“This guy is a clown. He’s a fool, so was his father and so was his grandfather.”

— Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), interviewed on Fox News, dismissing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“North Korea is not a State — it’s a cult.”

— Former North Korean spy Kim Hyun-hee, quoted by the Daily Mail, on how she was taught “that our leader, Kim Il-sung, was a God.”

USA Today:
“It’s a time-honored presidential tradition to reward political friends
and campaign contributors with plum ambassadorships to Caribbean
islands and glittering European capitals. The practice is getting fresh
attention as President Obama weighs second-term appointments for the
donors and fundraisers who help collect more than a $1 billion for his
re-election. In the 2012 campaign, 773 individuals and couples raised at
least $50,000 for Obama, who is expected to fill about 30 political
positions in his second term.”

The New York Times reports on a secret deal in which the CIA agreed to kill a Pakistani enemy “in exchange for access to airspace it had long sought so it could use drones to hunt down its own enemies.”

“That back-room bargain, described in detail for the first time in interviews with more than a dozen officials in Pakistan and the United States, is critical to understanding the origins of a covert drone war that began under the Bush administration, was embraced and expanded by President Obama, and is now the subject of fierce debate. The deal, a month after a blistering internal report about abuses in the C.I.A.’s network of secret prisons, paved the way for the C.I.A. to change its focus from capturing terrorists to killing them, and helped transform an agency that began as a cold war espionage service into a paramilitary organization.”

Foreign Policy: “Pro-democracy activists around the world are discovering that humor is one of the most powerful weapons in the fight against authoritarianism.”

Just as French President François Hollande is trying to impose budgetary discipline on his countrymen, his chief tax enforcer has admitted to hiding $770,000 in an offshore bank account, Businessweek reports.

“Budget Minister Jérôme Cahuzac, who resigned as budget minister two weeks ago, acknowledged this week that he lied to Hollande and others who questioned him after allegations about his secret overseas accounts surfaced several months ago.”

President Obama has appointed Caroline Kennedy as the next U.S. Ambassador to Japan, the Washington Post reports.

“The move, which her office did not return a call about, is almost certain to thrill the Japanese, who like their American ambassadors to be superstars. Kennedy’s predecessors include luminaries like legendary Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield, former vice president Walter Mondale, former House speaker Tom Foley, and former Senate majority leader Howard Baker.”

“Under persistent prodding from President Obama, Israel and Turkey resolved a bitter three-year dispute on Friday with a diplomatic thaw that will help a fragile region confront Syria’s civil war, while handing the president a solid accomplishment as he closed out his visit to the Middle East,” the New York Times reports.

Just before Obama left for Jordan, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu telephoned Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and apologized for deadly errors in Israel’s 2010 raid on a Turkish ship… Mr. Erdogan accepted Mr. Netanyahu’s gesture, and both sides agreed to dispatch envoys to each other’s nations, having recalled them in 2011.”

Josh Marshall: “No doubt this was part of a package that emerged out of Obama’s visit.”

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked if President Obama was counting on some rest and relaxation during his trip to Israel, the president quickly said, “It’s good to get away from Congress.”

David Hawkings: “The jape was caught on an open mic and appeared in no official transcripts, underscroring the perception that Obama is never more candid than when he’s lamenting his troubles back home in conversations abroad — and doing so with a foreign leader on the curious assumption that no one’s listening in.”

[Read more…]

As he embarks this week on his first presidential trip to Israel, President Obama “will seek to clarify his support for the Jewish state’s theory of its historical roots — addressing one of several subtle, but essential, missteps he is attempting to fix in his second term. The trip is a mission of remedial diplomacy, rather than the kind of specific peace initiative common for previous presidential visits,” the Washington Post reports.

“Obama will also travel to the West Bank city of Ramallah during his four-day trip for air-clearing meetings with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and other leaders, who are deeply disappointed by Obama and his staunch opposition to their diplomatic push for statehood through the United Nations.”

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds Americans by a wide margin sympathize more with Israel than the Palestinian Authority when it comes to thorny Middle East politics, 55^ to 9%.

“Venezuela’s information minister says the government has decided that the body of Hugo Chavez will not be embalmed for permanent display, as officials had said it would be,” the AP reports.

“For more than three decades, the Republican Party brand has been deeply tied to a worldview in which the aggressive use of American power abroad is both a policy imperative and a political advantage,” the New York Times reports.

Now, a new generation of Republicans like Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) “is turning inward, questioning the approach that reached its fullest expression after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and signaling a willingness to pare back the military budgets that made it all possible.”

“That holds the potential to threaten two wings of a Republican national security establishment that have been warring for decades: the internationalists who held sway under the elder President George Bush and the neoconservatives who led the country to long and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan under President George W. Bush.”

“America’s fraught ties with Afghanistan suffered a jarring blow Sunday, when Afghan President Hamid Karzai said during a visit by the new U.S. defense secretary that the Taliban were killing Afghan civilians ‘in service to America,'” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Washington Post: “The remarks painted an embarrassing picture of discord that marred a visit by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, his first foreign trip as Pentagon chief, and plunged the tenuous allies into crisis mode at a time when the United States is struggling to wind down the unpopular war.”

“An Italian court sentenced ex-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to one year in jail over the publication by his family’s newspaper of a transcript of a leaked wiretap connected to a banking scandal in 2006,” Reuters reports.

“However, judicial sources said the charges will expire in mid-September, before an appeal trial can be completed, because of the statute of limitations. So no matter what happens in the appeal, it is unlikely that Berlusconi would serve time in jail.”

Venezuela’s acting president says Hugo Chavez’s embalmed body will be permanently displayed in a glass casket so that “his people will always have him,” the AP reports.

New York Times: “In a letter of condolence to the people of Venezuela, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, struck a note of interfaith harmony on Wednesday, expressing confidence that the late Hugo Chávez would eventually be resurrected, along with Jesus and the Hidden Imam, a messianic figure in Shiite Islam.”

“Shortly before announcing that Hugo Chávez died, Venezuela’s government resorted to one of the late president’s favorite ploys to try to unite his supporters: allege a conspiracy by the U.S. to destabilize the country,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Vice President Nicolás Maduro kicked out two U.S. military attachés for allegedly plotting against Venezuela and even suggested that Washington may have been behind Mr. Chávez’s cancer.”

Said Maduro: “Behind all of the plots are the enemies of the fatherland.”

“Maduro’s rhetoric is similar to the kinds of conspiracy theories that Mr. Chávez wove during his 14 years in power, and which Mr. Chávez seemed to have adopted from his political mentor, Fidel Castro, who has long rallied support among Cubans by portraying the U.S. as an implacable foe.”

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has died, CNN reports.

The announcement came hours after Vice President Nicolas Maduro met with the country’s top political and military leaders about Chavez’s worsening health condition and suggested someone may have deliberately infected Chavez with cancer.

Wall Street Journal: “Chavez led the country virtually as a one-man show for 14 years. Just months into his fourth term, his death plunges Venezuela into political uncertainty.”