Soon after taking office, President Obama successfully pushed a stimulus plan through Congress in part based on the promise that it would “save or create” 3.5 million jobs.

The nation’s unemployment rate (at 10.2 percent in October) has continued to climb since then, but the Obama administration has repeatedly insisted that the stimulus plan is working. Last month, the government issued a report that showed the plan has saved or created 650,000 jobs, putting it on target to fulfill Obama’s lofty promise.

But news reports about the actual funding have exposed the report as a series of exaggerations and flat-out lies. Many of the “jobs” are nothing of the sort. The claims are so lame that a press corps partial to the president no longer can resist the urge to report the truth.

The stories about stimulus lies across America are so numerous that the Washington Examiner had the brilliant idea of creating an interactive map to track all of the money and the stories behind them. The lies include claims of saving or creating:

• Fifty jobs from purchasing a single lawnmower.
• Nine jobs at a shoe store for $889.60. The money actually was used to buy nine pairs of shoes for the Army Corps of Engineers.
• One job for purchasing $3,500 worth of paint.
• More than 100 jobs in a town police department whose staff totals 23 officers.
• And 4,300 jobs at a tech company that employed 3,000 of those people for only one month.

The Examiner puts the total number of bogus job claims at more than 75,000. Click on the image below to see the map and the complete recap of lies at Examiner.com.

[Cross-posted at Accuracy In Media]