Couldn’t get along without these people

My husband is a patient at Regions Hospital, where he is receiving excellent care. We are fortunate to have this hospital serving our community. All of the doctors and nurses and other health care professionals have been wonderful.

I have been struck by how many of these people came to our country as immigrants or refugees. In the several days my husband has been there he has had nurses and other professionals from Ghana, Afghanistan, Korea, Belarus, Laos, Thailand, and Liberia. They have all been so capable and so caring.

Hospitals and clinics and care centers could not get along without these people who were born in other countries. We need to appreciate them.

Maureen Smith, Roseville

Less than grand

The Republican Party is no longer the Grand Old Party, but something much less. The party seems rudderless since Donald Trump has taken control. Trump and party couldn’t even produce a platform of goals and beliefs going into the 2020 election. The main GOP/Trump concern has been immigration and border control. The message is too often slanderous and racist, such as, “immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country.”

In order to provide military support for Ukraine in their war against Russia, the GOP demanded immigration reform in exchange for funding Ukraine. The GOP got their wish when the Senate provided a bipartisan bill only to have the Speaker of the House refuse to bring the bill for debate and vote. By refusing to improve the conditions at the border and making immigration reform they were also refusing to assist Ukraine in its fight against Putin’s communist Russia. I am old enough to remember the Cuban missile crisis when Russia placed nuclear missiles in Cuba aimed at the United States. Russia is communist, Putin is a dictator and Putin’s Russia is no friend of free world democracy . GOP Godfather Ronald Reagan is rolling in his grave over the current GOP refusal to support Ukraine.

Pete Boelter, North Branch

Biden’s damage

A recent letter to the editor suggested that “Experience matters” and as a result the writer would vote for President Biden. In my judgment, money matters even more, as the nation struggles with the mismanagement of this vital resource.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a catastrophe, as we not only lost our soldiers in the exit, but left $9 billion in military equipment on the ground for our enemies’ use.

President Biden continues to defy rulings by the Supreme Court that invalidated his student debt program. Biden recently added over a billion dollars of relief to what was already a $5 billion “gift” to those who failed to pay student debt.

The largest expense that he thrust upon the citizens will be that associated with over 7 million illegal entries into the United States since his inauguration. There is no way to approximate the cost in resources of this failure of the Biden Administration.

Many of the Trump opponents are joking and having a good time regarding the $354 million judgment levied on Donald Trump.  This amount is large, but in comparison to the damage President Biden has done to our nation in three years, it is a drop in a bucket.

Jerry Wynn, St. Paul

 

‘Election interference’?

I have been watching media coverage of former President Trump’s recent campaign rallies, and have noticed that his latest theme seems to be that he is a victim of “election interference.” This most recent theme follows his complaints of being a victim of “weaponization” of our D.O.J., and of course a victim of a government “witchhunt.”

The problem I have with his interpretation of the government’s four indictments pending against him as “election interference” is that the timeline just doesn’t support it.

Mr. Trump is accused of paying hush money to an adult film star and reporting it as a campaign expense in 2016.

On Jan. 2, 2021, Mr. Trump made the now-famous call to Georgia attorney general Brad Raffensperger asking him to miraculously find almost 11,000 votes that didn’t exist. (A judge this week dismissed a charge in the indictment related to that call, but others remain.)

Four days later, Jan. 6, saw our former president inciting and encouraging a crowd of supporters to “fight like hell” and march to our Capitol building to interrupt the counting of the electoral ballots confirming his election loss to Joe Biden.

Finally, sometime during the removal of documents related to his time in office also in January of 2021, that sensitive and highly classified material ended up at his Mar-A-Lago estate, which he both denied continued to hide from the authorities.

It wasn’t until November of 2022 that Mr. Trump decided to announce his decision to run for re-election … well over a year AFTER the illegal acts he is accused of, and of which he has been indicted. With that timeline, it seems obvious that the “election interference” our former president is complaining about was self-inflicted.

Mike Miller, Lakeland

Only now they attend to the border

President Biden himself created the border crisis on day one when he signed executive orders dismantling former President Trump’s executive actions to protect our southern border. For years we’ve been lied to over and over that our border was closed and secure with the media giving a pass until the horrific story of Laken Riley made it impossible to ignore.

Only now that polls show border security is the top issue in an election year will President Biden and Democrats pretend to fix the border. They really don’t care or they would’ve been working with our border states by providing real support in securing the border and vetting every person before letting them in when they had three branches of government.

Let’s never forget when Biden was running for office he told asylum seekers to surge the border and that’s exactly what they did, and now we’re shocked by the chaos? Now our sanctuary cities have realized they must cut funding for American citizens while they hand out free benefits to the newly arrived migrants.

Even former President Obama had a better border policy than Biden who’s too pig-headed to admit to a mistake and make a course correction; it’s always someone else’s fault.

Walter J Huemmer, St. Paul

 

Segregated from other opinions

Now that the 2024 ballot appears set for the two major-party candidates the political homogeneity their two parties threaten us with will only lessen the respect for nonconformity and result in repercussions for those holding differing viewpoints.

