THIS IS LIKELY TO ATTRACT SCANT SYMPATHY IN THE HEARTLAND: Federal Workers Worry About Their Jobs Under Trump.

HEH: Troops sour on Mattis nomination after he releases 6,000-book reading list.

JUST A NUMBER: IMDB seeks injunction against law that prevents it from posting actors’ ages.

While IMDb insists that it “shares the worthy goal of preventing age discrimination,” it claims that the law “does not advance, much less achieve, that goal.”

Now, a week after the January 1 deadline to remove actor ages from its site, IMDb is taking things a step further, and has in fact made a court filing to request a preliminary injunction stopping the Attorney General of California from enforcing the law.

“Rather than properly passing laws designed to address the root problem of age discrimination, the state of California has chosen instead to chill free speech and to undermine access to factual information of public interest,” the Amazon subsidiary said in a Thursday court filing. The law “plainly violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and cannot be enforced.”

But if you think of California lawmakers as Hollywood operatives with a (D) after their names, it all makes sense.

“WHAT CHANGED BETWEEN AUGUST AND JANUARY?” he asked rhetorically.

THINKPROGRESS SENIOR EDITOR IS SCARED OF HIS PLUMBER:

A visit from a plumber left ThinkProgress senior editor Ned Resnikoff “rattled” due to fear that the plumber may have voted for Donald Trump.

Resnikoff stated his fears in a November Facebook post, a screenshot of which is now making the rounds on the Internet.

The plumbing visit, which came four days after the 2016 election, became a harrowing experience for Resnikoff even though the plumber was “a perfectly nice guy and a consummate professional.”

“He was a perfectly nice guy and a consummate professional,” Resnikoff shared. “But he was also a middle-aged white man with a southern accent who seemed unperturbed by this week’s news.”

Resnikoff said his fear was rooted in the chance that the plumber knew he was Jewish.

“While I had him in the apartment, I couldn’t stop thinking about whether he had voted for Trump, whether he knew my last name is Jewish, and how that knowledge might change the interaction we were having inside my own home,” he said.

The “uncertainty” of the situation left Resnikoff “rattled for some time.”

“I have no real reason to believe he was a Trump supporter or an anti-Semite, but in my uncertainty I couldn’t shake the sense of potential danger,” he wrote. “I was rattled for some time after he left.”

Sheesh, what is it with the left being utterly paranoid about plumbers at the end of hard-fought presidential election? To be fair though, this plumber probably is a crypto-Russian sympathizer as well. Joe McCarthy says they’re everywhere, you know.

UPDATE: If Resnikoff wants to vet all of his tradesmen for ideological purity, I wonder if he realizes he just lived out the end of Saturday Night Live’s post-election “The Bubble” sketch?

THAT’S (NOT) ENTERTAINMENT: The Serious Problem with Prioritizing Race at the Golden Globes.

WELL, SPEAKING AS SOMEONE WHO’S ACTUALLY BEEN CRUCIFIED, I HAVE TO SAY IT’S NO PICNIC. Students In College Bible Class Get Trigger Warning, Permission To Skip Studying Crucifixion Of Jesus Christ.

MEDIA ETHICS (ASSUMING THEY EXIST): Grand Theft Journalism, as dissected by Tom Kuntz at RealClear Investigations:

If, as is widely alleged, agents of the Russian government performed the hacking of Democrats’ emails to sway the presidential election, the press needs to ask if it can have it both ways. Is it appropriate to publish knowing you may be a tool of a hostile foreign government and only later decry its perfidious intent?

Few questions are harder to answer. A basic journalistic instinct is to verify the information and then publish, even if you can’t establish the source. But is that good enough in an age when authoritarian states like Russia and North Korea are or might be the sources? If Snowden was working for Russia, as some believe, should that change the decision to publish stories based on his leaks of American intelligence secrets?

(Let’s pause here to contemplate the irony of progressives who celebrate Snowden yet bay for Russia’s blood over election-year hacking activities – and those on the right suddenly warming to the previously loathed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for denying Russian involvement.)

Actually, the ethics are quite clear: Our side gets leaks from patriots. Their side consorts with thieves and thugs.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Of Class And Classes: If you want to help poor kids get ahead, then you need to support school choice. “The long knives have come out for Education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos. But her critics aren’t attacking her because they think she’ll do a bad job. They’re attacking her because they’re afraid she’ll do a good job. But I think that her success will be important, if you care about addressing inequality in America.”

