The Associated Press’ questioning of the actual number of stimulus jobs created is obviously all about hatred for a black man.

A Colorado company said it created 4,231 jobs with the help of President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan. The real number: fewer than 1,000.

A child care center in Florida said it saved 129 jobs with the help of stimulus money. Instead, it gave pay raises to its existing employees.

Elsewhere in the U.S., some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two, three, four or even more times.

The government has overstated by thousands the number of jobs it has created or saved with federal contracts under the president’s $787 billion recovery program, according to an Associated Press review of data released in the program’s first progress report.

Hey, I’m typing right now. That means I’ve created jobs for me and my ten fingers. That’s eleven jobs, you unhinged winger nutjobs. See? Pulling stuff out of your ass and calling it math can be fun!

The discrepancy raises questions about the reliability of a key benchmark the administration uses to gauge the success of the stimulus. The errors could be magnified Friday when a much larger round of reports is released. It is expected to show hundreds of thousands of jobs repairing public housing, building schools, repaving highways and keeping teachers on local payrolls.

If it doesn’t meet the projections it’s because President Bush originally ordered the paper that the reports were printed on. Right after he invented AIDS.

The White House seized on an initial report from a government oversight board weeks ago that claimed federal contracts awarded to businesses under the recovery plan already had helped pay for more than 30,000 jobs. The administration said the number was evidence that the stimulus program had exceeded early expectations toward reaching the president’s promise of creating or saving 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year.

But the 30,000 figure is overstated by thousands — at the very least by nearly 5,000, or one in six, based on AP’s limited review of some of the contracts — because some federal agencies and recipients of the money provided incorrect job counts. The review found some counts were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of jobs; some jobs were credited to stimulus spending when, in fact, none were produced.

This is the first day’s lesson in Introduction To Federal Efficiency at The University of Sanity: The government takes the taxpayers’ money, pisses it into the wind and has a hard time accounting for it after it blows all over the place.

When the government can actually follow the money, it’s usually not a pretty sight.

Try to explain all of this to your lefty friends in the coming weeks every time they repeat the meme that a robust, government-run option in health care reform will introduce efficiency and savings, as the president claims. Efficiency and any resulting lower costs are anathema to the federal beast once it gets its inherently greedy hands on your money.

There’s no evidence the White House sought to inflate job numbers in the report, but the administration embraced the flawed figures the moment they were released.

Of course they did. Vetting and cross-checking are things to be done only on the off chance that someone in the press notices that they’re just flailing about here. While it’s unusual for AP to be reporting this, the “saved or created” mantra will still be repeated by the majority of the MSM.

Because math is hard.

As is actual journalism.

So they’ll simply continue to write love letters for a while.