HOW BAD WAS THAT BLOOMBERG HIT PIECE ON THE KOCH BROTHERS? It’s even being savaged by the Washington Post’s Ombudsman. “I think the story lacked context, was tendentious and was unfair in not reporting some of the exculpatory and contextual information Koch provided to Bloomberg. . . . The Kochs are wealthy people with outsize influence; they are fair game for journalists. But journalists should also play the game fairly.”

JOHN TAMNY: President Obama Is Doomed, But Only If the Republicans Figure Out Why.

MURDER? A Dissident’s Mysterious Death in Havana. “Days after a beating by a mob, Laura Pollán fell ill and soon died. She was cremated two hours later.”

WASHINGTON POST: Obama’s efforts to aid homeowners, boost housing market fall far short of goals. “President Obama pledged at the beginning of his term to boost the nation’s crippled housing market and help as many as 9 million homeowners avoid losing their homes to foreclosure. Nearly three years later, it hasn’t worked out.”

INDEED: “The Occupiers have the wrong address. The subprime crisis was designed in Washington, not New York.”

But of course, their whole purpose is to serve as tools to distract people from that fact.

AT AMAZON DIGITAL, the new Kelly Clarkson album for $4.99. She’ll probably sell more this way than any other.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Brendan O’Neill: “[G]reen thinking represents a challenge to the status quo? That’s a laughable idea. From schools and universities to every corner of the Western political sphere, the climate-change outlook is the status quo. It’s the new conservatism, its aim being to conserve nature at the expense of further developing and transforming society.”

SPEAKING TRUTH to power. “”So we get hauled in front of the Congress for developing a product that’s free, that serves a billion people. OK? I mean, I don’t know how to say it any clearer,’ Mr. Schmidt told the Post. ‘It’s not like we raised prices. We could lower prices from free to . . . lower than free? You see what I’m saying?'”

Plus this: “Mr. Schmidt is not going to be confused with Milton Friedman or the libertarian Mr. Rodgers. But it’s a sign of the discontent with Washington that even a mainstream Silicon Valley executive feels he needs to tell it like it is.”

TIM CAVANAUGH: How Can Spending 30 Percent More Be “Austerity?”

A: It can’t, of course.

But in a nearly fact-free 4,000-word thumbsucker in The Nation, deep thinker Ari Berman manages to avoid any mention of how much the Federal government is actually spending. Instead, Berman draws on comments from some of the most discredited retreads in government to make the case that a vaguely defined “austerity class” is in control of the U.S. capital.

If only that were true. Cavanaugh notes, however, that truth has little to do with political-class talking points: ‘Do I expect the anti-austeritists to be persuaded by these facts? I do not. I predict the ‘austerity class’ will become a popular trope, repeated with knowing nods among the 99 Percent.”

THE RED STATE IN YOUR FUTURE. “Voters around the country are concluding it’s better to be red than dead—applying a whole meaning to an old phrase. If you do not currently live in a red state, there’s a good chance you will be in the near future. Either you will flee to a red state or a red state will come to you—because voters fed up with blue-state fiscal irresponsibility will elect candidates who promise to pass red-state policies.”

Well, as Walter Russell Mead keeps noting, the Blue Model seems to have hit its limits.

DIVERSITY PROBLEM: Reverend: OWS protesters ‘are basically white kids.’ “It’s amazing to see that the ‘occupiers’ of Wall Street are basically white kids, and they’re dressed fairly well — there are some out there who are kinda scruffy — but I don’t see the media bringing up the fact that there are no black folks in it.”

THE HILL: Civil rights groups charge Obama with hypocrisy over Alabama immigration law.

THIS MUST BE MORE OF THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” WE WERE PROMISED (CONT’D): Afghanistan would back Pakistan in war with US, claims Hamid Karzai.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Rage On—and on and on…

I’ve been following the Wall Street protests, in New York and elsewhere. I read as well of the Democratic Party’s sorta interest in turning the anger of a few into a left-wing Tea-Party-like movement of many.

Against that background, I’ve also been counting up Barack Obama’s excuses (ATM machines are to blame and so are the tsunami, the EU, George W. Bush, the nine-month-old Republican House, the Arab Spring, the D.C. earthquake, and rising oil prices). He’s also growing his target list of various insults (everyone and everything from Clarence Thomas, Nancy Reagan, and the Special Olympics to fat-cat bankers, corporate jet-owners, millionaires and billionaires, and “the teabag, anti-government people”).

Out of all that chaos, I think there are two constants that explain the Obama frustration and the current outpouring of invective at Wall Street, “them,” the affluent, and our capitalist system in general.

On a wider political level, there is a growing realization that today’s brand of liberalism is really a form of slow societal suicide. We see red states recovering from recession; blue states are still broke. Greece is a mess; so is the entire anti-democratic, statist, and redistributive EU. . . . In sum, there is panic.

Palpably so.