President Bush’s approval rating in a new WSJ/Harris poll, down from 40 in February and 43 in January.

New Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke: “The prospective increase in the budget deficit will place at risk future living standards of our country.”

Today, President Bush repeated a highly misleading claim about the Medicare prescription drug program: “Twenty-six million seniors so far have taken a look and said, I think it’s worthwhile to sign up.”

This figure is meant to convince the public that tens of millions of seniors have chosen to enroll in the prescription drug program. But as the Boston Globe reported a month ago, the “actual number of voluntary enrollees is much smaller, about 5 million.” The rest either were automatically enrolled or already had drug coverage from their former company’s health plan.

Ron Pollack of Families USA explained:

For an administration that frequently provides inaccurate information, the use of the 25 million enrollment figure breaks new ground in misleading propaganda. The only real number that is worth focusing on is the approximately 4 million to 5 million who now have prescription drug coverage who did not have it prior to the start of the program. Unfortunately, the administration is trying to mask that failure with an exaggerated number that has nothing to do with new people who gained coverage.

The facts haven’t gotten in the way of the White House spin, however. Below are just some of the times the administration has used the inflated number: Read more

Sen. Feingold said the following to Fox News’ Trish Turner:

I’m amazed at Democrats, cowering with this president’s numbers so low. The administration just has to raise the specter of the war and the Democrats run and hide. … Too many Democrats are going to do the same thing they did in 2000 and 2004. In the face of this, they’ll say we’d better just focus on domestic issues. … [Democrats shouldn't] cower to the argument, that whatever you do, if you question the administration, you’re helping the terrorists.

UPDATE: Sen. Wayne Allard (R-CO) accuses Feingold of “siding with terrorists.”

Iraq edition.

The White House narrative about Iraq, parroted by conservatives everywhere, is that the media has failed to report the “good news.” Bush has faulted the media for ignoring “the quiet, steady” progress in Iraq. Just last week, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently blasted the media for “exaggerating” Iraq’s security problems.

Today, Ralph Peters, an author, wrote an piece for conservative website Real Clear Politics that began “During a recent visit to Baghdad, I saw an enormous failure. On the part of our media.” It was linked enthusiastically by right-wing bloggers.

The American people, however, aren’t buying it. A new CBS poll shows that about 60% of Americans believe that the media is reporting things in Iraq either accurately or better than they really are:

Of course, CBS did the poll, so it’s probably making things out to be worse than they really are.

Percentage of Americans who believe Bush decided to go to war to free the Iraqis or promote democracy, according to a new CBS poll.

Percentage of Americans who believe the Iraq war was worth the costs, according to a new CBS poll.

The Memory Hole has acquired a list of films that were produced or used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Among the films on the list is a 1955 animated version of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” with its “chilling finale in which the farm animals looked back and forth at the tyrannical pigs and the exploitative human farmers but found it ‘impossible to say which was which.’”

[The original] ending was altered in the 1955 animated version, which removed the humans, leaving only the nasty pigs. … The C.I.A., it seems, was worried that the public might be too influenced by Orwell’s pox-on-both-their-houses critique of the capitalist humans and Communist pigs. So after his death in 1950, agents were dispatched (by none other than E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame) to buy the film rights to “Animal Farm” from his widow to make its message more overtly anti-Communist.

Some other notable films in the CIA’s library: Read more