Republicans don’t want Rice to succeed Hillary Clinton
They vow to block her promotion to secretary of state
Senate Republicans vowed Wednesday to block the promotion of Susan B. Rice to Secretary of State. Rice, the current United States ambassador to the United Nations, has come under fire recently over the State Department’s handling of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, which left four Americans dead, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said at a Wednesday news conference he will do “everything” in his power to prevent Rice from replacing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who announced earlier in the week that she will not serve another four years in that post.
McCain was joined by senior GOP senators seeking to block President Obama’s expected nomination of Rice who would become the nation’s third African American secretary of state. “We will do whatever’s necessary to block the nomination that’s within our power as far as Susan Rice is concerned,” McCain said. According to an NBC News report, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and New Hampshire’s Kelly Ayotte supported that stance.
Rice has been the focal point of accusations that the Obama administration misled the public about the nature of the Benghazi attack. Five days after the attack, she appeared on several news talk programs and said the attack stemmed from outrage in the Arab world over an anti-Muslim video, not an act of terrorism. The White House later corrected that claim.
The Washington Post has reported for weeks that both Clinton and Obama will recommend Rice for nomination once the office is vacated in January.
“Susan Rice should have known better and if she didn’t know better, she’s not qualified,” McCain said on Fox & Friends regarding the Benghazi attack.
“I don’t trust her,” Graham said. “She doesn’t deserve to be promoted.”
Despite Republican opposition to Rice, the president on Wednesday spiritedly defended the embattled U.N. Ambassador, assailing conservative opposition to her as “outrageous.”
“When they go after the U.N. ambassador, apparently because they think she’s an easy target, then they’ve got a problem with me,” the president said.
As President Obama and our representatives in Washington debate gun-violence prevention measures, many in the African American community are saying, “It’s about time!”
WASHINGTON—Although the U.S. military is ending its policy of excluding women from combat and will open combat jobs and direct combat units to female troops, but not every position will open at once.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta made the announcement of the change in policy last week and notified Congress of the planned change, according to an official source.
“We will eliminate the policy of ‘no women in units that are tasked with direct combat,’” the senior defense official said.
WASHINGTON—More than 11 million Blacks lived below the poverty line in 2011, including an estimated 5.2 million that languish in severe poverty, according to a recent report.
The yearly report by the Half in Ten campaign found that, even though Blacks comprise 13 percent of the total population in the United States, they accounted for 27.6 percent of Americans living below the poverty line, defined as $23,018 a year for a family of four. Less than one in 10 of those living below the poverty line in 2011 were White.
WASHINTON—Despite efforts in some states to suppress the Black vote and predictions that African Americans would not turn out at the rate they did in 2008, Blacks overcame all obstacles and were key to Obama’s re-election to a second term, an analysis of voting data shows.
Exit polls show that 93 percent of Blacks voted for Obama this year, down slightly from the 95 percent rate in 2008. But voting for all groups was down this year compared with the presidential election four years ago.
WASHINGTON—Only days before the presidential election, as the mega-storm slowed down both candidates and knocked out power in millions of homes across the East Coast, a Black voter operation used every possible mechanism to continue get-out-to-vote and voter protection efforts for Tuesday.
