Open Thread at Noon

Trump Asserts 'Complete Power to Pardon' in Saturday Tweetstorm

Adam Serwer

The president also angrily lashed out at the media and his critics.

President Trump lashed out at the media in a Saturday morning tweetstorm, insisting his authority to issue pardons is “complete” and expressing frustration over stories that revealed Attorney General Jeff Sessions may have lied about his contacts with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign.

“A new INTELLIGENCE LEAK from the Amazon Washington Post, this time against A.G. Jeff Sessions. These illegal leaks, like Comey’s, must stop!” the president tweeted, following up by stating that “While all agree the U. S. President has the complete power to pardon, why think of that when only crime so far is LEAKS against us. FAKE NEWS.”

The tacit acknowledgement the president has been thinking about his pardon power in relation to the Russia investigation, and the qualification that no crimes but leaks had been revealed “so far” raised eyebrows among media observers.

The Mystery of Why Japanese People Are Having So Few Babies

Alana Semuels

Many point to unromantic 20-somethings and women’s entry into the workforce, but an overlooked factor is the trouble young men have in finding steady, well-paid jobs.

TOKYO—Japan’s population is shrinking. For the first time since the government started keeping track more than a century ago, there were fewer than 1 million births last year, as the country’s population fell by more than 300,000 people. The blame has long been put on Japan’s young people, who are accused of not having enough sex, and on women, who, the narrative goes, put their careers before thoughts of getting married and having a family.

But there’s another, simpler explanation for the country’s low birth rate, one that has implications for the U.S.: Japan’s birth rate may be falling because there are fewer good opportunities for young people, and especially men, in the country’s economy. In a country where men are still widely expected to be breadwinners and support families, a lack of good jobs may be creating a class of men who don’t marry and have children because they—and their potential partners—know they can’t afford to.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller — J. Scott Applewhite / AP

When Will President Trump Fire Robert Mueller?

David A. Graham

The White House is threatening the special counsel and trying to dig up dirt on him, and the prospect that the president will try to fire him now seems very real.

The idea that Donald Trump might fire—or try to fire—Special Counsel Robert Mueller has bubbled up enough times to seem possible, but still improbable. For one thing (as Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer, among others, can attest) press reports that this president might fire someone are frequently wrong. For another, it seemed that even Trump was prudent enough to avoid making the mistake that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency.

Yet Trump has a knack for making the wildly implausible suddenly imminent. In the last 36 hours, the idea of Mueller being fired—and the political crisis it would likely set off—has become distinctly real. In an interview with The New York Times, Trump all but said he would fire Mueller if his investigation went into places Trump didn’t like. Since then, several reports have suggested that Trump’s defense strategy, as investigations probe deeper into his life and administration, is to attack Mueller and attempt to discredit him. Increasingly, the operative question seems not to be whether Trump will try to fire Mueller, but when he will do so and what will push him over the edge.

A group of soldiers in 'Dunkirk.' — Warner Bros.

Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk Is a Masterpiece

Christopher Orr

Epic yet intimate, the director's new war film is boldly experimental and visually stunning.

What is Dunkirk?

The answer is more complicated than one might imagine. Director Christopher Nolan’s latest is a war film, of course, yet one in which the enemy scarcely makes an appearance. It is a $150 million epic, yet also as lean and spare as a haiku, three brief, almost wordless strands of narrative woven together in a mere 106 minutes of running time. It is classic in its themes—honor, duty, the horror of war—yet simultaneously Nolan’s most radical experiment since Memento. And for all these reasons, it is a masterpiece.

The historical moment captured by the film ascended long ago to the level of martial lore: In May 1940, in the early days of World War II, some 400,000 British and Allied troops were flanked and entrapped by Germany on the beaches of Dunkirk in northern France. Although the Channel was narrow enough that the men could almost see across to England, the waters were too shallow for warships to approach the beaches. So a flotilla of some 700 civilian craft—the “Little Ships of Dunkirk”—made their way from Ramsgate in England to assist in the rescue.

Tyler, the Creator at the 2011 Video Music Awards — AP / Chris Pizzello

The Classic Queer Paradox of Tyler, the Creator

Spencer Kornhaber

On Flower Boy the rapper suggests he’s not straight—and struggles with a stigma he helped propagate.

Tyler, the Creator became famous, in part, for being hateful. When his rap collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (“Odd Future” is fine) caught buzz around 2010, it was because of their delirious energy and Eminem-like love of mayhem. But it was their threats against women and “faggots,” delivered in song and on social media, that elevated them from subculture phenomenon to become essay prompt and political flashpoint. The likes of GLAAD and the band Tegan and Sara declared Tyler poisonous and asked the music industry to stop supporting him. Theresa May, back when she was home secretary of the U.K., took the extraordinary step of banning him from her country because his lyrics “encourage violence and intolerance of homosexuality.”

