Readers Wish Congress Labored For Them, Too

A roundup of the week's best ColorLines conversations.

By Jamilah King Sep 03, 2010

We’re all in a hurry to enjoy a long weekend at the beach, and it’s no wonder: it’s been a tough news week. Unless you allow yourself to geek out on reading Kanye West’s (genius!) Twitter account, chances are you were on the receiving end of stories about greedy politicians and their scandalous insider hustles. And Jan Brewer. Luckily, our readers were right there with us, pushing us to dig deeper. Here’s the best of the week’s commentary from you, the readers.

Lazarusbrands had a lot to say about Texas Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, who’s the latest Congressional Black Caucus member to get caught up in an ethics scandal:

I must take issue with your statement that Congresswoman Johnson "seems to feel the heat." On the contrary, in a very unusual move for a major newspaper editorial board, the Dallas Morning News Editorial Board’s August 30th commentary implores the congresswoman and her staff to "stop talking." The DMN editors rightly observed that the more the congresswoman speaks, the more arrogant and self-serving her statements get.

On Facebook, readers chimed in on Naima Ramos-Chapman’s digest of the furor surrounding New Orleans’s charter schools at The Root:

Ya’ll were rightfully upset at Julianne Hing’s news that it cost millions to kill Oscar Grant. Liza quipped:

BART actually paid an outside consultant $283,000 to "recommend" that Marysol Domenici and Tony Pirone be fired? You mean it wasn’t obvious that these two needed to be taken out of law enforcement before they got someone else killed? Some outside consultant gets hundreds of thousands of dollars to "recommend" what obviously had to be done?

And Hena Ashraf added to the Park51 debate a personal account of what it’s like to attend the mosque that everyone’s talking about. Cbrownlie added some clarity to the whole debate:

I want you to know that many people of faith are appalled by this anti-Islamic drumbeat. In my community the Unitarian Universalists are organizing a "read-in" of the Qur’an on 9/11 which will include readings in Arabic with an English translation courtesy of our local Islamic community. We will also remember the thousands of lives that have been lost in the wars and the violence that has followed the attacks of 9/11/01.

But hey, there was some good news. Seth Freed Wessler wrote about how immigration actually drives up wages. Michelle Chen brought up a good point by noting:

I agree with the overall findings, which are reflected in other studies I’ve read, but I am concerned that the real struggles faced by less-skilled native-born workers could get drowned out in the polarization over whether immigration is a "net positive or negative." Highlighting the need for labor equity across all demographic groups is necessary to counter the right-wing backlash and foster solidarity among workers who might otherwise see each other as competition. And just as we shouldn’t accept blanket indicators of overall growth on face value, we should also be conscious that economic "positives" seldom affect all communities equally.