Tue: Charles Koch's Wet Dream in Action.

The Best Lawyers Don't Want to Work for a Client Who Won't Listen

Donald Trump's lawyers argued they would not have enough time to prepare for his upcoming trial in federal court in the Jan. 6 case, and legal experts agree the former president doesn't have adequate representation for all of his criminal prosecutions.

U.S. District Court judge Tanya Chutkan set a March 4 trial date on charges that Trump tried to subvert the 2020 election, and he's currently scheduled to stand trial March 25 in New York on business fraud charges and May 20 in Florida in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, and and he'll be arraigned next Wednesday in the Georgia election case.

"We've never been here before – four complex criminal trials potentially all unfolding over the next year," NBC News correspondent Ken Dilanian told MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "You know, there's a lot of bombast and hyperbole when Trump's lawyers go into court saying how long this will take. In this respect, they are correct – they have their work cut out for them here. It's just the amount of work they have to do to get ready for all four of these separate trials, plus the civil case you mentioned. There's some overlap between the legal teams, some people are different. It's just mind-boggling. Then you have Donald Trump who is going to be trying to run for president even as he is devoting some resources, because a defendant has to be involved in his own defense. You know, there are certain things only the defendant knows, so we are in for a real show next year to see how this all plays out."

"Frankly, Donald Trump, from where I sit, doesn't appear to have enough lawyers and enough legal resources to really successfully defend all these cases in this compressed period," Dilanian added. "That's really part of the argument his lawyers were making. They've made it in both Florida and in Washington before these federal judges, that, 'Look, we need more time because we just need to get more legal resources onto this.' He's at a real disadvantage here, and that's not something to be taken lightly."

Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis has indicated she intends to take her case against Trump and his co-conspirators to trial next year, despite the former president's effort to pause the case until after the 2024 election, and MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin said judges would not be persuaded by arguments that Trump was too busy to defend himself.

"Donald Trump doesn't have enough legal resources right now, but partially that's because he keeps playing legal musical chairs," Rubin said. "Judge Chutkan made it clear yesterday, the fact, [Trump attorney John] Lauro, 'You're just coming onto this case doesn't mean Donald Trump hasn't been sitting with these allegations for a long time. I'm not going to allow this rotating cast of lawyers to be the occasion for delay here.' I think you'll see that from the other judges, as well. The fact that he can't assemble a legal team is not the judge's problem."

If You Need These Drugs, You Could Be Dead Before the Price Cuts Take Effect. Yet It Is Still Welcome

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Tuesday announced the first 10 prescription drugs that will be subject to Medicare price negotiations under the Inflation Reduction Act, a critical step in the Biden administration’s attempt to drive down the high cost of prescription drugs for older people.

Medicare provides health insurance coverage to 65 million people in the United States, according to KFF, a nonpartisan group that studies health policy issues. While the program wields enormous power over the costs of other aspects of medical care, dictating how much doctors and hospitals can be paid for medical services, it has been barred from negotiating drug costs.

That will change next year, when Medicare for the first time will be able to directly haggle with drugmakers over prices for the costliest medications. The negotiated prices will go into effect in 2026.

The drugs selected to undergo negotiations are:

Eliquis, a blood thinner

Xarelto, a blood thinner

Januvia, a diabetes drug

Jardiance, a diabetes drug

Enbrel, a rheumatoid arthritis drug

Imbruvica, a drug for blood cancers

Farxiga, a drug for diabetes, heart failure and chronic kidney disease

Entresto, a heart failure drug

Stelara, a drug for psoriasis and Crohn's disease

Fiasp and NovoLog, for diabetes

The Paranoid Style in American Plutocrats

Recently Dr. Peter Hotez, a leading vaccine scientist and a frequent target of anti-vaxxer harassment, expressed some puzzlement in a post on X, formerly Twitter. He noted that many of those taunting him were also “big time into bitcoin or cryptocurrency” and declared that “I can’t quite connect the dots on that one.”

OK, I can help with that. Also, welcome to my world.

If you regularly follow debates about public policy, especially those involving wealthy tech bros, it’s obvious that there’s a strong correlation among the three C’s: climate denial, Covid vaccine denial and cryptocurrency cultism.

What Happens in the Antarctic Doesn't Stay in the Antarctic

Deep ocean water in the Antarctic is heating up and shrinking, with potentially far-reaching consequences for climate change and deep ocean ecosystems, according to a report.