Andrew Harnik / AP

The GOP Escalates Its Battle With the CBO

Vann R. Newkirk II

In an 11th hour push to repeal Obamacare, Republicans are leaning on a murky analysis that supports their plan.

The Department of Health and Human Services does a great number of things, but providing authoritative analysis of legislation isn’t usually one of them.

That task is left instead to the Congressional Budget Office, the independent agency lawmakers typically rely on to score each and every bill. Yet when it comes to health care, Republicans seem willing to put their trust in the evaluation that’s best for them, regardless of who prepared it—and dismiss assessments that will only make Obamacare repeal harder.

As the prospects for passing a repeal-and-replace law have grown dimmer over recent weeks, Republicans have increasingly divorced themselves from the CBO, which has repeatedly assigned negative scores to the party’s plans. Instead, the GOP has opted for a much more insulated approach to mathematics. Most recently, lawmakers seized on a “preliminary draft” of HHS’s appraisal of a controversial amendment to the Senate’s Better Care Reconciliation Act.

The GOP Health-Care Bill's Byrd Rule Dilemma

Vann R. Newkirk II

The Senate parliamentarian’s rejection of important provisions of the GOP’s Obamacare repeal bill puts its status in further jeopardy.

On Friday, Senate Democrats released a list of provisions in the Republican health-care bill that the Senate parliamentarian holds can pass via a simple, filibuster-proof majority vote. Among those provisions that didn’t meet her scrutiny are the bill’s plans to defund Planned Parenthood, restrict tax-credit funding for insurance plans that provide abortions, and a six-month “lockout” period from purchasing insurance for people who don’t maintain continuous coverage.

If this preliminary guidance holds, the Better Care Reconciliation Act—which is already in dire straits—seems likely to fail.

The final assessment of the parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, is a critical step in the GOP’s strategy for passing their bill to repeal and replace Obamacare. Republicans have opted to pass their health-care legislation via the special reconciliation process, under which they can cut debate short in the Senate and thus eliminate indefinite filibusters, which Democrats would certainly use in order to block any attempt to repeal Obamacare. But bills have to follow a certain procedure—called the Byrd Rule—in order to pass by reconciliation.

The Scaramucci Takeover

Rosie Gray

The choice of the former hedge funder and ardent Trump loyalist reflected longstanding dissatisfaction with Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

The Scaramucci revolution was televised.

After months of chatter that his job was on the chopping block, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer finally exited stage right on Friday after financier, donor and TV talking head Anthony Scaramucci was given the job of White House communications director, which had been vacant since the departure of Mike Dubke in May. Spicer resigned in opposition to the move.

The incident brought simmering conflicts inside the White House to a boil and pitted top advisers against each other in a last-minute effort on the part of some of them to stymie the appointment of Scaramucci, known as “The Mooch,” who had refashioned himself as an ardent Trump supporter during the campaign and had been left in limbo during the early days of the administration after not getting a promised job.

How Not to Die of Botulism

Bradley Wertheim

Highly-poisonous botulinum toxin (the stuff in Botox), played a formidable role in the history of food and warfare. It is still a factor in prison-brewed alcohol and some canned foods, and can quickly kill a person.

After tanking up on “pruno,” a bootleg prison wine, eight maximum-security inmates at the Utah State prison in Salt Lake County tried to shake off more than just the average hangover. Their buzz faded into double vision, weakness, trouble swallowing, and vomiting. Tests confirmed that the detainees came down with botulism from their cellblock science experiment. In secret, a prison moonshiner mixed grapefruit, oranges, powdered drink mix, canned fruit, and water in a plastic bag. For the pièce de résistance, he added a baked potato filched from a meal tray weeks earlier and peeled with his fingernails. After days of fermentation and anticipation, the brewer filtered the mash through a sock, and then doled out the hooch to his fellow yardbirds.

People protest against the supreme court legislation in Wroclaw, Poland, on July 20. — Mieczyslaw Michalak / Agencja Gazeta / Reuters

Poland: The EU's Next Big Test

Krishnadev Calamur

The government’s proposed changes to the supreme court has angered the bloc.

Poland’s Senate has approved a controversial measure that would allow the government to replace every member of the nation’s supreme court with people of its choice. The move puts it on a collision course with the European Union that says the bill threatens the independence of the judiciary and the bloc’s values.

The EU threatened Poland with the unprecedented step of sanctioning it with Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union, a move that would suspend Warsaw’s voting rights within the bloc. But the threat by the EU’s first vice president, Frans Timmermans, notwithstanding, any move to use Article 7 must be unanimous—and that’s not likely given that Hungary, Poland’s Visegrad ally, has threatened to veto any such action.