Rod Blagojevich
speaker
701 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 26 Mar
Rod Blagojevich’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You got to go to Congress. You got to change those laws. You got to undo some of those guidelines because these judges are required by law to whack a guy. Because he fits certain criteria, but they don't look at the other stuff in his life, that this guy's never had a crime before, that he's got a family, that he's actually done good works.
Those things are taken into consideration when they have these guidelines that the judges have to follow. They were pushed by prosecutors to give them the tools to go after criminal behavior.
Almost none. Maybe none at all. None. It's adult babysitting.
Yeah. And there's resources where you can do that. I mean, there are places where you can learn. Not enough vocational stuff. Not nearly enough. But you can do that.
Counseling, yes.
No? I mean, like guidance, what? They don't teach you anything. They'll, you know...
But they didn't teach the other guys. I mean, I know enough about that to know that they weren't getting any kind of guidance. The counselors are just giving you guidance on how to deal with the world we're in. No. That place.
Yeah, there's some motivation. So, for example, I'm sitting in Jailhouse Rock before 110 inmates who the day before I see in the yard all muscled up. They're all big muscle guys. They got tats all over. Right. And they got interesting hairstyles. You know, some of them Fu Manchu. You know, they look like Genghis Khan. Some of them. Right.
You got these racist Nazi guys with swastikas tatted on them. Right. And they're all of a sudden on this particular day, they're wearing caps and gowns. And hear me, the former governor of Illinois, once thought about, believe it or not, as a presidential candidate. I'm about to sing Jailhouse Rock to these guys. Right? The wardens there. Oh, my God.
We had practiced for a year because there was a way to get your bind out of prison was embracing music. And they have a music room there with good acoustics and good – and there was a guy who was – He had the head of the music department, an inmate, a drug dealer who went to Berklee, the music school in Boston. Really great musician. His name's Ernie.
I don't want to say his last name to embarrass him. Great guy. He was like my music mentor. And I learned that if you practice singing, I'm not a singer, but you can actually improve. And it was like a way where we would practice for hours a day where I wasn't in prison for those five hours. I was focusing on trying to get good at something, right? So there we are a year later.
We had auditioned and won the gig for the Jailhouse Rockers to perform before the GED graduates. And there's the warden, all the brass in the prison, 110 of these badass guys. They had an outside guest speaker to give a motivational speech. I'm stepping up. I'm about to sing my first song by Clint Black called A Better Man. You know? Leave in here a better man. You ever hear that song?
Country song. I don't know if I have. Yeah. But before I do, I catch the warden. And I had been told sometime before. that the warden has the power in a federal prison under certain circumstances where he could actually release an inmate without the court.
And in one particular case, some guy was slicing up another inmate, almost killed him, and a third inmate intervened and stopped the fight and saved the guy's life. The aggressor got more criminal charges against him and got sent to an even higher prison. The victim, thank goodness, survived. Fucked up. He was bloodied up and all of that.
The third party that intervened, the peacemaker, saved a life. The warden sent him home. Wow. He had the power to do that. So I was told this. Now suddenly I'm about to sing Jailhouse Rock, right? There he is. I figure, I think I'll go off the program and ad-lib a little bit. Because I've been on stage before. I know how to do that.
So I look at the warden and I say, I'd like to dedicate this song to the warden.
Nobody laughed. The warden's staring at me. All the inmates don't know what to make of it. They were afraid to laugh, you know.
But GED is one way where you can get a reduction. You can get good time. So you can spend a little less time in prison. I'll give you maybe, I don't know, several months or maybe a year off your sentence or something. So there are some incentives. Okay. Yeah. Something like that. There should be more of that.
I appreciate you, Joe. God bless you, and congratulations on your great success.
Yeah, so it's Vindication Publishing, my own little publishing company. I've pre-sold 8,000 books, so far so good. The reason I have to do it myself is the New York publishers don't like the good Trump stuff.
Showing 681–700 of 701 · page 35 of 36
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