A “friend” brings to my attention the latest column from Rich Lowry, editor of National Review. With the stock market tanking, he has some advice for Donald Trump:

For a president who underlined the increasing importance of working-class whites to the GOP coalition and who trampled so much bipartisan economic orthodoxy during the campaign, to be so overtly obsessed with the stock market is a strange disconnect….This isn’t how he should view it, and it was shortsighted to be so boastful about the good times.

….Wages would be a worthy new object of his attention. Trump has the ability to shift the public conversation onto ground of his choosing, and it’d be better if wages didn’t often take a back seat to the stock market and GDP growth. Trump has a story to tell here. A historically low unemployment rate is having an effect. Wages grew at a 3.1 percent rate year over year in October and November, the highest level since 2009.

This illustrates the problem with economics and the right: they believe their own nonsense too often. Lowry is trying to make a purely political point here, namely that if the stock market is going down, the president should start boasting about something that’s going up. Obviously that makes a kind of hardnosed pragmatic sense, but the problem is that wages aren’t exactly kicking ass these days.

Here’s a simple chart showing three different measures of wage growth over the past few years:

There’s no story here for Trump. The red line is the Employment Compensation Index, which includes everything that employers have to pay for: wages, Social Security, health insurance, etc. The green line is average cash earnings growth for everyone from burger flippers to neurosurgeons. The gray line is cash earnings growth solely for blue collar workers, who make up about 70 percent of the workforce.

I included all three of these to forestall any griping that I was cherry picking. But they all tell the same story: real wage growth during the Trump presidency is pretty low. In the most recent quarter, real wages grew about 0.2 percent over last year, and a guesstimate based on October and November numbers suggests that in the final quarter real wages grew about 0.4 percent. That’s better than no wage growth, but hardly something Trump can be hanging his reelection hat on.

As for why Trump brags on the stock market, it’s because he’s a billionaire Republican and billionaire Republicans care about the stock market. Likewise, he doesn’t care much about wages because higher wages give workers more leverage and this annoys billionaire Republicans. I’m pretty sure Lowry knows this, since Republicans scream blue murder about hyperinflation being right around the corner every time wages for ordinary workers go up half a percent.

As for Trump, he prefers to demagogue about the border wall, which is perfect for him. He can pretend that a wall will cut down on illegal immigration and therefore help workers, which gets him applause from the working class. Business owners, however, know that the wall won’t do anything, so they’re happy to let Trump rant. Everyone’s happy.

As I think you can guess, there’s not a lot to write about this morning. So how about Beto O’Rourke? Liberals are chattering a lot about how much attention he’s getting—too much? not enough?—and factions are apparently being formed for some kind of war between him and Bernie Sanders. Or maybe just between their supporters. Or something. I’m not really sure about that part. Really, I just want to know if Beto is getting lots of undeserved attention in the early race for the 2020 Democratic primaries.

So let’s take a look. Here is the past 90 days of Google Trends for Beto O’Rourke:

Hmmm. Not much action there for Beto following the election, so let’s zoom in to just the past 30 days:

Still not much. A couple of little blips, but basically flat for the past month. So how does that compare to other potential candidates for 2020?

That’s better! Over the past month Beto is right up there with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a bit ahead of Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. Whether he can keep this up after the mini-war is over is another thing entirely. We’ll see.

UPDATE: The original version of this post used a Google Trends chart showing that Beto O’Rourke was getting less attention than any of the others. It’s been corrected.

From Stacey Mortensen, executive director of the Altamont commuter rail system in San Jose:

No matter how you look at it, Merced will be the northern point of high-speed rail for quite some time. So we need to get there. We are trying to be part of the solution.

Behold California’s bullet train. A thing of beauty, is it not?

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll is out. I wonder if Donald Trump has gotten tired of so much winning yet?

We all know Donald Trump lies a lot. But this is pathological:

Speaking to members of the military during his surprise trip overseas this week, President Trump spoke about the raises they received. “You haven’t gotten one in more than 10 years — more than 10 years,” he said Wednesday. “And we got you a big one. I got you a big one. I got you a big one.”

