Three weeks ago, on July 18, I put up a Pollster chart showing that, despite everything, Donald Trump’s approval rating had been rock steady for the previous two months. Well, it turned out that merely mentioning this was enough to start his job approval sliding again. It started going down on precisely the day I wrote that post. You’re welcome!

The debt ceiling, we are told, will be breached in late September if Congress doesn’t raise it.¹ This would spawn widespread havoc because it would cause the US government to stop paying some of its bills. Most likely, interest payments on treasury bonds would be prioritized, which means there wouldn’t be a default on American sovereign debt, but it’s not clear if much more could be done on that score. As a result, Social Security checks could be delayed randomly, payroll checks to federal workers might be held up, and doctors would stop getting Medicare reimbursements.

So where are we on this? This seems to be the current state of play:

• In the executive branch: After several months of vagueness, the White House finally announced that it supports a “clean” increase. That is, an increase in the debt ceiling with no conditions attached.
• In the House: The House Freedom Caucus is insisting that it won’t vote for a debt ceiling increase unless it includes spending cuts. Without the HFC, Paul Ryan doesn’t have the votes to pass anything.
• In the Senate: The debt ceiling bill needs 60 votes, which means that Mitch McConnell needs a bunch of Democrats to help him out. Democrats haven’t taken a firm position yet, but are generally suggesting that they don’t want to raise the debt ceiling if it just means Republicans can pass a huge tax cut for the rich. McConnell didn’t improve matters when he churlishly announced last week that he wanted no Democratic input on the upcoming tax bill.

Now, it’s possible that none of this matters. In recent years it’s become SOP to dick around on the debt ceiling for months and then come to some kind of last-minute accommodation around 10 pm on the day the money runs out. Maybe that’s just the way things are these days, and we have to get used to it.

For what it’s worth, though, I hope Democrats stay sort of vague about all this and don’t start holding hostages. If they just want to give Mitch McConnell ulcers for a few weeks, who can blame them? But when push comes to shove, they need to be the party of grownups, the ones who will approve a clean debt ceiling increase even when a Republican is in office. One party of lunatic hostage takers is enough.

¹Technically, it’s already been breached. However, for the past few months the Treasury Department has been using “extraordinary measures” to keep paying the bills, something we never had to do in the past. These days, Congress doesn’t deal with the debt ceiling until even the extraordinary measures have run out and doom is truly only hours away.

It’s sort of like the gas tank in your car. In the past, Congress filled up whenever the dashboard light came on. Crisis averted! But now they just laugh at the light. They don’t even start to take things seriously until the tank is down to about two ounces of gasoline and the fuel pump is sucking so much wind that it nearly melts.

Over at Vox, Harold Pollack writes about a problem: “very old politicians.” I was nodding along until I got to this sentence about the Senate:

In the body as a whole, 23 senators are at least 70. Seven are 80 or older.

This doesn’t seem all that old. So I got curious: how does the age distribution of the Senate compare to the country as a whole? Obviously there are no youngsters in the Senate, so we need to compare to a subset of the population. It’s very seldom that anyone becomes a senator before age 40, so here’s a comparison of the US Senate to the overall US population 40 and over:

It turns out the Senate looks a lot like America. The main difference is too few senators in their 40s and too many in their 60s. But the 70+ crowd is roughly the same as their distribution in the population.

Now, in the rest of the world, most of those folks who are over 70 are retired, and maybe a lot of these senators should be too. Still, they don’t look an awful lot different than a random group of over-40s plucked off a street corner.

It’s waterfowl baby season again! This year, for the first time I can remember, we have baby ducks. We always have baby geese, but never ducklings. I assume there must be some treachery involved in this, since ducks naturally have babies unless someone stops them—and I suppose this someone must be our neighborhood association, which doesn’t want thousands of ducks on our lake. Whatever they do to maintain the duck population at reasonable levels, I assume they also do it to our local rabbits, since we continue not to live with wall-to-wall rabbits.

As for the geese, I suspect they’re protected, so there’s nothing anyone can do about them. I guess I could find out real answers to all these questions if I were really curious, but I’m not.

Anyway, here are the baby ducks. The duck in front is diving underwater for whatever reason it is that ducks dive underwater. Neither siblings nor mama look very impressed, but mama looks happy and proud. This is because all ducks look happy thanks to the shape of their bills and our happy childhood memories of Donald Duck, but who cares? They look happy, and that makes me happy.

Tomorrow: baby geese. But no lunchtime photo. What can this mean?

