Friday, February 13, 2004

Will Ashcroft Exile Janet and Britney Next?

How long is this freak Ashcroft going to be the nation's highest law-enforcement official? As long as Bush is President, I would guess. The guy's doing a rotten job of prosecuting terrorists. But he has his priorities.

U.S. Plans to Escalate Porn Fight Los Angeles Times 02/13/04

The Justice Department has quietly installed an outspoken anti-pornography advocate in a senior position in its criminal division, as part of an effort to jump-start obscenity prosecutions.

The Bush administration's election-year move follows three years of heat from the Christian right, which believes that Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, a longtime friend and ally, has fallen down on the job when it comes to fighting smut. ...

Officials said the appointment of Bruce A. Taylor, who worked in the department during the heyday of its anti-porn efforts in the late 1980s and early '90s, shows that Justice is serious about cracking down on porn after what critics called lax enforcement by the Clinton administration.

In his resume, the 53-year-old Taylor, who got his start as a Cleveland city attorney in the 1970s, lists his involvement in more than 600 obscenity cases as a prosecutor or a legal advisor. ...

Most recently, he has been the president and chief counsel of the National Law Center for Children and Families, a Fairfax, Va., group active in writing federal legislation outlawing indecent material on the Internet ...

Among the supporters of his law center is Cincinnati billionaire and philanthropist Carl Lindner, who in the early 1990s gained additional celebrity by helping lead the opposition to a local exhibit of sexually explicit work by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Lindner gave Taylor's group $100,000 in 2002, according to federal tax records.

I guess there's some comfort in this: if Ashcroft weren't such a sex-obsessed character, he would be concentrating even harder on spying against peace activists and things like that than he already is.

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