In Photoshop, how do I set the size of the frame I want to crop so they are all 350×315. I’m editing multiple 5+ meg files of headshots and can’t remember how to do it.
Have PS5 for pc and PS6 for mac, if that matters.
Archives for 2014
McDonnell Guilty
I'm getting physically aroused. RT @JamilSmith "The McDonnell family is sobbing in the courtroom."
— John Cole (@Johngcole) September 4, 2014
From the WaPo live blog:
Robert McDonnell has been found guilty of 11 corruption counts. He has been found not guilty of falsifying loan documents.
Maureen McDonnell has been found guilty of 8 corruption counts as well as obstruction of justice. She has also been found not guilty of falsifying loan documents.
The McDonnell family is sobbing in the courtroom.
Updates as they happen.
Never has a blog tag been more appropriate, and it has been here for years.
*** Update ***
Count by count verdict
Here’s the verdict, count by count, in the Robert and Maureen McDonnell corruption trial:
Count 1: Conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud
Maureen G. McDonnell: Guilty
Robert F. McDonnell: Guilty
Count 2: Honest services wire fraud: $15,000 wedding check
Maureen G. McDonnell: Guilty
Robert F. McDonnell: Guilty
Count 3: Honest services wire fraud: MoBo $50,000
Maureen G. McDonnell: Guilty
Robert F. McDonnell: Guilty
Count 4: Honest services wire fraud: MoBo $20,000
Maureen G. McDonnell: Not guilty
Robert F. McDonnell: Guilty
Count 5: Conspiracy to obtain property under color of official right
Maureen G. McDonnell: Guilty
Robert F. McDonnell: Guilty
Count 6: Obtaining property under color of official right: $50,000 in 2011 to MGM
Maureen G. McDonnell: Guilty
Robert F. McDonnell: Guilty
Count 7: Obtaining property under color of official right: $15,000 wedding check
Maureen G. McDonnell: Guilty
Robert F. McDonnell: Guilty
Count 8: Obtaining property under color of official right: $2,380 Kinloch 5/29/2011
Maureen G. McDonnell: Guilty
Robert F. McDonnell: Guilty
Count 9: Obtaining property under color of official right: $1,424 Kinloch 1/7/2012
Maureen G. McDonnell: Not guilty
Robert F. McDonnell: Guilty
Count 10: Obtaining property under color of official right: $50,000 MoBo
Maureen G. McDonnell: Guilty
Robert F. McDonnell: Guilty
Count 11: Obtaining property under color of official right: $20,000 MoBo
Maureen G. McDonnell: Not guilty
Robert F. McDonnell: Guilty
Count 12: False statement to Townebank on 10/03/2012
Maureen G. McDonnell: N/A
Robert F. McDonnell: Guilty
Count 13: False statement to PenFed on 02/01/2013
Maureen G. McDonnell: Not guilty
Robert F. McDonnell: Not guilty
Count 14: Obstruction of an official proceeding
Maureen G. McDonnell: Guilty
Robert F. McDonnell: N/A
As Lanny Frattare would say: “and there was no doubt about it.”
*** Update ***
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), who took over the office previously held by Robert F. McDonnell (R) in January, released a statement a short time after the verdict was announced.
“I am deeply saddened by the events of the trial that ended in today’s verdict, and the impact it has had on our Commonwealth’s reputation for honesty and clean government,” McAuliffe said. “Dorothy and I will continue to pray for the McDonnell family and for everyone who was affected by this trial.”
It was just a press release, because even Terry knows it would be inappropriate to be caught on camera chugging champagne and grinning from ear to ear.
Politicking While Black
The new sin/crime:
On Sunday the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist and television host, mentioned that voter turnout in Ferguson, Mo., was a mere 12 percent in the last election, and pledged to help boost that number with a registration drive. Twelve percent, he said, was “an insult to your children.” He wasn’t the first to think of channeling the anger over Mike Brown’s death in this particular direction. Twitter users on Saturday noted voter registration tables in front of the makeshift memorial where the unarmed teenager was shot by a police officer.
