(Clay Bennett via GoComics.com) We've been talking about the Republican rejection of democracy for a while now, but to see and hear them explicitly state it is still unnerving. pic.twitter.com/2DNCzPnCER — Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) April 30, 2024 I’m guessing that Republicans have so little power in Washington state, their caucus has fallen into the ever-tempting …
Tuesday Morning Open Thread: SalmagundiPost + Comments (206)
All but one bill died in Florida, as did 20 in West Virginia. Georgia adjourned its session without having passed any of the two dozen proposals that Republicans introduced. And Iowa lawmakers adjourned recently having passed just one of the three dozen bills that Republicans introduced or carried over from last year.
LGBTQ+ activists are nonetheless reluctant to celebrate this session as a tide-turning win. Jeff Graham, the executive director of the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Equality Georgia, said he fears that what feels like relief now could turn out to be a pause.
“I’ve been doing this long enough that I see LGBTQ+ issues ebb and flow over time,” Graham said. “That doesn’t mean we are out of the woods. It doesn’t mean we aren’t going to see these attacks continue. But I do think we’re beginning to see people push back and say enough is enough. This is not what we elected you to do.”…
If you're 60, 69.1% of all job growth since your birth occurred under Democratic administrations.
If you're 45, that number is 74.7%.
If you're under 30, the number is 100%. pic.twitter.com/NYb69zOsdC
— ????????????_???????????? (@SundaeDivine) April 28, 2024
A massive Powerball win draws attention to a little-known immigrant culture in the US https://t.co/MQgejLg66Y
— The Associated Press (@AP) April 30, 2024
Only in America, land of opportunity… Per the Associated Press, “A massive Powerball win draws attention to a little-known immigrant culture in the US”:
Cheng “Charlie” Saephan wore a broad smile and a bright blue sash emblazoned with the words “Iu-Mien USA” as he hoisted an oversized check for $1.3 billion above his head.
The 46-year-old immigrant’s luck in winning an enormous Powerball jackpot in Oregon earlier this month — a lump sum payment of $422 million after taxes, which he and his wife will split with a friend — has changed his life. It also raised awareness about Iu Mien people, a southeast Asian ethnic group with origins in China, many of whose members fled from Laos to Thailand and then settled in the U.S. following the Vietnam War.
“I am born in Laos, but I am not Laotian,” Saephan told a news conference Monday at Oregon Lottery headquarters, where his identity as one of the jackpot’s winners was revealed. “I am Iu Mien.”
During the Vietnam War, the CIA and U.S. military recruited Iu Mien in neighboring Laos, many of them subsistence farmers, to engage in guerrilla warfare and to provide intelligence and surveillance to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail that the North Vietnamese used to send troops and weapons through Laos and Cambodia into South Vietnam.
After the conflict as well as the Laotian civil war, when the U.S.-backed government of Laos fell in 1975, they fled by the thousands to avoid reprisals from the new Communist government, escaping by foot through the jungle and then across the Mekong River into Thailand, according to a history posted on the website of Iu Mien Community Services in Sacramento, California. More than 70% of the Iu Mien population in Laos left and many wound up in refugee camps in Thailand…
There are now tens of thousands of Iu Mien — pronounced “yoo MEE’-en” — in the U.S., with many attending universities or starting businesses. Many have converted to Christianity from traditional animist religions. There is a sizeable Iu Mien community in Portland and its suburbs, with a Buddhist temple and Baptist church, active social organization, and businesses and restaurants…
Saephan, 46, said he was born in Laos and moved to Thailand in 1987, before immigrating to the U.S. in 1994. He graduated from high school in 1996 and has lived in Portland for 30 years. He worked as a machinist for an aerospace company.
He said Monday that he has had cancer for eight years and had his latest chemotherapy treatment last week.
“I will be able to provide for my family and my health,” he said, adding that he’d “find a good doctor for myself.”
Saephan, who has two young children, said that as a cancer patient, he wondered, “How am I going to have time to spend all of this money? How long will I live?”
He said he and his 37-year-old wife, Duanpen, are taking half the money, and the rest is going to a friend, Laiza Chao, 55, of the Portland suburb of Milwaukie. Chao had chipped in $100 to buy a batch of tickets with them…