WASHINGTON — Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Tuesday acknowledged that mistakes were made in the firing of top U.S. attorneys and took responsibility following calls for his resignation.

"I accept that responsibility and my pledge to the American people is to find out what went wrong here, to assess accountability and to make improvements so that the mistakes that occurred in this instance do not occur in the future," Gonzales said during a news conference at the Justice Department.

[...]

"I've overcome a lot of obstacles in my life to become attorney general. I am here not because I give up, I am here because I learn from my mistakes, because I accept responsibility and because I am committed to doing my job and that is what I intend to do here on behalf of the American people," he said. (Personal responsibility. Nice. To bad the Dems never show that.)

Democrats are upset over the firings of eight attorneys announced last December. They believe some of those fired were pressured by leading Republicans to speed up investigations of potential voter fraud involving Democrats.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who has called former White House counsel Gonzales one of the most political attorneys general in recent history, renewed his call the second time in three days for the attorney general to resign.

"Being attorney general is the one Cabinet officer when the president says, 'jump,' you don't necessarily say, 'how high,' but that is what Attorney General Gonzales has done, over and over again," Schumer said at a press conference on Capitol Hill with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean said Gonzales "ought to be shown the door — he ought not to be in this administration. We have got to end corruption in our government. It is not OK to be corrupt."... (Shut Up!)

...When the party in power changes hands in the White House, it is expected that the new president will fire all the sitting U.S. attorneys, as was the case for both Ronald Reagan in 1981 and Bill Clinton in 1993. President Bush, unlike Clinton and Reagan, did not fire all the attorneys en masse when he took office in 2001, and allowed a few to continue in their positions for several months. All were replaced with his own selections early in his administration...