“I have no interest in politics. Never have. Never will.”

— First Lady Michelle Obama, on The View, when asked if she would ever run for office.

The Daily Beast runs excerpts from a new book, Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency, which shows President Obama wasn’t always “the commander in chief who never flinches” as the White House likes to portray.

BuzzFeed compiles excerpts from Barack Obama: The Story by David Maraniss that deal with the “elaborate drug culture” surrounding Barack Obama when he attended Punahou School in Honolulu and Occidental College in Los Angeles.

The bottom line: “He inhaled. A lot.”

CBS News has learned that three Drug Enforcement Administration agents are under investigation for hiring prostitutes in Cartagena, Colombia.

“The alleged incident happened at the same time as the Secret Service agents were in Colombia for President Obama’s visit in mid April, but is separate from the ongoing Secret Service investigation.”

The U.S. Secret Service imposed new rules “aimed at tightening oversight of its employees on international trips in the wake of the Colombia prostitution scandal — banning staff members from bringing foreigners into their hotel rooms, drinking alcohol within 10 hours of duty and visiting “non-reputable establishments,” the Washington Post reports.

Meanwhile, CBS News reports the agency is now looking into reports “that Secret Service personnel traveling in 2009 with former President Clinton partied at strip clubs on a visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and that agents and White House staffers went to a Moscow night club known for its sexually charged atmosphere prior to Mr. Clinton’s trip to Russia in 2000.”

“This is the biggest job in the world and I’ve never seen a president make it smaller.”

— House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), quoted by NBC News.

KIRO-TV reports on a new Secret Service scandal at a strip club that occurred prior to President Obama’s trip to El Salvador in March of 2011.

“This source witnessed the majority of the men drinking heavily at the strip club. He says most of the Secret Service ‘advance-team’ members also paid extra for access to the VIP section of the club where they were provided a number of sexual favors in return for their cash. Although our source says he told the agents it was a ‘really bad idea’ to take the strippers back to their hotel rooms, several agents bragged that they ‘did this all the time’ and ‘not to worry about it.’ Our source says at least two agents had escorts check into their rooms. It is unclear whether the escorts who returned to the hotels were some of the strippers from the same club.”

The New York Times looks at President Obama’s shift from a senator who criticized George W. Bush’s use of executive power to a president who increasingly uses those same powers.

“Branding its unilateral efforts ‘We Can’t Wait,’ a slogan that aides said Mr. Obama coined at that strategy meeting, the White House has rolled out dozens of new policies — on creating jobs for veterans, preventing drug shortages, raising fuel economy standards, curbing domestic violence and more. Each time, Mr. Obama has emphasized the fact that he is bypassing lawmakers… Aides say many more such moves are coming.”

“Mr. Obama’s increasingly assertive use of executive action could foreshadow pitched battles over the separation of powers in his second term, should he win and Republicans consolidate their power in Congress.”

David Chaney, one of the Secret Service supervisors ousted from the agency this week for their involvement in the Colombia prostitution scandal, “made light of his official protective work on his Facebook page, joking about a picture of himself standing watch behind Sarah Palin,” the Washington Post reports.

Wrote Chaney: “I was really checking her out, if you know what i mean?”

Palin responded on Fox News: “Well check this out, bodyguard — you’re fired. And I hope his wife sends him to the doghouse. As long as he’s not eating the dog, along with his former boss.”

First Read: “In American politics, there are actual problems and perceived problems. And when it comes to that exorbitant GSA trip to Las Vegas or the Secret Service prostitution scandal in Colombia, those are perceived problems — that somehow the government isn’t working and a handful of employees aren’t taking their jobs seriously. The question, in this election year, is whether that perception hurts the guy running the government.”

“Make no mistake: These scandals aren’t coming from the Obama White House or from the aides working closest with the president… But the attention on these GSA and Secret Service stories only sullies the government’s reputation. Bottom line: The government can’t afford another one to surface again anytime soon, and neither can the party that has come to represent the idea that government is at least part of the solution to collective problems — the Democrats.”

Because he’s still officially a presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich is “likely costing the taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars a day with his Secret Service detail on the campaign trail,” the Daily Caller reports.

Gingrich recently had three people on his personal security detail, though sometimes there are “many more.”

Secret Service officials “planning a wild night of fun in Colombia did some of their own advance work last week, booking a party space at the Hotel Caribe before heading out to the night clubs,” ABC News reports.

“As first reported by ABC, the men went to the Pley Club brothel, where they drank expensive whiskey and bragged that they worked for President Obama. The men were also serviced by prostitutes at the club. But the night didn’t end there. The men brought women from the Pley Club back to the hotel and also picked up additional escorts from other clubs and venues around town, sources tell ABC News.”

Musician Ted Nugent is set to meet tomorrow with the U.S. Secret Service regarding his controversial remarks about President Obama, USA Today reports.

Nugent defended himself to Glenn Beck: “I don’t threaten, I don’t waste breath threatening. I just conduct myself as a dedicated ‘We the people’ activist because I’ve saluted too many flag-draped coffins to not appreciate where the freedom comes from. The Nugent family is a totally nonviolent, peace and love, rock and roll, working-hard, playing-hard American family.”

Vice President Joe Biden gets the bad lip reading treatment.

[Read more…]

ABC News reports that the Secret Service officials accused of misconduct in Colombia revealed their identities by boasting at a brothel “we work for Obama” and “we’re here to protect him.”

David Frum suggests President Obama could learn a few things from Robert Caro’s books on Lyndon Johnson.

“It’s hard not to detect in these pages an unspoken critique of Barack Obama. Yes, certainly, Obama shares Lyndon Johnson’s gift for driving opponents crazy, if it is a gift. But the use of power Caro so vividly describes is not something that comes naturally to our current president. The constant searching for opportunities; the shameless love-bombing of opponents; the endless wooing of supporters; the deft deployment of inducements and threats — these are the low arts that led to Johnson’s high success. You can see why a high-minded leader like Barack Obama would recoil from the Johnson style and embrace Kennedyesque rhetorical grandeur instead. Such presidents contribute great phrases to quotation books, but they tend not to add lasting laws to the statute books — or enduring change to the history books.”

A New York Times review of campaign donations and White House access logs shows that those who donated the most to Barack Obama and the Democratic Party since he started running for president were far more likely to visit the White House than others.

“Among donors who gave $30,000 or less, about 20 percent visited the White House, according to a New York Times analysis that matched names in the visitor logs with donor records. But among those who donated $100,000 or more, the figure rises to about 75 percent. Approximately two-thirds of the president’s top fund-raisers in the 2008 campaign visited the White House at least once, some of them numerous times.”

The rapidly unfolding prostitution scandal involving as many as a dozen Secret Service agents has upstaged President Obama’s trip to Columbia, where he is discussing trade and the economy with 32 other heads of state, the Washington Post reports.

“Though the agency has said Obama’s security was not compromised, the allegations of misconduct have brought intense scrutiny to an agency that had not had any major lapse since 2009, when two party crashers entered the White House uninvited. But the incident continued to grow Saturday when the Defense Department announced that five military personnel, who also are staying at the Hotel Caribe, violated curfew Wednesday night and have been confined to their rooms.”

New York Times: “Much remained murky, including the precise number of agents under scrutiny and the timeline, and officials emphasized that the investigation was still in its early stages.”