Women of Power. President Obama will announce this afternoon that he'll name U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to be the next national security adviser. Rice, who has been at the center of the firestorm over early accounts on the attacks at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, will succeed Tom Donilon. The New York Times calls Rice's appointment a "defiant gesture to Republicans" who hardly criticized her in the wake of the attacks. The post of national security adviser, while powerful, does not require Senate confirmation. According to White House officials, Obama will name Samantha Power, a National Security Council aide, as the next U.N. Ambassador.
IRS targets. "Conservative groups who say they were wrongly targeted by the IRS got an opportunity to share their stories on Capitol Hill," Politico reports. "Speaking for the first time before a congressional committee on Tuesday, representatives of six conservative organizations described a delayed process for winning IRS approval for a tax exemption and spoke of 'intrusive' questions from the agency focused on political beliefs.
Military leaders grilled. "The nation’s top military brass came under withering criticism Tuesday from high-profile female senators who slammed the military's handling of allegations of sexual assault," NBC News reports. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who has proposed legislation to require assault charges be handled outside of the victim's chain of command: "Not all commanders are objective...Not every single commander necessarily wants women on the force, not every commander believes what a sexual assault is, not every single commander can distinguish between a slap on the ass and a rape because they merge all of these crimes together.”