PFAW President Ralph G. Neas said the website had received 2,000 "hits" an hour and noted that other organizations reported similar responses from their constituencies.

"By most conservative estimates," he said, "over half a million Americans have already contacted their senators. What these petitions are saying is: John Ashcroft is the wrong man to entrust with our fundamental freedoms."

Debra Dion, AFL-CIO spokesperson, told the World that "several thousand" of those petitions had been collected on the AFL-CIO website. "We got a response far higher than we expected." Ashcroft received a 2 percent favorable rating from the AFL-CIO.

On Jan. 22 the Cleveland, Ohio City Council passed an emergency resolution opposing the Ashcroft confirmation. The council opposed him on the basis of his refusal "to disassociate himself from the Southern Partisan magazine, a journal which supports the ideology of the old southern confederacy," and because Ashcroft has "stated his opposition to affirmative action, gun control, desegregation orders, and gay rights."

The council also noted that "the sanctity of our democratic system was already compromised by the actions of the ... Supreme Court in selecting George W. Bush as President, and the Constitutional rights of all citizens would be further threatened by having someone like John Ascroft as Attorney General, with the power to deploy the FBI and the army of prosecutors ..."

Neas charged Ashcroft with distorting the facts about his record in his three days of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Time after time he attempted to "correct" his anti-labor, anti-people record and continued the tactics of distortion spiced with a dose of evasion.

Ashcroft’s opposition to the nomination of James Hormel as ambassador to Luxembourg was but the first of many instances where he torpedoed the appointment of a person, despite the fact that he or she had been approved by the appropriate Senate committee.

Ashcroft’s crude opposition to Hormel was so outrageous that then-Sen. Alphonse D’Amato (R-N.Y.), himself a certified right-winger, felt constrained to question it.

In a letter to Sen. Majority Leader Trent Lott, D’Amato said he was "embarrassed" that Hormel’s nomination had been held up and said he feared there was "but one reason and one reason only: the fact that he is gay." Ashcroft’s tactics in his campaign to prevent confirmation of Ronnie White to the federal district court was equally scurrilous.

In his appearance before the Judiciary Committee, Ashcroft tried to maintain the fiction that law enforcement officers had asked him to oppose White – and this despite a St. Louis Post Dispatch expose that Ashcroft had solicited opposition from the Missouri Chiefs of Police (MCP).

Eight of the 12 judicial nominees that Ashcroft voted against were women or members of national minorities. One of the most recent was Margaret McKeowan, a Clinton nominee to the Ninth Circuit Court, whose nomination was held up for two years by Ashcroft’s maneuvers. Ashcroft’s memory "failed" him when Maria Cantwell, Washington’s newly-elected senator, asked about his reasons for opposing McKeowan.

Although he refused to answer, he singled her out in a speech to the Heritage Foundation where he told his audience, "It’s time to expose Mrs. McKeowan and her ACLU friends for the liberal elitists they are."

Ashcroft’s reactionary credentials were honed in his unsuccessful efforts to prevent desegregation of St. Louis schools.

His relentless efforts to prevent a voluntary plan for desegregation eventually led to court orders demanding that the city comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling a quarter of a century earlier that banned segregation in public schools.In his senate testimony Ashcroft denied that he opposed voluntary desegregation. But, again, the record is there for all to see: In 1984 he assailed the St. Louis plan as an "outrage against human decency."

And The St. Louis American, the city’s African-American newspaper, minced no words when it said, "Here is a man who has no compunction whatsoever to standing on the necks of our young people merely for the sake of winning political favor."

Despite efforts to project himself as a "straight arrow," Ashcroft’s politics are a holdover from the stone age as witness an interview published in Southern Partisan.

When Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) asked him about the interview, Ashcroft feigned ignorance, saying, "I can’t say that I knew very much at all about the magazine."

Again the difference between the word and deed: Ashcroft’s remarks in the Southern Partisan article read like those of an avid fan. He praised the magazine for "helping to set the record straight" on what he called attacks the historical revisionists "brought against our founders."