Encouraging more participation in the democratic process in a community that feels alienated from political power — hence the demonstrations — seems like an obviously good idea; and one that’s particularly compelling because it’s so simple. Voting is an alternative to protesting in the streets.
And yet, the executive director of the Missouri Republican Party, Matt Wills, denounced the plan.
Mr. Wills told the right-wing website Breitbart: “If that’s not fanning the political flames, I don’t know what is. I think it’s not only disgusting but completely inappropriate.”
On another right-wing site, Red State, Dan McLaughlin also argued that there was something indecent about the registration drive. Ferguson presents an opportunity for “Right and Left” to find “common ground,” he wrote. But “the minute you turn your energies into just another effort to register Democratic voters and fire up the Democratic base in advance of an election,” he argued, “the harder you make it to keep the common ground from vanishing in the fog.”
Then, the other day, this:
The stars of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays movement took the stage on Labor Day at Charlotte’s Marshall Park to condemn the state’s record on voter suppression and racial profiling, and urge the community to organize and turn out at the polls this November. Just a few hundred feet away, police cuffed and arrested local LGBT activist and former State Senate candidate Ty Turner as he was putting voting rights information on parked cars.
“They said they would charge me for distributing literature,” Turner told ThinkProgress when he was released a few hours later. “I asked [the policeman] for the ordinance number [being violated], because they can’t put handcuffs on you if they cannot tell you why they’re detaining you. I said, ‘Show me where it’s illegal to do this.’ But he would not do it. The officer got mad and grabbed me. Then he told me that I was resisting arrest!”
Thinkprogress had an update this afternoon:
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department held a press conference about the incident Wednesday. They said they believe their officers behaved appropriately, and Deputy Police Chief Kerr Putney told reporters that officers routinely take a person away from the scene of a disturbance to “ease the tension,” and said the arrest was “sparked primarily by Turner’s non-compliance.” Mecklenburg County Commissioner Pat Cotham and several other supporters of Turner say they will continue to call for a full investigation.
Of course he behaved appropriately!
Look, here is how it works with bad cops and shitty police departments. They approach a person who is doing nothing wrong and mess with them. The person says “WTF are you doing?” The bad cops then arrest them for non-compliance or resisting arrest or some other bullshit. If they are lucky (translation: white or in public with lots of witnesses), they get taken to jail and get screwed with a while and released. If they are unlucky (translation: black or there is no one around with a camera), they get beaten, sometimes to death, and then taken to jail or the morgue.
In either case, the resisting or bullshit non-compliance charge is dropped 99% of the time (75% of statistics on the internet are made up) because there is no underlying charge. Regardless, the chief and FOP will stand behind the cop.
Freedom smells like tear gas and feels like plastic handcuffs in America. Especially if you are a person of color or “foreign” looking- and it doesn’t matter your station in life.
*** Update ***
According to the NY Post, only 6.2% of resisting arrest charges in NYC are prosecuted. So I was wrong- it’s not 99%, it’s 93.8%. My bad.
Grossly Negligent and Reckless
A judge put the hammer to BP:
A federal judge ruled on Thursday that BP was grossly negligent in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil well blowout that killed 11 workers, spilled millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and soiled hundreds of miles of beaches.
“BP’s conduct was reckless,” United States District Court Judge Carl J. Barbier wrote in his sternly worded decision. Judge Barbier also ruled that Transocean, the owner of the rig, and Halliburton, the service company that cemented the well, were negligent in the accident.
But the judge put most of the blame on BP, opening the way to fines of up to $18 billion under the Clean Water Act.
In a 153-page, densely technical decision, Judge Barbier described how BP repeatedly ignored mounting warning signs that the well was unstable, making decisions that he says were “primarily driven by a desire to save time and money, rather than ensuring that the well was secure.”
Judge Barbier painstakingly re-created the hurried effort to temporarily shut in a problematic well, deemed by some to be “the well from hell,” and shows how a series of problems, many of which were suspected by the rig’s crew, led to the blowout. Even after noting these anomalies, BP crew members ignored test results that should have reinforced caution, and, if heeded, could have prevented the disaster even in its final minutes, he wrote.
BP has long acknowledged responsibility for the accident, but has said that it should be fully shared with the companies that operated the Deepwater Horizon rig and improperly sealed the well with cement.
