I have a feeling that we’re going to need a whole lot of calm, peaceful pictures this week, so let’s start with this exquisitely ethereal view of the Blue Ridge Mountains in springtime. Ommm…

A few days ago a team of researchers published a paper about Harvard’s admission policies. In particular, they looked at affirmative action for four different categories of freshman admits: athletes, legacies, “dean’s interest,” and children of faculty. These are referred to as ALDC admits.

The question at hand is how many applicants who were otherwise unqualified were admitted because of their ALDC status. This is usually shown as a percentage or a distribution, but I think it’s useful to show it as a raw number too. For those who want to follow along, here’s an example for white applicants taken from Table 10 of the paper:

• Total ALDC admits: 2,179
• Percent who were otherwise qualified: 26%
• Number of unqualified applicants who were admitted as ALDC: 1,612

Here are the numbers for all applicants:

It turns out that more than 40 percent of Harvard’s incoming white students from the classes of 2014-19 benefited from their ALDC status compared to about 15 percent for other ethnic groups. As a result, 1,612 otherwise unqualified whites were admitted, triple the number of every other group combined.

Keep this in mind the next time you hear someone complain about affirmative action for black or Hispanic students crowding out better qualified white students. Whatever sort of affirmative action Harvard may have for marginalized groups, the raw numbers come nowhere even close to the preferences they already give to white applicants. And needless to say, there’s no reason to think that Harvard is unique in this regard. This is standard stuff at elite universities across the country. If there’s anyone being screwed by affirmative action, it sure isn’t white kids.

UPDATE: A couple of people have pointed out that I may have left the wrong impression with this post. I didn’t mean to imply that if ALDC preferences were eliminated Harvard would have admitted 1,612 fewer white kids. That’s not the case, and the paper says so. Most of those spots would simply have gone to different, less privileged white kids.

I was just trying to make a narrower point: There are a whole lot of white applicants who benefit from the ALDC preference system, far more than there are minority kids who benefit from affirmative action.

I don’t know if the Harvard data we have would tell us this, but here’s what I’d be interested in: if all the ALDC and racial preferences were removed and replaced with a class-preference system of affirmative action, what would Harvard ‘s entering class look like? It would certainly be less elite, but what would be the racial composition?

To (I assume) no one’s surprise, yet another shoe dropped today in Ukrainegate.

Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani didn’t rule out the possibility that the president threatened to cut off aid to Ukraine over calls for an investigation into largely discredited allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden and his son. Giuliani first said in response to a question on Fox Business Monday that Trump didn’t threaten Ukraine aid, but then added he “can’t say for 100%.”

So here’s where we are:

Phase 1: Nothing happened.

Phase 2: It doesn’t matter what I said.

Phase 3: I may have mentioned Biden.

Phase 4: It’s possible the president threatened to cut off aid to Ukraine.

The goal here is to admit to an impeachable act, but to do it slowly enough that each revelation isn’t quite enough to cause Trump’s supporters to bolt. Then, by the time the whole story is out, they’ve already defended pretty much every detail and have no choice but to stay on his side. And with that, Trump has successfully shot someone on Fifth Avenue and gotten away with it.

And just for laughs, here’s how Fox News is covering Ukrainegate this morning. This is their entire coverage with nothing left out, screencapped for posterity:

Ron Sachs/CNP via ZUMA

We are entering the inevitable end stage of Ukrainegate:

President Trump acknowledged on Sunday that he discussed former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. with Ukraine’s president….While Mr. Trump defended his July phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine as perfectly appropriate, he confirmed that Mr. Biden came up during the discussion.

I had an, um, spirited discussion about political matters with a friend this morning, and among other things he disagreed with my considered assessment that Ukrainegate, if true, represented “Nixonian levels of corruption.” In fact, he saw nothing wrong with it at all. It was just ordinary politics and he figured that presidents ask foreign leaders for favors like this all the time. Oh, and why did Joe Biden want to get rid of that prosecutor, anyway?

What’s more, he said, this wasn’t nearly as bad as all the stuff Hillary did. Nor was it as bad as Obama promising “more flexibility” to the Russians on a hot mic. It was just more Democratic witch huntery, like Mueller all over again, who proved that Trump was innocent of obstruction of justice because you can only obstruct criminal investigations, not counterintelligence inquiries.

I wasn’t even really mad about all this. Just depressed. This is what a big chunk of ordinary conservativedom thinks, and nothing is going to change it.

It’s pretty clear at this point that Trump realizes the truth of what happened is likely to come out. So he’s doing what he usually does: preemptively declaring that there’s nothing wrong with it and getting the entire conservative machine to publicly agree with him. I don’t know if it will work, but if Trump did what we all think he did, then he has to be impeached. It doesn’t matter if it’s politically helpful or not. It doesn’t matter if the Senate is likely to convict. It has to be done, and Republicans have to be put on the record as either approving or disapproving of his conduct.

The normally calm Dan Balz is becoming shrill:

America’s democratic system, the world’s oldest, is said to be resilient, with institutions strong enough to defend against runaway actors and with checks and balances designed to prevent too much power from building up in any one place or with any one person. Earlier in Trump’s presidency, that appeared to be the case. Right now, however, that is in question.

….Three years into his presidency, Trump has helped to reveal the weaknesses of the system. In the executive branch, and especially in the White House, there are few if any officials willing to challenge and check the president. To the extent that administration officials could do that, those who tried are gone. He has also demonstrated the degree to which Congress is dependent on a president who operates with some respect for the norms of the system created by the Founding Fathers.

