WHEN HE’S RIGHT, HE’S RIGHT: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg says the social network should not be ‘censoring politicians.’

DOMESTIC BLISS: Verbal ‘Shots Fired’ at Kellyanne Conway’s House After Her Husband Goes After HER on Twitter.

LET’S NOT: AOC Extends an ‘Olive Branch’ to GOP: ‘Let’s Go Retro’ on Taxing the Rich.

NO. DHS wants to expand airport face recognition scans to include US citizens.

Related: China Takes Another Step into ‘1984.’ “Every Chinese who updates his cellular service will have a 3-D mathematical model of his face uploaded into China’s massive surveillance system. Combined with ‘social credit,’ it will be damn near impossible for anyone to get away with anything. Worse than sci-fi notions of jailing people for ‘precrime,’ the Chinese system reduces people’s private space to virtually nil. Everything is recorded, and the algorithms connecting individuals to actions will be unbeatable for a regime as brutal as Xi’s.”

That’s from my latest VIP column for PJMedia. If you’ve been thinking about becoming a member, the promo code VODKAPUNDIT is good for a nice little discount.

YOUR PHONE BELONGS TO THE STATE, COMRADE: Putin signs law making Russian apps mandatory on smartphones, computers.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Cops Should Do a Wellness Check on Woman In Peloton Christmas Ad. “Honestly, after weeks of nothing but impeachment news, Peloton may have just saved America’s collective sanity by letting this be the focus of a post-long weekend Monday. This fictional frightened woman’s yearlong journey to lose the 14 ounces of water weight that her husband the good Doctor Mengele insists she musts is the Christmas miracle that a news-weary world needs.”

I just watched the ad, and the creep factor is off the charts.

BRICKS & MORTAR: Retailers Revamp Staffing as Fewer Shoppers Visit Stores.

Some chains, including Target, Walmart and Best Buy Co., have posted strong sales in recent years by adapting to the shift to online shopping. They use their stores to handle deliveries or convince shoppers to pick up orders rather than wait for an Amazon.com Inc. package.

Target says it now sources 80% of its online orders from stores, not warehouses. At the Brooklyn store around 80 workers handle internet orders, collecting products from shelves or putting items into boxes in the backroom for delivery.

Target retrained the bulk of its 300,000 year-round U.S. workers over the past year, giving them new titles and responsibilities. The Minneapolis, Minn.-based retailer hopes to mold each into an expert for a specific area of the store such as the beauty department, toys or online fulfillment to offer better customer service and use labor spending more efficiently.

Keeping staffers in the stores smartly avoids a common death spiral. Stores cut back on staffers because fewer people are coming in, but fewer people come in because there’s no one there to assist them.

HMM: FaceApp Went Viral. Now the FBI Is Calling It a ‘Potential Counterintelligence Threat.’

“A warning to share with your family & friends: This year when millions were downloading FaceApp, I asked the FBI if the app was safe,” Schumer tweeted Monday afternoon. “Well, the FBI just responded. And they told me any app or product developed in Russia like FaceApp is a potential counterintelligence threat.”

Schumer’s tweet accompanied a letter from the FBI in which it didn’t necessarily call FaceApp a counterintelligence threat, but did say that, like all other Russian apps, it could pose problems.

“Russia’s intelligence services maintain robust cyber exploitation capabilities as evidenced by, for example, Russia’s surveillance system, the System of Operative Search Measures, which allows the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) to obtain telephonic and online communications via direct communication to Internet service providers (ISP),” the FBI wrote. “In other words, the FSB can remotely access all communications and servers on Russian networks without making a request to ISPs.”

That’s a potential problem for anyone in Russia, let alone an app developer. The FBI noted in the letter to Sen. Schumer that the company “removes most of its photos from its servers 48 hours after submission.” The agency also said that it stores, “according to FaceApp,” its data in the United States, Singapore, Ireland, and Australia. But as long as someone is in Russia, where anything from user credentials to cloud servers to their own traffic, can be intercepted, anything can happen.

Cold War II has all kinds of parameters we could hardly even have imagined during the first go-’round.

BUZZKILL: Men who smoke marijuana daily may be more likely to get testicular cancer.

HEH: ‘OK, boomer’? Pay the bills, support a family, then we’ll talk.

WHAT WOULD HE KNOW? HE WAS MERELY ON THE CALL, RATHER THAN THE SUPERIOR HEARSAY EVIDENCE SUBMITTED TO CONGRESS: Ukraine President Zelensky Says (Again) There Was No Quid Pro Quo.

TO BE FAIR, SO DO CONSERVATIVES, LIBERTARIANS, MODERATES, AND INDEPENDENTS: Liberals Hate Michael Bloomberg.

WHAT, ARE THEY INSANE? Psychiatrists Organize Campaign to Declare Trump ‘Dangerous,’ Back Impeachment.

OH: Buttigieg Agrees That Illegal Aliens Are ‘Reclaiming Stolen Land.’

CHANGE: Brent Oil Set to Disappear as Crude-Price Benchmark Lives On.

Royal Dutch Shell PLC is expected next year to plug the last remaining Brent oil wells, located in the North Sea’s East Shetland Basin, about 115 miles northeast of Scotland’s Shetland Islands. The closures mark the end of an era, as the industry shifts its focus to smaller oil finds near existing infrastructure.

Many companies are shutting down platforms above massive fields discovered in the 1970s, but Brent stands apart as one of the first and most significant of these finds. The field has generated billions of dollars for Shell, its partner in the field, Exxon Mobil Corp. and the U.K. government.

In the late 1980s, Brent crude became the benchmark on which most of the world’s oil is priced and is still used to set the price of the multi-trillion dollar Intercontinental Exchange Brent futures market.

Keep on frackin’.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for December 2, 2019. “Biden noms his wife in public, an ex-staffer reveals how badly Camp Harris sucks, Sestak drops Out (or at least stops pretending he was in), Gabbard weaponizes Joe Rogan, and New Hampshire voters beg Tom Steyer to make it stop.”

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Samantha Power Rails Against Iranian Regime She Once Helped Bail Out.

DIDN’T HE JUST LEAVE A POWERFUL POSITION IN A DEMOCRATIC ADMINISTRATION? John Kerry launches coalition to fight climate crisis: ‘We are way behind.’

WELL, BYE: China Suspends Hong Kong Port Calls by US Military After Trump Signs Democracy Act.

SEEN ON FACEBOOK:

UH-HUH: Lisa Page: ‘There’s No Fathomable Way That I Have Committed Any Crime at All.’

HULK OUT: Clueless Millionaire Calls for End of Capitalism, Says It’s ‘Killing Us.’

HISTORY: Why Founder James Wilson supported the Electoral College over a ‘national popular vote.’

TWITTER: Twitter Permanently Suspends Accounts of Ilhan Omar’s Potential Challenger.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Hey Democrats — It’s Too Late To House Train Crazy Joe the Wonder Veep. “If Biden were your uncle or grandfather, the family would be having a difficult but necessary conversation about getting him some full-time care. This guy needs a nurse, not priority access to weapons of mass destruction. He’s at the point where he probably shouldn’t even be trusted with metal utensils during meals.”