While acknowledging that there was blame to share, Judge Barbier in most cases says the fault finally lies with BP, either because it was responsible for the most fundamental problems or because contractual relationships made clear that BP was fundamentally responsible.
Ultimately, according to the judge, the company that owned the lease to the well and was responsible for overseeing all of the drilling work displayed gross negligence, which in legal terms means that it was responsible for willful misconduct. Judge Barbier apportioned 67 percent of the blame for the spill on BP, 30 percent on Transocean and 3 percent on Halliburton.
Is $18 billion enough of a punishment?
Fundamental divergence; oddity or realignment
There have been two interesting news stories on elections in the past week as well as an interesting inside baseball geek out concerning how to model and predict Senate elections that could be either interesting outliers, or harbingers of change.
The two interesting stories are the Democratic Parties of Kansas and Alaska happily seeing their preferred candidates for Senate and Governor respectively drop out of the race. There were no mysterious revelations of hookers, blow, green balloons, or toe tapping in the restroom. There were no plane crashes, there were no children of the candiddates being diagnosed with cancer.
Instead, the candidates dropped out in Kansas and formed a fusion/unity ticket to allow independent candidates who are polling well to be the primary opposition to Republican incumbents in deep red states. The basic thrust is that Senator Roberts and Governor Parnell are reasonably unpopular with the general electorate but could very easily cobble together a coalition of 43% of the voters. 43% is usually more than enough to win a plurality in a three way race, while 43% is a big loss in a two way race. The bet is that the independent candidates have a much higher probability of putting together a plurality or even better a clear majority coalition against the incumbent.
The basis of the bet is that both independents are former Republicans who look at the deep-red strains of the Republican Party and think they are sufficiently bat-shit insane that it was worth running against Republican incumbents. In Kansas, this has been a long tradition where the electorate has been split into nearly even chunks of Teabaggers/extreme conservatives, moderate Republicans and then a wide array of Democrats of various flavors. Democrats could win state wide office with good candidates who could pick up a good chunk of the moderate Republicans who were momentarily disgusted at the Teabaggers. It is a long and successful strategy. Democratic success in Alaska in the past generation has either counted on a felony conviction (later overturned) or a split Republican Party for any state wide wins.
If Democrats can successfully engage in a strategy of being the party of the sane and continue to pick up former Republicans (such as John Cole) without losing significant elements of the current Democratic base, is that the start of a realignment?
The other big, and geeky debate that I’ve been paying attention to has been the poll aggregating and prediction site differentials.
Fundamental divergence; oddity or realignmentPost + Comments (32)
Open thread
Been too long since we had one. Enjoy a classic Max. He looks like that now except a little larger, less idealistic, fewer balls and he is probably chewing on a bigger piece of grass.
Chat about whatever.
Not exactly breaking news, but good call firing McChrystal
The other day I heard an old TED talk by Stanley McChrystal, the general famously let go in 2010 after his immediate retinue showed an astonishing contempt for the army’s civilian leadership in front of a Rolling Stone reporter. I get all kinds of talks from TED, some enlightening and some less so, but this one kind of floored me. He has basically one message, repeated slowly and with emphasis: great leaders forgive people who screw up and certainly don’t fire them. That may seem a smidge rich considering, well, you know. But! Lest he come across as an unrepentant insubordinate venting his grievances in public like a divorced drunk would to his bartender, McChrystal takes care to not mention the words “Obama” or “poopy mcstinkpants” even once. So who knows what inspired this particular diatribe. Could be anything!
To illustrate McChrystal reminisces about a time he got smoked in a simulated engagement designed specifically to trip up young officers. In other words he failed the Kobayashi Maru test, exactly as intended, and to his eternal amazement his commanding officer did not have him hanged. This further reinforces that he could not possibly be talking about you-know-who, because comparing a training exercise to gross insubordination by the staff of a commanding general in a real conflict would be incredibly stupid.
In all honesty I love TED at least as often as I roll my eyes, but the decision to build an hour-long episode around this kind of baffles me.
Not exactly breaking news, but good call firing McChrystalPost + Comments (23)