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MSNBC's Chuck Todd grilled Hillary Clinton over the scathing inspector general's report released on Wednesday that determined she "did not comply" with State Department rules in using a personal email address to conduct government business. The report "seemed to contradict many of the things you've said about the emails," Todd said, before asking Clinton if she accepts everything the report said as fact. Clinton argued that the report made clear that personal email use was allowed under State Department rules, though she acknowledged she realized people have "concerns." Snip... The existence of at least three previously undisclosed email correspondences between...

WASHINGTON - The Democratic left still smarts over President Obama's failure to deliver on some of its key issues, but has made no serious move to challenge him in 2012. Even the loudest critics among them think putting up a primary candidate would just split the party and strengthen the Republican who runs against him or her. "There is beginning to be some chatter about running a candidate from the left, but nobody wants to think that way," said Peter Daou, a liberal blogger and ex-digital media adviser to Hillary Clinton's campaign. The left's grievance list is long. They believe...

Augusta, GA: A plane crash that took 10 lives in October probably could have been prevented if alleged known faults inherent with the plane had been addressed prior to the fateful flight. Two lawsuits have been launched in recent weeks at the behest of the families of two skydivers killed in the October 7th airplane crash that left no survivors. A party of nine skydivers was returning from a sky diving event in Star, Idaho when the plane went down in rugged terrain west of Yakima, in the Cascade Mountains. The pilot was also killed, and there were no survivors...

With just two weeks remaining before confirmation hearings, no Republican senator has publicly suggested that she withdraw, but the most recent rumblings from Capitol Hill are at best neutral about the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet E. Miers, says a report in the NY Times. Even as White House Counsel Miers continued her visits with lawmakers, she has not excelled at winning the minds and hearts of GOP leaders, concluded the Times. Of the 10 Republicans on the key 18-member Judiciary Committee, three have publicly raised concerns. "I am uneasy about where we are,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama....

Miers' Views Labeled "Activist," Supportive of Abortion Rights in Washington Post In the latest blow to the pro-Miers contingency, the Washington Post provides copy of a 1993 speech Miers gave which exposes the first insight into her judicial philosophy. As one conservative constitutional attorney said: "This is going to be very disturbing to conservatives because I think it shows that she is a judicial activist," said Mathew D. Staver, president and general counsel for the Liberty Counsel, which frequently argues constitutional cases from the conservative perspective. "This concept of self-determination could clearly be read in support for things like abortion...

A 30-second TV ad is set to air tomorrow, Wednesday, that some believe may be as effective at helping stop the Harriett Miers confirmation as the Swift Boat ads were in helping stop John Kerry. BetterJustice.org, a conservative grass-roots organization, created and funded the hard-hitting anti-Miers (but pro-Bush) ad. The organization's board of directors includes several otherwise staunch Republican stalwarts, such as David Frum and Linda Chavez. "Miers is no more qualified to sit on the Supreme Court than I am to be a sumo wrestler!" So stated the so very un-sumo-like Ann Coulter. Video on Human Events Online

John Roberts enraged some conservatives because he provided pro bono legal assistance to supporters of equal rights for homosexuals. But Harriet Miers has helped gay rights advocates and their ideological soul mates on the left get something more valuable than advice: cold hard cash. Already savaged by conservatives for insufficient fealty to the cause, Miers now faces a possible high-tech lynching for uppity women because of her virtually unnoticed but longtime support for one of the left's most lucrative bait-and-switch efforts: Interest on Lawyers' Trust Accounts or IOLTA. This innocuous sounding program ostensibly funds legal services for the poor but...

Another skeleton Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers was deeply involved in an American Bar Association scheme that forces lawyers to pool their clients' funds into checking accounts and pass on the interest to "public interest" law firms, Evan Gahr reports at www.chimpstein.com. The program, known as Interest on Lawyers' Trust Accounts, or IOLTA, was intended to provide legal services to the poor but often ends up promoting left-wing causes, Mr. Gahr said. IOLTA has helped fund "a panoply of left-wing advocates, including a California group that sued to overturn the state's parental consent law for abortion, a gay organization that...

When Harriet E. Miers, President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, was moving toward the presidency of the State Bar of Texas in 1992, she enthusiastically supported an effort by the group to guarantee positions on its board of directors to female and minority lawyers, her two immediate predecessors said on Saturday. The two former presidents said Ms. Miers had recognized the value in making sure the group's leadership reflected the state's diversity. Ms. Miers's position at the time, which was reported in The Washington Post on Saturday, concerns some conservative groups, who fear that her support for diversity may veil sympathies...

Miers family received 'excessive' sum in land case By JACK DOUGLAS JR. and STEPHEN HENDERSON Knight Ridder Newspapers WASHINGTON — Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers collected more than 10 times the market value for a small slice of family-owned land in a large Superfund pollution cleanup site in Dallas where the state wanted to build a highway off-ramp. The windfall came after a judge who received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Miers' law firm appointed a close professional associate of Miers and an outspoken property-rights activist to the three-person panel that determined how much the state should pay....

WASHINGTON - Judith Miller's boss says the New York Times reporter appears to have misled the newspaper about her role in the CIA leak controversy. In an e-mail memo Friday to the newspaper's staff, Executive Editor Bill Keller said that until Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald subpoenaed Miller in the criminal probe, "I didn't know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end" of leaks aimed at Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson. "Judy seems to have misled" Times Washington bureau chief Bill Taubman about the extent of her involvement, Keller wrote. Taubman asked Miller in the fall...

The White House has begun making contingency plans for the withdrawal of Harriet Miers as President Bush's choice to fill a seat on the Supreme Court, conservative sources said yesterday. "White House senior staff are starting to ask outside people, saying, 'We're not discussing pulling out her nomination, but if we were to, do you have any advice as to how we should do it?' " a conservative Republican with ties to the White House told The Washington Times yesterday. The White House denied making such calls. "Absolutely not true," White House spokesman Trent Duffy said. But a conservative political...

With more than 25 years of legal experience and a five-year stint on the board of a legal malpractice insurer, where her duties included helping law firms weed out bad clients, Harriet Miers was in some ways unusually well-suited to guide the fortunes of the Dallas law firm she ran in the late 1990s. But in 2000 and 2001 her firm settled three malpractice suits of its own for at least $30 million, including one for $22 million. Miers' tenure as the firm's managing partner was among the credentials that President Bush cited when he nominated her for the Supreme...

Cover-Up Issue Is Seen as Focus in Leak Inquiry By DAVID JOHNSTON WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 - As he weighs whether to bring criminal charges in the C.I.A. leak case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special counsel, is focusing on whether Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, sought to conceal their actions and mislead prosecutors, lawyers involved in the case said Thursday. Among the charges that Mr. Fitzgerald is considering are perjury, obstruction of justice and false statement - counts that suggest the prosecutor may believe the evidence...