The White House made the crucial endeavor to achieve transparency and accountability of the stimulus funds. Unfortunately, however, the logistics to achieve said transparency and accountability necessarily rely on the use of self-reporting, to an extent. Because of the rapidity of the outlays, the administration seems to have taken the view that the fastest way to determine how stimulus funds impact localities is to have the localities (i.e., cities, districts, businesses, etc.) themselves report the impact of the funds.

However, it is worth noting that these self-reports are estimates. They are initial assessments that will be combed over by other, more formal groups, such Biden's Task Force, as well as by statisticians like Christina Romer and Orsag, who are taking a more detailed look at these reports, and even others. Their formal assessments will lead to more reliable data than these initial self-reports.

Frankly, in the context of assessing self-reports, it should come as no surprise that self-reports have flaws; they often do. That's not an "Obama administration" problem. That's a people problem. But, again, these initial reports aren't the final word on these funds.

That being said, it doesn't surprise me that the media has chosen to focus on the fact that a some of the self-reports are flawed. It's more exciting to say that "50,000 jobs came from spending no money," than it is to talk about the other 600,000 jobs that were saved or created.

Yet, with regard to those "50,000 jobs from spending no money," it's worth noting that job creation can be a collateral benefit of initial stimulus fund outlays. For example, stimulus funds may be used directly for creating or saving a job (e.g., construction foreman), allowing the business owner to hire an additional worker/s (e.g., construction worker). Thus, jobs could be indirectly created by the stimulus, causing some to count them as jobs created for "zero stimulus spending." Initial stimulus spending may also (and likely does) lead to the creation of wholly unrelated jobs. Collateral job creation is not some far-fetched concept. It happens.

BLAM! Maybe they should've loaded money on palettes and landed them on an aircraft carrier under a banner.

The problem now, as evidenced by TPM with this post, is that we're in Phase II of the MSM gotcha game. Phase I is rooted in innumeracy, and Phase II is reporting on the initial "controversy" generated. Reporters may not understanding statistical reporting or data entry, but they know for darn sure that some blowhard issued a nasty press release.

Barack Obama was not personally entering data.

You mean, he has better things to do right now ?

Perhaps, you should read the link below about recipient-reported data:

http://www.recovery.gov/Transparency/RecipientReportedData/Pages/RRData.aspx

I know that people love conspiracy theories (the right seems to have a special affinity for any that concern Obama), but suggesting that there are nefarious reasons behind these stimulus self-reports discrepancies is a stretch, particularly since a more likely explanation is that some people -- recipients of government funds -- likely made errors when they reported the required information. This explanation is reinforced by the data; many of the "phantom districts" are labeled "00" or "99," suggesting that many probably did not know their district and reported "00" or "99" on the forms, or that they left the "district" question blank and the data entry persons coded a non-response as "00" or "99."

Additionally, the notion that someone simply would not know the exact number of their district and report the wrong district is a perfectly reasonable one; people make mistakes. Indeed, information on the link above expressly states, "Recovery.gov has not changed or corrected the reported data." You're looking at raw data, which is being combed for errors as we speak.

Additionally, all this hubbub is over approximately 4% of the funds allocated. In other words, of ALL the funds allocated, 96% of the reports are in order. An error rate of about 4% on data collected via self-report, on such an expansive outlay, is actually quite impressive. I'm sure the retort would be that, "Hey, but 4% is nothing to sneeze at." My reply would be to refer you again to reporting procedures, which note that these are RAW numbers that are being checked for errors as we speak.

Oh, and about the "Obama Record"... Record unemployment occurred during the Great Depression. But, even under Reagan, unemployment was higher than it is today, and Reagan didn't even have to face the potential collapse of our financial system... Those "record deficits" are 37% loss of revenue because of the recession, about 33% because of Bush programs, 20% comes from programs started under Bush and continued by Obama, such as the Iraq & Afghanistan Wars and tax cuts, 7% comes from the supposedly "whopping" stimulus and 3% comes from Obama's so-called "budget-busting" budget... A major legislative accomplishment was the Recovery Act [the much-loathed (by the right wing) Fair Pay and Hate Crimes legislation are others], which has moved our economy, according to nonpartisan economists, from negative GDP growth to positive territory. So, in a matter of months, Obama has help move our economy away from potential collapse, and set it toward a path of potentially robust recovery. That may be a negligible accomplishment to you, but I'll go out on a limb and say that history probably won't be so dismissive of the feat.

It's clear that hyperbole is your friend. But, maybe you spend less time with him, and more time with your enemy: fact.