Problem displaying formatted date using DATE_FORMAT

I’m using the following to display a list of recent news (“News” category) on the main page:

$news=$wpdb->get_results("SELECT  p.ID, p.post_title, p.post_date
FROM wp_posts p
, wp_term_taxonomy t
, wp_term_relationships r
WHERE p.ID = r.object_id
and r.term_taxonomy_id = t.term_taxonomy_id
and p.post_type = \"post\"
and t.term_id = \"4\"
and p.post_status = \"publish\" ORDER BY ID DESC LIMIT ".$how_many);
foreach($news as $np){
printf ("<li><small>%s: </small><a href=\"http://mikinduri.com/blog/archives/%s\">%s</a></li>", $np->post_date,$np->ID,$np->post_title);
}?>

The result is this:

# 2008-07-03 10:39:01: Vogue Optical Donates Sunglasses
# 2008-05-21 09:01:42: Compost Sale
# 2008-01-21 09:37:27: Mikinduri Foundation back on track
# 2008-01-02 12:17:07: Very Sad News: MCoH Worker Murdered
# 2007-12-07 10:58:55: MCoH on CBC News, The National

I would like to format the date. Prior to upgrading to WP 2.6 I used this in my SELECT statement and it worked:

DATE_FORMAT(p.post_date, ‘%M %D, %Y’)

However, when I use the DATE_FORMAT function now, the above code returns this:

# : Vogue Optical Donates Sunglasses
# : Compost Sale
# : Mikinduri Foundation back on track
# : Very Sad News: MCoH Worker Murdered
# : MCoH on CBC News, The National

Why does the formatted date not get printed?