Just imagine the reaction of the liberal media if a video had surfaced of a George W. Bush administration official admitting that “lack of transparency” was “a huge political advantage” in selling the Iraq war and that they relied on the “stupidity of the American voter” to launch an attack on Iraq? That video would be everywhere. However, the clip of ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber using those exact phrases in talking about the passage of the Affordable Care Act has yet to be reported on ABC or NBC’s evening or morning shows.

On Saturday, Erika Rawes at USA Today's Wall Street Cheat Sheet engaged in some impressive gymnastics as she discussed the middle class and identified seven things its members "can't afford anymore" (the headline) or that "a larger percentage of people have trouble paying for" (the content).

It's a sloppy list. One of the items — debt — isn't a "thing" at all, but rather the result of buying too many "things" without paying for them. Rawes also managed to avoid citing any government policies or practices which might be contributing to the problem. It's not like there's a shortage of items in the past 6-1/2 years (since the recession as normal people define it began), or the past dozen (if you want to go back to where the housing bubble began to inflate in earnest), or even the past 25 (if you want to talk about roughly when the mad rush to have things made in Communist China began). One of the six legitimate "things" on the list is of far more recent origin (HT Political Outcast; bolds are mine):

Sandwiched in between two domestic terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists in Canada during the past three days, USA Today ran a Tuesday op-ed which appeared in Wednesday's print edition by Mary Zeiss Stange called "Beware the Christian Extremists."

With all due respect, ma'am, we've got bigger worries. But in Ms. Stange's world, Christian "religious extremism taken to potentially lethal ends" is really the "primary threat to homeland security." She castigates the news media, which in her view "have been remarkably slow when it comes to zeroing in on the pervasive reality of hate-based Christian extremism," because "It is easier, after all, to blame the un-American other."

CBS, USA Today, and the Associated Press all sang from the same sheet of music on Saturday, as they covered the end of the Catholic bishops' Extraordinary Synod on the Family. On CBS Evening News, Jim Axelrod played up a supposed "deep split over the direction Pope Francis wants to take the Church," after the Church's leaders rejected controversial language about homosexuals and divorced Catholics in an earlier draft report. Axelrod also underlined that the bishops "considered language in [the] document...that would welcome gays."

USA Today, gave the equivalent of almost a full page to Eric Holder's resignation in Friday's print edition.

The paper's primary story by Gregory Korte, at the top right of the front page, described him as having "championed gay, civil, voting rights." The item's continuation on Page 8A included a quote from Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, which calls itself "America's largest civil rights organization working to achieve lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality." Griffin called Hold "our Robert Kennedy." How odd, given that Michael Lind's 2000 book on RFK described him as "prudish and homophobic." That's what happens when you grow up learning airbrushed history, Chad. The paper's second story went into puffery by describing how "Holder Took Work as AG Personally." Excerpts from each follow the jump.