The social conditions the two political parties are striving for will actually ensure that people only encounter people who think like them, leaving the majority unaware of solid arguments for other opinions. This will result in nothing short of more political party McCarthyism and, just as in the 1950s, does foretell of lasting damage to our democracy long before becoming futile.

Julia Bell, St. Paul

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Chicago Cubs outfielder Ian Happ in December paid $3.09 million for a 3,395-square-foot condominium in a newly constructed, 16-story luxury condo building in the West Loop.

Happ, 29, has spent his entire seven-year career with the Cubs, and was an All-Star in 2022. He signed a three-year, $61 million contract extension with the team last year.

In the West Loop, Happ’s three-bedroom condo is one of 58 in its building. His unit has 3 ½ bathrooms, herringbone entry floors, arched doorways, top-of-the-line kitchen appliances, cabinetry by Bovelli Custom Millwork, bathroom fixtures from Lefroy Brooks and a living room fireplace provided by South Side fireplace manufacturer Atelier Jouvence.

The real estate agent who represented Happ in his purchase, Nancy Tassone, declined to comment on the purchase.

The unit has a $937 monthly homeowners association fee, in addition to an unspecified property tax bill.

Happ is one of the few current Cubs to own a place in Chicago. Shortstop Dansby Swanson and his wife, Chicago Red Stars forward Mallory Swanson, paid $3.5 million last year to buy a six-bedroom, 7,000-square-foot mansion in Lakeview from former Cubs President Theo Epstein and his wife, Marie. And starting pitcher Kyle Hendricks has owned a six-bedroom house in Lakeview since buying it in 2017 for $2.18 million.

Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.

Join our Chicago Dream Homes Facebook group for more luxury listings and real estate news.

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The back-to-the-SAT bandwagon rolls on. As swiftly as they followed the leader in dropping the standardized test as an admission requirement, the elite schools are reversing course. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was an early re-adopter, back in 2022. Earlier this year, Dartmouth followed suit. In February, Yale hopped aboard. Brown joined them this month, and although other Ivies say they’re holding firm on keeping the SAT optional, news reports suggest that Penn, too, might soon be headed back to the future.

It seems increasingly clear that the anti-SAT movement was just a fad. Like many fads, this one had people joining in without taking the time to think things through. The determination to do something about racial injustice was in the air and activists had been campaigning against standardized tests for years. They made an easy target — and once one or two schools dropped them, following along was the path of least resistance.

It’s called the bandwagon effect — the tendency to do what other people are doing without pausing to figure out whether those others are right. The schools now reversing course acted too fast in dropping the tests, without the thoughtful consideration that higher education should exemplify.

This bandwagon effect was first noted in politics, but recent decades have seen a deluge of papers using the theory to analyze the behavior of consumers. Institutions, too, like to climb on bandwagons. A much-cited 2000 study found that firms that adopt trendy management techniques tend to be more admired, even when the innovations don’t yield better results compared to peers. A 2020 literature review shows little has changed.

Bandwagon thinking is forgivable when people are deciding which sweater to buy or which country to visit. But it’s troubling that institutions of higher learning should be so hasty to join the crowd.

In explaining the school’s long-expected decision to reinstate a standardized test requirement for applicants, Brown’s provost put it this way: “Our analysis made clear that SAT and ACT scores are among the key indicators that help predict a student’s ability to succeed and thrive in Brown’s demanding academic environment.”

The sad part is that we already knew that. We also knew, as many an analyst has lately pointed out, that the tests had been a help — not a hindrance — in diversifying the campus. Surely the colleges that rushed to abandon them were aware of their utility; if they didn’t know, shame on them for not troubling to find out. The re-adopters all commissioned formal studies prior to reversing themselves. But the time to undertake analysis was before deciding to drop the tests in the first place. Instead — as the bandwagon effect predicts — colleges hopped aboard without making a serious effort to determine whether the wagon was rolling in the right direction. All they knew for sure was that they didn’t want to be left behind.

Don’t get me wrong. The tests have their limitations. But they’re higher education’s version of Churchill’s mot about democracy: in this world of sin and woe, they’re neither perfect nor all-wise; they’re the worst admission requirement except for all those others that have been tried from time to time.

As the over-hasty colleges now sheepishly concede.

I recognize that the elite schools are in a tough position. They want diverse student bodies, but last year the Supreme Court put a damper on their ability to work directly toward that end. I thought the majority was wrong, but the decision is what it is.

The main loophole it left was enabling students to tell stories of how they’d overcome the costs exacted by race. This makes sense, given that for disadvantaged college students, “grit” seems to be a strong predictor of academic success. (At least in the first year.)

But measuring grit is hard. One promising suggestion that deserves further study is to compare the test scores of applicants with those not at the same school but in the same zip code. Of course, the admission essays might be the best tools, except that now they’re being written by generative AI.

That’s a problem for another day. For now, let it suffice to say that the schools that dropped test requirements, in their rush to showcase their support for diversity, acted too precipitously. They had nothing to guide them but the choices of their peers. Nobody wanted to be the kid in last year’s outfit. And so they went along with the crowd.

That’s always the risk when one hops aboard the bandwagon: Somebody else is in the driver’s seat.

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”

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