He continued: “They said: ‘You know, we could make it smaller. We could make it 3 percent. We could make it 2 percent. We could make it 4 percent.’ I said: ‘No. Make it 10 percent. Make it more than 10 percent.’ ”

It’s one thing to say this at, say, a press conference or something. But Trump repeated this nonsense to the actual troops it applies to. If there’s anyone in the world who knows he’s lying, it’s these guys. They know they haven’t gotten a 10 percent raise, but they have to stand at attention anyway and listen to their commander-in-chief BS them about it.

For the record, the 2017 pay increase (for 2018) was 2.4 percent. The 2018 increase (for 2019) was 2.6 percent. Adjusted for inflation, they’re both pretty close to zero.

Here’s a cute little chipmunk at the top of Snow Summit. I saw him dive into a burrow when I got close, so I sat down, focused the camera, and waited for him to come out. Sure enough, he got bored quickly and emerged to pose for a few pictures.

Are we due for a recession? One barometer is to simply look at how much we’re all chattering about the possibility of a recession. This is normally calculated using media mentions of the word recession, but that’s old school—and I don’t know where to get that data anyway. So instead, here are two other measures of how much we’re all talking about the economy:

The orange line is an index based on the average daily number of uses of the word recession in the Wall Street Journal. The blue line is the Google Trends chart for recession as a percentage of the Google Trends chart for expansion. It crossed the 50 percent mark two weeks ago.

As you can see, there’s been a slight upward trend in both indexes all year, followed by a huge uptick in December. The Journal index increased by 50 percent in December compared to its average over the previous 11 months, while the Google Trends index soared by 150 percent.

Why is this? Is it because we all get bored during the holiday season and invent things to chatter about? Is it because the stock market has been doing so poorly? Is it because Donald Trump has been whining about the Fed so much? Or is it because we really are getting close to a downturn? Wait and see!

I wasn’t around for yesterday’s discussion, but it must have been pretty exciting.

Yesterday’s discussion of the Liaoning Underwear Index left out one remarkable fact. Nearly three-quarters of men there wear XL and bigger. Not a single one, apparently, deigns to go for S. pic.twitter.com/1FUH2qJl7V

— Simon Rabinovitch (@S_Rabinovitch) December 27, 2018

Cultura via ZUMA

Peter Stone and Greg Gordon of McClatchy’s DC bureau have fresh evidence that Michael Cohen was in Prague after all:

A mobile phone traced to President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen briefly sent signals ricocheting off cell towers in the Prague area in late summer 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign, leaving an electronic record to support claims that Cohen met secretly there with Russian officials, four people with knowledge of the matter say.

During the same period of late August or early September, electronic eavesdropping by an Eastern European intelligence agency picked up a conversation among Russians, one of whom remarked that Cohen was in Prague, two people familiar with the incident said.

There are two things that are interesting about this. First, if it’s true, it’s a huge shot-in-the-arm for the credibility of the entire Steele dossier, where this allegation originated. Second, it means that special counsel Robert Mueller knows about all this and decided to keep it closely held instead of using it in the charge sheet against Cohen.

But why would Mueller want to keep it secret? Well, the alleged purpose of Cohen’s trip to Prague was to visit with Russian intelligence folks in order to come up with a plan for making cash payments to the hackers who were working with Team Trump to take down Hillary Clinton. Even for Mitch McConnell, I assume this would be considered an impeachable offense, and it’s the kind of thing you’d really want to nail down solidly before you make it public. What’s more, I assume—again, if this is true—that Cohen turned over names and dates and Mueller might want some time to see if he can interview any of the people Cohen talked with. Who knows? Maybe one of them will take a flight that makes a refueling stop in Canada someday.

Headlines I never expected to see, part 176 in an ongoing series:

Amazing. The “blob,” as Obama folks called the foreign policy establishment toward the end of their tenure, is even stupider and more obstinate than I ever would have guessed. Do they all secretly get together and watch Fox News every afternoon, or what?

Get. Out. I don’t care if Trump is an idiot or not. If he’s offering the chance to get the hell out of Syria and Afghanistan, tell him he’s a genius and take the deal. Anyone who doesn’t sign on to this loses the privilege of mocking Glenn Greenwald for the rest of their lives.