Here’s another entry in the “Twitter is a cesspool” sweepstakes. It’s a piece from Kat Rosenfield about the toxic tweetstorms plaguing the Young Adult book business:

The Black Witch, a debut young-adult fantasy novel by Laurie Forest, was still seven weeks from its May 1 publication date, but positive buzz was already building….The hype train was derailed in mid-March, however, by Shauna Sinyard, a bookstore employee and blogger who writes primarily about YA and had a different take: “The Black Witch is the most dangerous, offensive book I have ever read,” she wrote in a nearly 9,000-word review that blasted the novel as an end-to-end mess of unadulterated bigotry. “It was ultimately written for white people. It was written for the type of white person who considers themselves to be not-racist and thinks that they deserve recognition and praise for treating POC like they are actually human.”

….Sinyard [slammed] The Black Witch as “racist, ableist, homophobic, and … written with no marginalized people in mind”…Harlequin Teen, was bombarded with angry emails demanding they pull the book…Positive buzz all but died off, as community members began confronting The Black Witch’s supporters, demanding to know why they insisted on reading a racist book…The result is a jumble of dogpiling and dragging, subtweeting and screenshotting, vote-brigading and flagging wars, with accusations of white supremacy on one side and charges of thought-policing moral authoritarianism on the other…”None of us are willing to comment publicly for fear of being targeted and labeled racist or bigoted.”

….In recent months, the community was bubbling with a dozen different controversies of varying reach — over Nicola Yoon’s Everything Everything (for ableism), Stephanie Elliot’s Sad Perfect (for being potentially triggering to ED survivors), A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J. Maas (for heterocentrism), The Traitor’s Kiss by Erin Beaty (for misusing the story of Mulan), and All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater (in a peculiar example of publishing pre-crime, people had decided that Stiefvater’s book was racist before she’d even finished the manuscript.)

This sounds horrible. Twitter is ruining the YA book business. But wait. There’s also this:

The Black Witch, which took one of the worst online beatings in recent memory, scored a No. 1 rating in Amazon’s department of “Teen & Young Adult Wizards Fantasy” a few days after its release and has been overwhelmingly well-reviewed since….The scandals that loom so large on Twitter don’t necessarily interest consumers; instead, the tempest of these controversies remains confined to a handful of internet teapots where a few angry voices can seem thunderously loud. Still, some publishing professionals imagine that the outrage will eventually become powerful enough to rattle the industry.

In other words, in terms of emotional energy, a thousand tweets are worth about one letter to the editor. Namely nothing. And while I’d normally say that maybe the adults ought to step into this mess and do something about the bad behavior, it turns out that adults are the problem in the first place:

In an interesting twist, the teens who make up the community’s core audience are getting fed up with the constant, largely adult-driven dramas that currently dominate YA. Some have taken to discussing books via backchannels or on teen-exclusive hashtags — or defecting to other platforms, like YouTube or Instagram, which aren’t so given over to mob dynamics.

Twitter is a cesspool. It’s also a lot of fun if you follow the right people, which is why so many of us continue to use it. But it’s also a cesspool. Always keep that in mind when you’re deciding just how deeply you want to engage with Twitter.

Republicans want to put health care behind them and start focusing on taxes:

“What we ought to focus on is how we cut taxes in such a way that the average person in our country who has not experienced this recovery has more money in their accounts at the end of the week or the end of the month,” said Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, another GOP tax writer. “That’s what we should focus on, and I think we’ll have some success there.”

I assume that Tim Scott is talking about folks in the middle. That’s who he says he wants to help. In case you’re curious, here are some statistics about the median household in the United States:

• Median income: $56,515.
• Average federal income tax rate: 2.6 percent.
• Average federal income tax paid: $28 per week.

That’s it. The average household doesn’t pay much income tax. It pays payroll taxes. But Republicans aren’t planning to do anything about payroll taxes. They’re focused solely on income taxes, and I doubt they’re planning to start sending big checks to people who owe no income tax at all. On average, this means that the absolute maximum they can provide to “the average person in our country who has not experienced this recovery” is $28 per week.

I’ll be surprised if they do even that much. But at higher incomes I’ll bet they do plenty.

First this:

.@senorrinhatch: “We’re in tax now…they shot their wad on health care and that’s the way it is. I’m sick of it.” https://t.co/GQBvI5munO pic.twitter.com/wp2l3rNQzm

— POLITICO (@politico) August 7, 2017

Then this:

In the past weeks we’ve had WH Comms Director talk about sucking his own dick, a FOX anchor sending dick pics & now this from…Orrin Hatch. https://t.co/Xru9YfaAga

— ☪️ Charles Gaba ✡️ (@charles_gaba) August 7, 2017

And then this:

As few of you were alive during the Civil War, here’s a valuable jargon lesson on “wads” and the shooting of them. https://t.co/dOYvcfgImO pic.twitter.com/wk9aaNb3s2

— Senator Hatch Office (@senorrinhatch) August 7, 2017

Who wins? Considering that he’s 83, I have to give this one to Hatch. Not bad for an oldster!

