include poor white students.

Read more…

Pres. Bush made the case for his administration's financial bailout plan directly to the nation on live television Wednesday night.

Editor’s note: On AC360° Thursday night, Anderson Cooper asked if it did any good for John McCain to suspend his campaign and go to Washington to help resolve the financial crisis.  Here is what GOP Strategist Ed Rollins had to say.

Ed Rollins
GOP Strategist and Former Huckabee National Campaign Chairman

COOPER: Do you think it helped John McCain’s campaign?

ROLLINS: No, absolutely not.

And I would have said this ahead of the meeting. I think the bottom line is that — because this has happened in two weeks — these people represent Middle America. At least they think they do. And three weeks ago, four weeks ago, they weren’t about Wall Street. They weren’t about — they were about small-town America, worried about different things.

Now, all of a sudden, the world is coming to an end. The president gave — I have been around this business 40 years — the president gave the most doom-and-gloom speech I have ever heard in my life last night. If everybody didn’t rush to their bank and pull their money out today, I would be shocked.

And so, all of a sudden, they’re getting bombarded by little people out there, saying, what is this? Stick up for me.

COOPER: I have got to tell you, watching the president last night give that speech, it was like watching him in Jackson Square in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I mean, he did not seem to be there.

ROLLINS: No, he wasn’t there.

COOPER: I mean, he was physically there, but I…

ROLLINS: No. It was not — it was not his words.

John King
CNN Chief National Correspondent

Suzanne Studer is patient and polite, her greeting constant: “Congressman Denny Rehberg’s office, Suzanne speaking ……”

To spend an hour with her on Wednesday was to understand firsthand why consensus in the Congress is proving hard to come by, and why President Bush felt compelled to address the nation in a prime time effort to sell the administration’s $700 billion financial rescue package.

“Absolutely not on the bailout,” Studer repeated as she took notes on one call.

“Protest on the bailout, ok,” as she took another.

“You are calling to protest – well you know I have heard a lot of those so let me just get this written down,” she says politely to yet another frustrated constituent.

Studer has worked in the office two years now and says she has never experienced anything like the flood of calls in recent days, and not a one in support of the package.

“I got one, ‘Think about it,’” she told us.

Keep reading

President Bush speaking at the U.N.

Elise Labott
CNN Producer

Watching President Bush’s farewell speech to the United Nations General Assembly, I was struck by the about-face this administration has taken on its relevance.

In his early years President Bush could barely contain his disdain for the U.N. and other global institutions. He saw it as a massive bureaucracy which tied U.S. hands and he didn’t even appoint an envoy to the U.N. for nine months after taking office. He refused to pay U.S. dues to the U.N. and withdrew from a number of international treaties supported by the U.N. members, like the international criminal court, the Kyoto Protocol and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Today he said, “the United Nations and other multilateral organizations are needed more urgently than ever.”

Keep reading

Cate Vojdik
AC360° Writer

The Republican National Convention is getting into full swing tonight, a day later than planned, thanks to Hurricane Gustav. The trick will be to fit all the planned speakers into the shortened timeframe. Among the GOP headliners we’ll hear from tonight: Sen. Joe Lieberman, former Sen. Fred Thompson, First Lady Laura Bush …and President Bush.

President Bush will make his comments live via remote from the White House. That’s about 1,000 miles from St. Paul in case you were wondering. Bush was supposed to give his speech live in St. Paul yesterday but backed out as Gustav hurtled toward the Gulf Coast. Today, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said it was a “mutual decision” that Bush would address the convention by remote instead of in person. A new national poll hints at what may have fueled that mutual decision. In the CNN/Opinion Research poll, only one in three Americans approve of the job Bush is doing. A quarter of those polled say Bush is the worst president in U.S. history, and six in ten have an unfavorable view of him personally. Ouch. And here’s what’s most troubling for the McCain campaign: A majority of those polled say that McCain’s policies would be the same as Bush’s, a number that has risen slightly since the Democratic convention ended.

The prevailing wisdom is that John McCain’s biggest task in St. Paul is to distance himself from Bush – and his policies. The big wild card is whether McCain’s surprising choice for a running mate will help or hurt him in this respect. McCain’s staffers spent much of the day responding to questions about how thoroughly Sarah Palin was vetted before she was tagged as veep. Their answer: very. But considering Palin’s pregnant teenage daughter and the so-called trooper-gate investigation that Palin’s facing back in her home state of Alaska, not everyone was swallowing that answer.

But back to the task at hand for the McCain campaign. The speakers you’ll hear tonight will talk about what makes him the right choice for president and why he’s his own man. They’ll talk about McCain the maverick, the former POW, the public servant. We’ll hear more about his adopted daughter, Bridget. It’s all part of the convention’s overarching theme: service above self. That’s the plan in broad brush strokes.

What do you think it will take to convince voters like those in the new CNN poll that McCain will chart a new and better course as president if elected? We’d love to hear from you. And stay with CNN for our special live coverage of the RNC in St. Paul.

Here’s tonight’s lineup:
Keep reading

Joe Klein
AC360° Contributor
TIME columnist

The woman, a venture capitalist from the Denver area, looked a bit like Cindy McCain, and so it was disconcerting when she announced, in a focus group of undecided voters conducted by the Republican pollster Frank Luntz, that she had decided she just couldn’t vote for John McCain this year. “I supported him enthusiastically in 2000, but he’s hired the same people who ran him into the ground last time to run his campaign,” she said. McCain’s tone was more negative now. “It breaks my heart.”

Most people don’t care about the consultants a candidate hires — very few handlers achieve the celebrity status of a Karl Rove or a James Carville. Most voters who supported McCain in 2000 but not this year have more obvious gripes: they don’t like the way he’s shaved his policy positions to approach Republican dogma. They may remember that he opposed the Bush tax cuts before he favored them…

Read More…

Ed Henry
CNN White House Correspondent

Sex is not involved so let’s call it Money, Lies and Videotape.

It’s a shocking tape that comes from a sting operation by the Times of London newspaper. It shows a Texas lobbyist and Bush fundraiser, Stephen Payne, trying to wrangle a big donation for the George W. Bush Presidential Library from a man whom he thought was representing the exiled former president of a Central Asian country who wanted some White House access.

“A couple hundred thousand (dollars),” says Payne. “I think that would probably get the attention of people.”

Keep reading