ROGER SIMON: Iran Shows Obama, Not Trump, Putin’s Biggest Lackey.

CHINA’S NAVAL AVIATION PROGRAM: One step at a time.

There is no fast-track to creating a carrier aviation capability and the Chinese apparently understood that from the beginning.

HATERS GONNA HATE: A Window Into A Depraved Culture. Heather Mac Donald in City Journal on the Chicago Facebook torturers:

We live in Ta-Nehesi Coates’s America, characterized by the assumption that blacks are the eternal targets of lethal white oppression. Coates’s central thesis in Between the World and Me, his acclaimed phantasmagoria of racial victimology, is that America continuously aspires to the “shackling” and “destruction” of “black bodies.”

Chicago’s four torturers certainly have not read Between the World and Me. But the book’s worldview echoes throughout our society, including in the inner city.

Read the whole thing.

ANDREW JACKSON AS DONALD TRUMP’S MUSE: An intriguing essay.

Five of Donald Trump’s biggest campaign promises were also made by Andrew Jackson. So let’s keep score. Did Jackson actually keep his promises when he got into office? How did it all work out? And what can Jackson’s presidency teach us about what a Trump presidency might be like?

BIG DEAL, THAT’S LESS THAN TWICE WHAT I DEADLIFT: Watch very strong man Bryce Harper deadlift 505 pounds. To be fair, it’s not a true deadlift, but a “deadsquat,” which is a bit easier because the weight is in the same plane as your legs.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Prepare Yourself for the Trump Administration With an ‘Anti-Oppression Cleanse.’ One might hope that such a cleanse would involve discarding toxic lefty ideas, but any such hope would be in vain.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: College Progressives Try to Label Conservative Students as ‘Hate Group’

Wait, I thought dissent was patriotic again.

THIS IS FROM BEFORE THE ELECTION, BUT STILL VALUABLE: The Original Underclass: Poor white Americans’ current crisis shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has.

As Isenberg documents, the lower classes have been disregarded and shunted off for as long as the United States has existed. But the separation has grown considerably in recent years. The elite economy is more concentrated than ever in a handful of winner-take-all cities—as Phillip Longman recently noted in the Washington Monthly, the per capita income of Washington, D.C., in 1980 was 29 percent above the average for Americans as a whole; in 2013, that figure was 68 percent. In the Bay Area, per capita income jumped from 50 percent to 88 percent above average over that period; in New York, from 80 percent to 172 percent. As these gaps have grown, the highly educated have become far more likely than those lower down the ladder to move in search of better-paying jobs. . . .

So why are white Americans in downwardly mobile areas feeling a despair that appears to be driving stark increases in substance abuse and suicide? In my own reporting in Vance’s home ground of southwestern Ohio and ancestral territory of eastern Kentucky, I have encountered racial anxiety and antagonism, for sure. But far more striking is the general aura of decline that hangs over towns in which medical-supply stores and pawn shops dominate decrepit main streets, and Victorians stand crumbling, unoccupied. Talk with those still sticking it out, the body-shop worker and the dollar-store clerk and the unemployed miner, and the fatalism is clear: Things were much better in an earlier time, and no future awaits in places that have been left behind by polished people in gleaming cities. The most painful comparison is not with supposedly ascendant minorities—it’s with the fortunes of one’s own parents or, by now, grandparents. The demoralizing effect of decay enveloping the place you live cannot be underestimated. And the bitterness—the “primal scorn”—that Donald Trump has tapped into among white Americans in struggling areas is aimed not just at those of foreign extraction. It is directed toward fellow countrymen who have become foreigners of a different sort, looking down on the natives, if they bother to look at all.

I recently read J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, and I’m currently reading Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash. I think this is a good review of both. And boy, you really see that the “deplorables” language has a long pedigree. As do actions intended to get rid of the deplorables.

THE HEAT IS OFF: Donald Trump’s Win Is Punishing Gun Company Stocks.

The firearms industry loses its greatest salesman on January 20.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Officials could lower bar for passing new NY teacher exam.

PIERS MORGAN: Sorry, Meryl but that hypocritical anti-Trump rant was easily the worst performance of your career (apart from that time you gave a child rapist a standing ovation).

Related: Kellyanne Conway: ‘I didn’t hear Meryl Streep give a shout out to the mentally challenged boy tortured on Facebook.’ My goodness, she really puts the knife in here. Watch the video at the link: This is not your father’s GOP.