I understand that Balz probably wants to appear nonpartisan here, but this is simply wrong. What allows Trump to get away with this behavior is neither a supine executive branch nor a Congress that’s overwhelmed by the blinding light of Trump’s audacity. It is one thing, and one thing only: a Republican Party that has literally decided to allow Trump to do anything he wants as long as he keeps sending them plenty of conservative judges to confirm. That’s it. None of this could have happened if the Republican Party had even a few dozen members willing to do the right thing and rein him in.

But it doesn’t. Even now, when Trump has been credibly accused of pressuring a foreign country to smear a political opponent, Republicans are either defending Trump or remaining silent. No one is demanding that the whistleblower complaint be turned over to Congress. No one is demanding to see a transcript of the damning phone call. No one is willing to do anything.

That’s why the resilience of American democracy is now in question.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Nancy Pelosi is getting a lot of grief over this:

is whistleblower/Ukraine situation changing Pelosi’s view on potential Trump impeachment?

adviser tells me: “no. see any GOP votes for it?”

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) September 21, 2019

Obviously this is just the latest episode in the longrunning “Why won’t Nancy Pelosi impeach Trump?” melodrama currently playing out among Democratic activists. But while it’s at least arguable that Trump should be impeached for his sundry depredations of both law and ethics up to now, it’s not arguable that he should be impeached over Ukrainegate. So far, here’s all we know:

• A whistleblower filed a complaint against someone, which the inspector general considers “urgent” and “credible.”
• Various blind news reports say the complaint is about Trump and possibly involves a promise made to Ukraine if they’d open an investigation into Joe Biden’s son.

I’m sure I don’t have to point out that this isn’t even close to impeachable, do I? It could become impeachable at any second if a transcript of the Trump-Ukraine phone call leaks, but that hasn’t happened yet.

If that does happen, and if the transcript is as bad as we think it is, then I’ll join the chorus demanding impeachment hearings and forcing Republicans to either join in or defend Trump’s corruption. But not until then.

A 577-unit market-rate development planned for the Crenshaw district in Los Angeles.Los Angeles Department of City Planning

Gentrification has been a flash point in race relations for some time now. In Los Angeles it’s an endless battle, with activists fighting to keep everything from skid row to historically black neighborhoods out of the hands of the rich. One councilmember not only wants to reject a housing proposal proposed for an empty lot in his district, he wants to establish “anti-displacement zones”—which probably means rent control—around all upscale housing developments.

It’s a difficult issue because it’s so easy to see both sides. On the one hand, longtime residents really do get pushed out as rents go up and affluent white folks move in. It seems obviously unfair to toss that onto the bonfire of all the other abuses and inequities that blacks and Hispanics already suffer. On the other hand, can we really say that low-income areas should stay low-income areas forever and never be improved? That hardly seems like a great answer either.

I don’t have anything new to offer on this front except to recommend this story from the Washington Post. It focuses on one particular area of grievance, but it does a good job of laying it out from multiple points of view and without trying to put all the blame on one side or one thing. In a small way, you will probably understand the issue a little better if you read it, and that’s something I so rarely get to say these days.

The Black Keys perform live during the 2014 Turn Blue tour at the United Center in Chicago.Daniel DeSlover/ZUMA

Last night the Black Keys performed at the Wiltern Theater in LA and there was a problem: fans who bought tickets from third-party vendors like StubHub were turned away. There was massive pointing of fingers over this, with TicketMaster saying everyone knew the tickets were nontransferable while the third-party guys said TicketMaster changed the rules 40 minutes before showtime. It was a mess. But being the pedantic nerd that I am, this is what jumped out at me:

Hundreds of fans who purchased tickets from usually reliable third-party vendors, such as StubHub, SeatGeek and Vivid Seats, had the same experience….A representative for the band and Ticketmaster said everyone who purchased a ticket through Ticketmaster or the band’s fan page got in. The concert was well-attended, with 97% of the 1,850-seat venue full.

So according to TicketMaster, there were only 55 empty seats. But according to the Times, “hundreds” of fans were turned away. This doesn’t add up unless duplicate tickets were sold, but the story doesn’t suggest that anything like this happened. It was all just a big communications cockup.

Maybe so. But this is one pedantic nerd who’d be curious to do a deeper dive into this to find out what really happened. The third-party vendors are all refunding the ticket prices to their customers, so it’s hard to see what motivation they would have had to cheat in the first place. Maybe something else was going on?

CORRECTION: Black Keys, not Black Flag. Black Keys, not Black Flag…

Cheriss May/NurPhoto via ZUMA Press

The Wall Street Journal reports today that President Trump asked the Ukrainian president “about eight times” in a single phone call to investigate Joe Biden’s son. This was obviously something Trump was pretty obsessed with. However, the Journal report also says this:

Mr. Trump didn’t mention a provision of foreign aid to Ukraine on the call, said this person, who didn’t believe Mr. Trump offered the Ukrainian president any quid-pro-quo for his cooperation on any investigation.

I’m pointing this out because yesterday’s reporting on the whistleblower complaint said the whistleblower was concerned about an alarming “promise” Trump made. This contradicts that reporting.

It’s possible that there are multiple phone calls involved here, or that some of the sources for the past week’s revelations don’t have the full story. Still, there’s a contradiction here.

Here is Hopper the mighty hunter stalking her prey in the suburban lawns of Orange County. Soon an invisible bug will be no more.