Here’s this morning’s briefing of all the news you should be paying attention to.

1. Associated Press Gets Ben Bernanke’s Statement Wrong: The AP says Fed chief Bernanke thinks Obama’s stimulus package would “lift economy.” That’s not what Bernanke thinks.

2. Barack Obama Re-Interprets TARP: TARP was intended to buy up troubled assets and help deal with the liquidity crisis. Obama wants to turn it into a welfare program.

3. Joe Biden Says Obama Embracing Bush Plan in Iraq: Maybe he misspoke, but Joe Biden makes it clear the new administration will steer the same course as the outgoing guys in Iraq.

4. Barack Obama Cooks the Books: Obama is intentionally painting a doomsday scenario — either to pave the way for huge tax increases, or to make himself look like a miracle worker even if things get much worse from here on out.

5. Democrats Reintroduce SCHIP: Their plan is a budget buster that will raise taxes and expand the program beyond taking care of kids.

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1. Associated Press Gets Ben Bernanke’s Statement Wrong

The AP says Fed chief Bernanke thinks Obama’s stimulus package would “lift economy.” That’s not what Bernanke thinks.

The AP, like every other mainstream press organization, is so convinced that you’re stoopid, that they try to get away with blatantly biased statements like this.

You have to read Bernanke’s words to get a clearer picture of what Bernanke is saying here. And what he’s really saying matches closely with what I’ve been telling you here for weeks now:

A fiscal stimulus is fine as far as it goes. It will certainly pump up reported GDP statistics for a while, but it doesn’t fix the real issues. We still have major problems in the financial system that must be solved before any kind of sustained economic recovery can take place.

2. Barack Obama Re-Interprets TARP

TARP was intended to buy up troubled assets and help deal with the liquidity crisis. Obama wants to turn it into a welfare program.

In a letter to Congress, Obama adviser Larry Summers said that Obama wants to be handing TARP money out to community banks, small businesses, consumers unable to borrow money, and people in danger of being foreclosed on their mortgages.

In short, these people are looking at the TARP as a big welfare program. That’s not what it was supposed to be.

The TARP was a break-glass-in-case-of-fire program, originally conceived as a last-ditch response to an extreme emergency. That emergency materialized in mid-September as the institutional money markets crumbled in the wake of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.

3. Joe Biden Says Obama Embracing Bush Plan in Iraq

Maybe he misspoke, but Joe Biden makes it clear the new administration will steer the same course as the outgoing guys in Iraq.

The truth is, though he was nominated in large part for his firm anti-Iraq stances, Obama and his chosen team have been all over the map on the issue, with the only consistency being that, as the primary gave way to the general election, the general election gave way to the transition, and the transition in turn gave way to the inauguration, his position has become farther and farther right, to the point at which, now, his position and apparent policy largely indistinguishable from those of his predecessor.

At an appearance in Baghdad today, Biden said that “the new administration will stick to the timetable in the [U.S-Iraq Status of Forces] agreement.” As AP writer Robert Reid points out, “Obama pledged during his election campaign to withdraw all American combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of taking office” (naturally he misses the fact that Obama actually sponsored legislation that would have removed all troops from Iraq by March of last year). The SOFA, though, provides for combat troops to remain in Iraq until 2012, with the possibility of an even longer stay if the situation on the ground warrants it.

Biden said the incoming president, though still committed to withdrawal, now “wants the withdrawal to be a responsible one,” and that he “does not want to waste the security gains that have been achieved,” according to Iraqi spokesperson Ali al-Dabbagh.

4. Barack Obama Cooks the Books

Obama is intentionally painting a doomsday scenario — either to pave the way for huge tax increases, or to make himself look like a miracle worker even if things get much worse from here on out.

Since Orszag was the Director of the CBO until recently — and since these data are recent enough to take into account all we know about the current downturn — it would not be surprising if Orszag’s projections closely mirrored those of the CBO. In fact, since Orszag is at liberty to project how these numbers will be improved by Obama’s policies (something CBO’s projections cannot do), we would expect that Orszag’s numbers would be better than those of the CBO.

Instead, they are dramatically worse.

While the CBO projects that current policies will yield deficits of roughly 1 percent of GDP by 2019, Orszag anticipates they will be 5 times higher. And that’s after Obama scrubs the federal budget line by line to cut our waste, after he restores economic growth, after he introduces extraordinary new efficiencies to health care, after he restores the solvency of our entitlement programs, and after he fixes the educational system and America’s crumbling infrastructure.

In other words, once Obama has delivered us a better world, the budget will look far, far worse than we think possible today.

Obama is intentionally painting a doomsday scenario here — either to pave the way for huge tax increases, or to make himself look like a miracle worker even if things get much worse from here on out.

5. Democrats Reintroduce SCHIP

Their plan is a budget buster that will raise taxes and expand the program beyond taking care of kids.

To fund this massive expansion of SCHIP (and an expansion of government along with it) Democrats are counting on at least 22 million new smokers to light up.

This isn’t going to happen; which means the Democrats either plan to A) kick children off of health insurance or B) raise taxes on all of us by tens of billions of dollars. Any guess on what direction they will choose? (Hint: it isn’t option A)

While Democrats are proposing a permanent tobacco tax increase of up to 61 cents per pack of cigarettes many of overlooking the “problem” this creates.

The “problem” is that the percentage of Americans who smoke has been dropping for decades. And research and logic both show that raising the prices of cigarettes will lead to less smoking. Less smoking will lead to less taxes being collected. Less taxes being collected will lead to less and less money being collected by Uncle Sam to pay for an expansion of SCHIP.