UPDATE: From the comments: “When you’re so stupidly pompous that Piers Morgan calls you on it… well, there’s your lifetime achievement award right there.”

Plus several people saying that the lefty hysteria over Trump is bringing them around to being pro-Trump. Yes, Hollywood will help cement the Trump 2020 coalition. . . .

UPDATE: Yep:

ANOTHER UPDATE: You know, I think people are beginning to question Hollywood’s authority. UFC’s Dana White fires back at ‘uppity 80-year-old’ Meryl Streep after MMA, NFL dig.

MORE: From the comments:

MOB RULE: Rough ride for Uber as Morocco cabbies sabotage app.

As their smartphone screens lit up with ride requests last month, Uber drivers in the Moroccan city of Casablanca must have thought that business was booming.

Instead, they found themselves surrounded by irate local taxi drivers, who forced them from their vehicles and handed them over to the police, the latest in a string of protests in the kingdom against the controversial travel app.

“After the tramway, illegal drivers and now Uber, they are trying to kill us off,” said Abdelouahed, who works for a small local taxi firm.

Uber launched in Morocco’s economic hub in 2015 but was banned by local authorities after just one month.

It has recently found itself the target of increasingly brash protests organised by owners of Casablanca’s famous tomato red cabs.

“When you open Uber on your phone, you see drivers swarming around you like a virus,” said Nordine, a fifty-something driver sat on the hood of his taxi.

“And like a virus, you need radical solutions. Trap them.”

If cabs swarmed like a virus to provide immediate and inexpensive service, Uber wouldn’t be necessary. Compounding the problem, every cabbie busy harassing an Uber driver is a cabbie too busy to provide service to a passenger — creating more Uber demand.

Cabbies don’t seem to have thought this through.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Of Class And Classes: If you want to help poor kids get ahead, then you need to support school choice. “The long knives have come out for Education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos. But her critics aren’t attacking her because they think she’ll do a bad job. They’re attacking her because they’re afraid she’ll do a good job. But I think that her success will be important, if you care about addressing inequality in America.”

THIS DEAL KEEPS GETTING WORSE ALL THE TIME: Obama Gifts Iran With Massive Uranium Shipment From Russia Sufficient “For More Than 10 Nuclear Bombs”

In what amounts to an 11th hour “gift” by the outgoing Obama administration to Tehran’s leadership to keep the country, which on Sunday was involved in yet another shooting incident with a US destroyer, content and compliant with Obama’s landmark “Nuclear deal”, the AP reported that Iran is to receive a huge shipment of natural uranium from Russia to compensate it for exporting tons of reactor coolant. The move was approved by the outgoing U.S. administration and other governments “seeking to keep Tehran committed to a landmark nuclear pact.”

AP cites two senior diplomats who said that the transfer which was recently agreed by the U.S. and five other world powers that negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran, foresees delivery of 116 metric tons (nearly 130 tons) of natural uranium. U.N. Security Council approval is needed but a formality, considering five of those powers are permanent Security Council members, they said.

It’s almost like the Allies offering up Danzig to keep Hitler “content” with the Munich Agreement.

THE STATE IS INFALLIBLE, BUT SOMETIMES IT CHANGES ITS MIND: After One-Child Policy, Outrage at China’s Offer to Remove IUDs It Required. “In the eyes of the government, women are labor units. When the country needs you to give birth, you have to do so. And when they don’t need you to give birth, you don’t.” Tom Friedman admires them.

CHICKENS, ROOST: Pandemonium at Mexico’s Gas Pumps.

Through the week, roads across Mexico were blocked by protesters and burning tires, thousands of businesses were ransacked, upward of 1500 people—among them, police officers— were arrested, and at least five people were killed as furious citizens took to the streets following the more than 20 percent price gas hike.

The Mexican government has for years maintained artificially low gas prices in Mexico thanks to massive subsidies that are absorbed by the state, but as of this year that all changes. The cost of fuel will finally be adjusted to conform to real market value. The surge in gas prices is the just first major sign of changes to come, but certainly the most tangible so far.

And Mexicans, clearly, are not happy.

Dozens of videos have appeared online showing mass looting across the country in response to the gasolinazo, as the gas price surge is called—from Sinaloa and neighboring Puebla and Mexico State, all the way to the southernmost state of Chiapas, which shares its border with Guatemala.

Statism: Creating rising prices amidst increasing supply since… ever.