“Antarctic bottom water” is the coldest, saltiest water on the planet. These waters play a crucial role in the ocean’s ability to act as a buffer against climate change by absorbing excess heat and human-caused carbon pollution. They also circulate nutrients across the ocean.

But in the Weddell Sea, located east of the Antarctic Peninsula, this vital water mass is in decline, due to long-term changes in winds and sea ice, according to the study published Monday by the British Antarctic Survey.

They found that the volume of the cold bottom waters has shrunk by more than 20% over the past three decades. They also found that ocean waters deeper than 2,000 meters (6,600 feet) have warmed four times faster than the rest of the global ocean.

“We used to think that changes in the deep ocean could only occur over centuries. But these key observations from the Weddell Sea show that changes in the dark abyss can take place over just a few decades,” Alessandro Silvano from the University of Southampton in the UK, a co-author of the study, said in a statement.

The planet’s coldest, saltiest ocean waters are heating up and shrinking, report finds

Real "On the Scene" Reporting

Two journalists became part of the story on Monday when they were robbed at gunpoint while reporting on a string of armed robberies in Chicago.

The robbery took place just before 5 a.m. in the 1200 block of North Milwaukee Avenue in the West Town area, Chicago police told media.

The Spanish-language TV station, Univision Chicago, said its reporter and photographer were robbed by three men wearing ski masks and bearing guns, the Chicago Sun Times reported.

The suspects reportedly exited two separate vehicles, demanded money from the two men and stole a camera, two bags containing equipment and a personal backpack. They then fled in the vehicles.

Police said no injuries were reported and no arrests have been made.

The journalists were filming a story about robberies in the West Town community for the morning news.

The footage never aired, as the camera that recorded it was stolen, Luis Godinez, vice president of news at Univision Chicago, told the Chicago Tribune.

Beware of the Blob

China's economy is turning into a big black blob.

This transformation means that while the country's economy will still be significant to global business, it will no longer be the lodestar for growth. It will still advance, but much more slowly. And while those on the outside will still be able to observe the economy, it will become increasingly difficult to truly understand what's going on within.

The reality of China's blob era pushed its way to the center of the global news cycle earlier this month when the Chinese government announced that it would no longer publish the unemployment rate for young people as part of its monthly jobs report. The final release for the data series — July's number — came in at a record high of 20.5%. The number had become a global shorthand for China's inability to reignite its economy since President Xi Jinping ended the country's draconian COVID-19 lockdowns. So now it's gone.

The sudden disappearance of the youth-unemployment report generated headlines, but it's not a shock for longtime China watchers. Data has been disappearing from all over the country for years now. Reports detailing everything from exports to cement production — which are arguably more crucial for understanding the country's structural malaise than youth unemployment — have vanished or become corrupted to the point that they're no longer useful. This is not happening just because the economy is slowing; plenty of countries continue publishing data even though it's no longer rosy. This is happening because Xi's China is one that puts ideology before economic growth.

For decades, the Chinese Communist Party's primary focus was to develop the economy, and more recently, to turn the Chinese consumer into a dynamic force of global demand. That transition required major reforms in how China operated its economy — slowly opening it up and giving it a more bottom-up structure in which individuals make more choices about their livelihoods. But after years of fueling China's rise, these efforts have been stopped in their tracks. Not because the reforms weren't working, but because the China they were creating is not the one Xi wants to see.

"I don't even know that it is possible to move to a private, domestic, demand-driven economy in China, given how it directly conflicts with the top-down manner in which the party typically manages the economy," Charlene Chu, the managing Director and senior analyst at Autonomous Research, told me. "It would take a sea change in thinking."

Even as the main drivers of China's economy stumble, there will be no direct support to help households power through this fragile period. Xi has been telling his people to prepare for a "struggle," to be ready to put geopolitical concerns over economic ones for the foreseeable future. This is bad news for multinational corporations — companies like Nike and Starbucks — that banked on a growing, opening China. And it's bad news for investors who've been waiting for China's growth to return to something like it was before the pandemic. The economy has been showing signs of a structural slowdown for a long time, but the strain on the system has become so great that the market can no longer ignore it.

The struggles that China faces are real — economic pain, foreign-investor concerns, crumbling demographics — but in the face of these challenges, it's clear that Xi will not bend on his vision for the sake of the country. He'd rather shut out the world.

China is doing everything it can to conceal the true extent of its economic turmoil