Hey Cindi MM does’nt have to have it jammed down his throat. He eagerly drinks the poisoned kool-aide. I live in the south and people like MM are everywhere, blissfully living in ignorance, until something untoward happens to upset that bliss and then you know what its all our fault(liberals or non GOP types).
Maybe this mindless drone should drink the drink and rid us of his dolefully ignorant presence.
Like a good Christian though, I love him, or is it as a good christian I’d love to burn him at the stake?

Just to lower the tone right down

That hand gesture he’s making is a little *suggestive* is it not?

Has the Spirit of Justice had a “wardrobe malfunction”?

So funny….  Ashcroft had NOTHING to do with the statues (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1788845.stm) and you have nothing to do with truth.

Let’s see:
200 terror convictions, Violent crime WAY down, the only AG to aggressively go after those corrupt CEOs, etc…, 57% INCREASE in weapon convictions (that should make you happy). Also——there are not hundreds of people dead (children included), killed because of their religion (Waco & the Davidians).

He may be ugly, you may not like his style, but he did a decent job and didn’t kill Americans over their religion.

It’s certainly true that the DoJ claims Ashcroft had no part in the decision to cover the statues with a curtain, but there is still some debate on how true that claim may be. Some valid points as to why the explanation provided by the DoJ doesn’t wash have been raised and, as far as I’m aware, Ashcroft himself has never chimed in on the issue in public.

It’s definitely the sort of thing that I wouldn’t put past someone such as Ashcroft, but beyond being something to rib him about it’s not the sort of thing I would demand his removal from office over. The reality is that it doesn’t really matter if he had a hand in it or not as it’s really the least of his transgressions during his time in office.

How much of a hand he had in any of the rest of the claims you make in your comment are easily as debatable as how much of a hand he had in the decision to hang the curtain. What isn’t debatable is the damage he’s done to civil liberties while in office.

Of course DOJ denies he had anything to do with covering up the statue.  On an unrelated note, if you have some time this Sunday morning, go visit your local Assembly Of God church.  You’ll find it an eye-opening experience.  (Ashcroft’s father and grandfather were Assembly Of God ministers.) 

Then ask yourself if it is coincidence that the statue was uncovered until Ashcroft became AG. No, you wouldn’t remove someone from office for that.  But it does provide a window into his mind.

As for violent crime being down; many other countries that imprison a much smaller proportion of their citizenry than we do, have lower violent crime rates.  I’m not sure throwin’ a bunch of people in prison is the determinate variable.

200 terror convictions, Violent crime WAY down, the only AG to aggressively go after those corrupt CEOs, etc…, 57% INCREASE in weapon convictions (that should make you happy).

Terror convictions

I’m not familiar with that particular statistic. I did a search on “200 terror convictions” and came up empty. When I dropped the 200, I got many hits discussing DOJ’s mishandling of the Detroit Case. Isn’t it true that, with the exception of Richard Reid, DOJ has not made any of its high profile cases? Does the 200 number conflate violation of immigration law with terrorism?

Violent crime.

Administrations and thiner supporters tend to take credit for good things that happen during their tenure and try to blame the other side when things don’t go well. Here are some other explanations for the lower rate of violent crime that, singly or in combination, IMHO are more plausible than Ashcroft being a hotshot AJ.

1. The Brady bill.

2. Clinton’s Community Police Program

3. Aging of the baby boomers. The following quote is from a March 2001 article in Reason Magazine titled
The bum rap against TV violence.

But Centerwall’s intriguing data are more readily explained in terms of a factor he chooses to slight: the unanticipated surge in births between 1947 and 1964 (peaking in 1957) known as the baby boom. Murders are disproportionately the handiwork of young males, and throngs of them were maturing in the 1970s, producing unusually high homicide rates. It was shrewd of Centerwall to select Canada as his other test case because Canada and the United States were among the very few countries to experience a postwar bulge in birth rates. South Africa, with its low pre-1975 murder rates, did lack television, but more significantly it lacked a baby boom.

When America’s violent crime statistics are extended beyond Centerwall’s cutoff date of 1975 and beyond the dates of his publications, the weakness of his causal argument becomes clear. Violent crime in the 1980s remained high, but as the baby boom cohort members aged past their 30th birthdays in the l990s crime began to decline. FBI statistics show that from 1991 onward the violent crime rates have decreased each year. Moreover, rates for property crimes have been decreasing since 1980. Thus, as more entertainment violence has become available on television, crime rates in the United States have been decreasing.

... only AG to aggressively go after those corrupt CEOs

Yeah, given the magnitude of the Enron debacle the administration could ill afford to do otherwise - particularly with the long history of Bush (41 and 43)/Ken Lay cronyism. When the relationship became a potential liability, Bush 43 clained he hardly knew one of his largest donors.