White House Opens New Front in Media War, Launches Attack on AP

The concerted effort by the White House to cower and intimidate the media has moved from their deranged daily attacks on Fox News and today they launched a new attack on the Associated Press for exposing their fraudulent job numbers. Welcome to the Enemies List, AP.

The Obama administration on Thursday slammed a report from The Associated Press alleging the government had overstated by thousands the number of jobs it has created or saved with federal contracts under President Obama's $787 billion recovery program.

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.

Within minutes of the publication of AP's story, the White House released a statement at 12:15 a.m. Thursday that it said was the "real facts" about how jobs were counted in the stimulus data distributed two weeks ago.

If only they reacted so swiftly to developments in other wars, such as in Afghanistan. They seem to care more about their own political image than they do about our military.

Now while they claim these job numbers are being corrected, their own web site still has what they claim is the wrong information.

Oops.

As of early Thursday, on its recovery.org Web site, the government was still citing 30,383 as the actual number of jobs linked so far to stimulus spending, despite the mistakes the White House has now acknowledged and said were being corrected.

A Colorado company said it created 4,231 jobs with the help of 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 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.