Putting their stamp on it...

The U.S. Postal Service is an easy target -- and an especially tempting target for proponents of the small-government, free market approach to basic services.

Time and time again, the USPS comes under fire for everything from its predictable billion-dollar deficits, to the ground it's losing to new communications technologies, to the market share it's lost to competitors in the private sector.

It also regularly takes hits for mistakes (like the one above) that serve to make jokes easier to write and eyebrows easier to raise.

According to the New York Times, "The United States Postal Service has issued a new stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty. Only the statue it features is not the one in the harbor, but the replica at the New York-New York casino in Las Vegas."

Time to call in an expert?

"You might think that the post office would have just gone with the original, the one off the tip of Lower Manhattan that for 125 years has welcomed millions of New York’s huddled masses yearning to breathe free," the NYT story goes on to say. "Instead, they accidentally used the 14-year-old statue that presides over thousands of weary gamblers a week. The post office, which had thought the Lady Liberty 'forever' stamp featured the real thing, found out otherwise when a clever stamp collector who is also what one might call a superfan of the Statue of Liberty got suspicious and contacted Linn’s Stamp News, the essential read among philatelists."

So, I wonder how the USPS will rectify this error?

“'We still love the stamp design and would have selected this photograph anyway,' said Roy Betts, a spokesman, in the NYT story. Mr. Betts did say, however, that the post office regrets the error and is 're-examining our processes to prevent this situation from happening in the future.'”

Yes, go with that...