monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

China has granted approval to 38 Trump trademarks, including for an escort service.One of Trump’s signature issues has been his promise to get tough with trading partners like China, which he alleges takes unfair advantage of the United States. It looks like Trump has succeeded in his promise to get China to open up to American trade, at least on a personal level. According to a report from the Associated Press, the Chinese government has moved swiftly to grant those requested trademarks, which in addition to the escort service include hotels. (The escort service is likely a defensive move to protect against someone starting Trump Escorts in China.)

The Republicans Did This to Themselves
They spent seven years hyperventilating over Obamacare, and now they're paying the price for their shameful politics.

...The problem this bill is meant to solve is that the entire professional right lied to the GOP base for seven years about the horrors of the Affordable Care Act, vowed to right all of its illusory wrongs, and now must answer for these hysterics. This bill lets Republicans in Congress pretend they were playing it straight with the American people the whole time.

Trump could make courthouse arrests of illegal immigrants the new normal

Juan Coronilla-Guerrero was appearing in an Austin court when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents nabbed him. Coronilla-Guerrero had been previously deported, was here illegally and was facing assault and drug charges.

Federal officials likely considered a courthouse the safest and easiest place to make an arrest. “What if they have a weapon on them in the streets and there are kids around?" said Chris Harris, a veteran Border Patrol agent. "At least in the courthouse the individual would have gone through a metal detector, and it is a confined and controlled space that would actually enhance public safety."

Yet the incident touched off anger in Austin.

“ICE's presence in our courthouses will harm any trust our immigrant families place in the court system," Austin City Councilwoman Delia Garza said in a statement.

Critics see Coronilla-Guerrero’s arrest as an infringement on rights of the immigrant community.

The architects of the new GOP health care plan have an amazing new perspective. "Republicans," Politico reported this morning, "say the plan's price tag and estimates of how many people it will cover aren't really important."

Under normal circumstances, it's tempting to think these would be the first two questions Republicans would ask about any reform plan. Wondering how many Americans will have health insurance and how much the plan will cost aren't exactly obscure matters of policy minutiae, but as of this morning, GOP officials prefer to think of these metrics as trivia.

Mick Mulvaney, Donald Trump's budget chief, added this morning that "insurance is not really the end goal here."

No wonder Republicans are proceeding without a score from the Congressional Budget Office. They don't know what their bill will cost or how many millions of Americans will lose their health insurance -- and they plainly don't care.

The effort to move the goalposts, ignoring meaningful metrics and making up new ones, is almost certainly a political necessity borne of the realization that the GOP's American Health Care Act isn't going to work as a matter of public policy.

Bird flu has started killing more people in China, and no one's sure why. Zika virus is set to come back with a vengeance as the weather warms up and mosquitoes get hungry. Yellow fever is spreading in Brazil, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria are evolving faster than doctors can keep up with them.

And the new health care replacement bill released Monday night by Republican leaders in Congress would slash a billion-dollar prevention fund designed to help protect against those and other threats.

This is insane.

The Prevention and Public Health Fund accounts for 12 percent of the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The CDC, the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies had been hoping and pressing for more money to develop drugs, tests and vaccines and to look harder for where those germs might be lurking

It's about spending for our health or building a wall. It's a simple decision for most of us who have some common sense.

How much should we spend on "preventing" diseases?

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Huh, I thought he's tax Mexican imports and exports and possibly have a tariff added in somewhere until Mexico just decided to say "screw it" and fork over some money. This is an interesting choice.

Your trust was and is misplaced.

Making money off the presidency

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China has granted approval to 38 Trump trademarks, including for an escort service.One of Trump’s signature issues has been his promise to get tough with trading partners like China, which he alleges takes unfair advantage of the United States. It looks like Trump has succeeded in his promise to get China to open up to American trade, at least on a personal level. According to a report from the Associated Press, the Chinese government has moved swiftly to grant those requested trademarks, which in addition to the escort service include hotels. (The escort service is likely a defensive move to protect against someone starting Trump Escorts in China.)

NewRepublic

Brian Beutler has a very good piece made up

The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said antimicrobial resistance is a “fundamental threat” to global health and safety at the first general assembly meeting on drug-resistant bacteria.

It is only the fourth time the general assembly has held a high-level meeting for a health issue.

“If we fail to address this problem quickly and comprehensively, antimicrobial resistance will make providing high-quality universal healthcare coverage more difficult if not impossible,” said Ban. “It will undermine sustainable food production. And it will put the sustainable development goals in jeopardy.”

It is estimated that more than 700,000 people die each year due to drug-resistant infections, though it could be much higher because there is no global system to monitor these deaths. And there has been trouble tracking those deaths in places where they are monitored, like in the US, where tens of thousands of deaths have not been attributed to superbugs, according to a Reuters investigation.

Scientists have known for more than half a century that patients could develop resistance to the drugs used to treat them – one of the first people to sound the alarm was Alexander Fleming, who is credited with creating the first antibiotic, penicillin, in 1928. He cautioned of the impending crisis while accepting his Nobel prize in 1945: “There is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.”

But scientific innovation, and increased awareness, has shown the severity of the threat. The World Bank announced this week that without containment, the economic impact of the crisis makes it unlikely for the UN to reach its sustainable development goals for 2030.

only two new classes of antibiotics reached the market in the past half century. “The emergence of bacterial resistance is outpacing the world’s capacity for antibiotic discovery,”