The Washington Post asks readers to rank eight issues they want the new Congress to address:

Notice anything missing? Like, say “jobs” or “the economy”? Four of the eight options are geared towards deficit reduction -- and there's nothing about jobs, at a time of historic levels of sustained unemployment. Amazing.

Unsurprisingly, real polls, conducted by people who aren't as spectacularly out of touch as the Washington Post, find that far more people identify unemployment as the most important issue facing the nation than deficits. In a Bloomberg poll conducted last month, for example, 50 percent of respondents said “unemployment and jobs” is the most important issue -- twice as many as those who said “federal deficit and spending.” So, to the American people, unemployment is the top priority, by a huge margin. To the Washington Post, it doesn't crack the top eight.

UPDATE: After this post, and a flood of critical comments on its web page, the Washington Post has now added “job creation” to its poll -- but doesn't indicate that it was added long after the poll went online, so people viewing the results won't know that the poll is rigged against that choice. Heck of a job, WaPo!