Count California as the latest victim of the Porkulus Flu, in which job numbers get excruciatingly inflated while the state runs a fever of unemployment.  The Sacramento Bee lances the “saved or created” boil of the Golden State’s stimulus accounting, thanks to a closer look at the claims made by the California State University system, which credited half of its workforce as “saved or created” jobs.  The CSU admitted that these were not real numbers — and inadvertently revealed what everyone already knows about budgeting in Sacramento and Washington DC:

Up to one-fourth of the 110,000 jobs reported as saved by federal stimulus money in California probably never were in danger, a Bee review has found.

California State University officials reported late last week that they saved more jobs with stimulus money than the number of jobs saved in Texas – and in 44 other states.

In a required state report to the federal government, the university system said the $268.5 million it received in stimulus funding through October allowed it to retain 26,156 employees.

That total represents more than half of CSU’s statewide work force. However, university officials confirmed Thursday that half their workers were not going to be laid off without the stimulus dollars.

“This is not really a real number of people,” CSU spokeswoman Clara Potes-Fellow said. “It’s like a budget number.”

It’s like a budget number.  In other words, unreal — not connected to reality.  We certainly have seen plenty of unreality in budgeting from California over the last year as they struggled to close a budget gap that was all too real, mainly by making up numbers and using budgetary gimmicks.

That also applies to the Obama administration, especially on Porkulus numbers.  All of them have been disconnected from reality, using silly formulas to claim credit for jobs that were never at risk in the first place.  Some of the jobs claimed as “saved” got raises funded by the federal government, which is the antithesis of a job at risk.  And as unemployment goes into double digits, it adds insult to injury for those increasing number of Americans who have lost their jobs.

Some people got federally-funded raises.  They got pink slips, in record numbers.

Let’s recap the nonsense from “saved or created” accounting by the Obama administration:

• New Hampshire
• Florida and Georgia
• Ohio
• Wisconsin
• New Jersey
• Virginia
• Texas
• Illinois (via WashJeff)

This is nothing short of a threadbare lie, one beginning to be exposed in every state where Obama and his team trots it out.  The national media needs to start holding them accountable for their fantasy bookkeeping — and Congress needs to pull back the funding for Porkulus right now.