I have a project for some enterprising data journalist or PhD student. Maybe this just comes of reading Atrios so much, but I’d like to know if millennials are really being attacked constantly for their perceived deficiencies. You know the drill: slackers, Facebook addicts, always playing video games, etc.

Obviously this stuff is out there. After all, I just reeled off a few examples and it only took me a few seconds to think of them. But is this worse than the Xers had it? Or the boomers? Or the Greatest Generation™? Or Aristotle’s pals compared to Plato’s? The problem is that I can’t think of any reasonable way to investigate this that’s open to a lazy blogger. Take this Google Ngram, for example, which plots the popularity of the phrase “kids today” in books since 1940:

Actually, this is kind of interesting. There’s a sudden surge around 1965 and another surge starting around 1981. Hmmm. And if I had to guess, I’d say that the phrase “kids today” is more often derogatory than not. But I don’t know that. Nor do I know what similar phrases were used in the past. Or if Google’s corpus of books is really representative. Or why Google still hasn’t gotten past 2008 in their Ngram viewer.

In any case, this approach is hopelessly flawed. It would take some really diligent research to come up with a credible longitudinal estimate of disparagement toward the kids unless those Freakonomics guys can come up with some annoyingly clever natural experiment that provides a quick answer. But I’d like to know! Are kids today on the receiving end of more abuse than kids of yesteryear? Who wants to be the Albert Einstein of the generation gap who finally solves this puzzle?

UPDATE: Several people have suggested that the 1965 surge is due to the song “Kids” from the 1963 movie version of Bye Bye Birdie:

Maybe! The timing doesn’t seem quite right, but it’s close. We still need to figure out 1981, though.

Rex Shutterstock via ZUMA

The New York Times writes today that presidents have been lying for a long time:

One of the first modern presidents to wrestle publicly with a lie was Dwight D. Eisenhower in May 1960, when an American U-2 spy plane was shot down while in Soviet airspace. The Eisenhower administration lied to the public about the plane and its mission, claiming it was a weather aircraft…In 1972, at the height of the Watergate scandal, President Richard M. Nixon was accused of lying, obstructing justice and misusing the Internal Revenue Service…President Clinton was impeached for perjury and obstruction in trying to cover up his affair with an intern, Monica Lewinsky, during legal proceedings.

Ah, those were the good old days. Presidents lied infrequently, but when they did, they told real whoppers. And those whoppers were designed to cover up serious misdeeds.

This is what makes Donald Trump so different. He tells lies constantly, but his lies are mostly trivial. It’s easy to understand why Nixon or Clinton lied, regardless of whether we approve. But it’s not so easy to understand the point of Trump’s torrent of fibs. Can he not help himself? Does he genuinely not understand what he’s doing? Is he unable to deal with the possibility that he isn’t the greatest human being in the history of the planet? It’s a mystery.

One way or the other, he sure is one weird dude. My guess is that he’s also not entirely in control of his faculties anymore. Here is Robin Wright in The New Yorker:

Why Is Donald Trump Still So Horribly Witless About the World?

“Trump has an appalling ignorance of the current world, of history, of previous American engagement, of what former Presidents thought and did,” Geoffrey Kemp, who worked at the Pentagon during the Ford Administration and at the National Security Council during the Reagan Administration, reflected. “He has an almost studious rejection of the type of in-depth knowledge that virtually all of his predecessors eventually gained or had views on.”

…“The sheer scale of his lack of knowledge is what has astounded me—and I had low expectations to begin with,” David Gordon, the director of the State Department’s policy-planning staff under Condoleezza Rice, during the Bush Administration, told me.

This is decidedly not normal. Most people, even if they were abysmally ignorant, would learn some things over the course of two years of campaigning and being president. Even if, like Trump, they declined to read anything, they’d pick up stuff by osmosis. There’s a helluva lot of expert conversation that surrounds people like Trump, and you can hardly help but learn from it unless you’re actively trying to block it out.

Apparently that’s what Trump does. It’s not just that he’s galactically ignorant, it’s that he actively works to stay that way. What kind of person is so afraid of facts and knowledge that he actually spends emotional energy to prevent learning anything, even if that learning is essentially free?

Alternatively, Trump is no longer completely in control of his faculties and simply forgets stuff almost as soon as he hears it. My guess is that it’s some of both.

I’m not sure what prompted me to look at this, but I did. I suppose I’m just tired of Elon Musk (don’t ask) and taking a break. Anyway, here are federal interest payments as a share of GDP since 1960:

It’s hard to see any big warning signs here. This could become a problem if both the deficit and interest rates go up substantially, but as long as Republicans don’t enact another Reaganesque tax cut and inflation stays subdued, that seems unlikely.