By John Brummett

Congress told the Obama White House to track that $787 billion in supposed stimulus spending and report to the taxpayers on the good it was doing. So the Obama administration set up this Web site — recovery.gov.

Last week this Web site got down to business, inventing randomly numbered congressional districts among the states and even some of the territories such as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

Then it published tabular data that displayed federal money supposedly spent in these districts and jobs supposedly created or saved within these districts.

Let’s take my little state, Arkansas, as just one example.

We have only four congressional districts. But this Web site said we had 13, numbered randomly from the 00 District to the 79th. The 00 District was reported to have received $68,417 and saved one job. Who that guy was — I couldn’t say.

The national Recovery Board, set up by the administration to execute this transparency and accountability, defended itself by saying, hey, we just report what the people out in the field send us.

So there’s someone working by the appointment of our president to account on how our $787 billion in Chinese-borrowed money got spent. What this guy does is open files on his computer sent in from people out in the country, then regurgitate the information without review.

Somebody reports some expenditure in the 79th Congressional District of Arkansas. This guy working by appointment of the president of the United States to account to the people on the responsible and effective expenditure of our indebted dollars doesn’t instinctively know that Arkansas doesn’t have anywhere near 79 congressional districts.

Here’s a job, then, that should not have been created by the stimulus: that person’s. That goes, too, for the jobs of the yahoos out in the country sending in this nonsense.

We wonder why people worry that the government can’t run health insurance.

This is the second time I’ve been given to wonder something. It’s whether Obamaists tend to become arrogantly incompetent the further you get from the inner circle.

The first time was in August when, reeling from the town halls, the Obamaists activated a supposed grassroots effort through the Democratic National Committee.

This supposed grassroots effort came into Arkansas and accomplished, so far as I can tell, nothing other than heartache for an embattled Democratic U.S. senator, Blanche Lincoln, who faces re-election next year and now provides a swing vote on filibustering health care reform.

Lincoln had made a tactical decision to eschew town hall meetings, knowing she had nothing firm to defend at that point and that in due time she’d be meeting with voters by the droves in her re-election campaign.

So this Obama field unit got her schedule and saw that she was to address a county Democratic dinner. Unbeknownst to her, the Obama outfit put out a false public statement that the event was a health care reform rally.

This caused officials of the facility hosting the event to freak out about the size and tenor of the event, and to pull out. So at the last minute, local Democrats were looking for a new site and Lincoln was getting accused of trying to run and hide from constituents.

Here’s all the report you need on stimulus spending: It did three good things. It provided cash for clunkers to stimulate car business. It provided a big tax credit to stimulate first-time home purchases. It bailed out bankrupt state governments, though California proved too much a mess even for that.

Otherwise, spending for infrastructure and such proceeds with all due government speed, meaning like thick ketchup through an eye-drop bottle.

The only thing the federal government can do fast is put nonsense on the Internet.

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John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of “High Wire,” a book about Bill Clinton’s first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.