Lakeside Grad on U.N. Inaction in Syria: 'A Disgrace'

Samantha Power, a Lakeside High School graduate and President Obama's nominee for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, called the world's failure to intervene in Syria and stop mass killings "a disgrace" in front of a Senate panel Wednesday.

“I believe that America cannot — indeed, I know that America should not — police every crisis or shelter every refugee,” she said during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing to consider her nomination, according to The Washington Post. “While our goodwill knows no bounds, our resources are finite, strained by pressing needs at home. And we are not the world’s policeman. We must make choices based on the best interests of the American people.”

Read the full story for more information, including tough questions Power faced from some Republican senators who questioned the nominee's past positions on Israel.

Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss was also one of several politicians to introduce Power to the panel, and he noted her Atlanta upbringing.

"Samantha is an Irish-born American who matriculated to Atlanta to become educated at high school to prepare herself not just for this job, but to go to Yale and go to Harvard Law School," Chambliss said to the panel. "Pretty good credentials coming out of Lakeside High School in Atlanta."

Power graduated from the DeKalb County school in 1988. She finished with a 4.08 GPA and a 1320 SAT score. She also participated in cross country, track and basketball.

Power covered the atrocities in Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia and her 2002 book on genocide, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, earned her a Pulitzer Prize. Power worked on President Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and ran the human rights office in the White House.

Some say that Obama’s nomination of Power demonstrates his renewed commitment to human rights.

“Power's appointment should be considered a signal that Obama wants his foreign policy legacy to include more than just a footnoted commentary about his desire to advance human rights on a global scale,” Toni Panetta, a political and policy strategist, wrote recently in blog for The Huffington Post.

However, others were equally critical of the appointment. During his nationally syndicated radio talk show recently, Rush Limbaugh cited the fact that Power is married to Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein, who Limbaugh said "is the leader of this entire belief system that the Bill of Rights is anti-government and needs to be changed."