Political Issues Examiner: Fake Sarah Palin Photo and Needless Mischief.
It’s amazing what some people will do with Photoshop. These are fairly sophisticated Photoshops. The creator definitely spent time matching skin tones and matching pixels on the neck line. Seems more than just a joke to me.
The above article goes into detail about the origination of both photos, but I thought I should put the pictures up for all to see:
There’s much more to the below post, go give it a read. At least in the next 4 to 10 years, we will finally be able to say the Credit Crisis is over. (/Sarcasm off)
We’re entering that exciting phase of any financial crisis when the lawsuits come fast and furious, criminal charges are lodged, and Wall Street firms agree to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for having snookered their customers once again.
In recent weeks, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, UBS and Wachovia have reached settlements with state regulators under which they agreed to pay more than $500 million in fines and penalties. They have also agreed to buy back more than $50 billion in so-called auction-rate securities from retail investors who had been misled into believing that those securities were as safe as shares in money-market funds.
Steven Pearlstein - A Con Game In Pinstripes - washingtonpost.com.
I particularly liked the following paragraph.
What is so telling about these stories — and, rest assured, there will be many more before we’re finished — is that they come only a few years after these same companies reached similar settlements for defrauding many of the same investors during the telecom and dot-com boom. While the fraud back then had more to do with bogus research and accounting and manipulation of initial public offerings, it is clear that they sprang from the same slimy ethical culture that has produced the current credit crisis. Wall Street has become a fundamentally corrupt enterprise in which the motto is: “We’ll do anything for a fee.”
In a way I sympathize with the investors, fraud is fraud. However, when you invest in instruments that you ken nae unnerstan, you bear the risk of the instruments losing money.
I just finished watching McCain’s speech. It was decent; not bad not great. Definitely softer hitting than Palin’s rouser.
There was one line from the speech that I particularly enjoyed which I’ll paraphrase: “. . . when I’m President, I will veto any pork barrel spending bill that comes to my desk. . . ” Sorry for the paraphrase, but when I tried to find the actual transcript, the word veto does not exist in either NPR’s transcript or Instapundit’s transcript. NPR’s page links to an audio file, I remember it being in the first 5 or so minutes of his speech. Maybe McCain actually, you know, read the crowd?
While the classical liberal in me loves the phrase for its content, I think it was about the only part of McCain’s speech where his delivery matched the crowd. The crowd’s spontaneous and charged chants of “U.S.A., U.S.A.” just felt mismatched when compared to McCain’s more or less subdued delivery. When McCain delivered the above line, he sounded and appeared charismatic, energetic, and inspired. Unfortunately for McCain, he then dropped back into his regular pattern. Can you tell there was something he did beyond the plain words that perked my ears? In this swing voter’s non important opinion (I live in Tex., my vote only counts for things other than President) I think McCain’s speech started on a high point and trailed off.
On another note, his speech did not reek of the usual pandering to fundies that I had gotten used to from these conventions. However, I’m still young enough that my only points of comparison are GW, Gore, and Kerry.
It’s going to be an interesting two and a half months. Come on Barry and John; give us more ammo for some editorial cartoons!
This is hilarious! For something so innocent and cute, the producers sure cut away mighty fast.