KURT SCHLICHTER: Read My Lips: Schumer Is Playing You For A Fool, Mr. President. The last guy to make an immigration deal with Schumer was Marco Rubio. That deal is why Trump is President, not Rubio. There’s a lesson there, probably.

UPDATE: Don Surber: No, Trump Did Not Cave. “Pelosi and Schumer jumped the gun because they hope to gain leverage in a situation in which the president holds the trump card.” If that’s true, they miscalculated, since the reaction should serve to remind Trump that his presidency will fail if he gives up on this issue.

SOONER, PLEASE: Pentagon Preps to Destroy Enemy ICBMs in 2030.

The Missile Defense Agency’s first-ever successful intercept of an ICBM target using a Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, using the kinetic force of an Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) to destroy the target, is paving the way toward advanced future kill vehicles able to discern and attack multiple approaching threats, industry and Pentagon officials said.

During the test, an ICBM-class target was launched from the Reagan Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, a Missile Defense Agency statement said.

“Multiple sensors provided target acquisition and tracking data to the Command, Control, Battle Management and Communication (C2BMC) system,” the statement added.

The intercept, taking place over the Pacific Ocean, used X-band radar to track the target for using a fire control solution to destroy the ICBM.

All of this is seen by developers as a crucial step toward a new future system, called Multi-Object Kill Vehicle, or MOKV. It is designed to release from a Ground Based Interceptor and destroy approaching Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs — and also take out decoys traveling alongside the incoming missile threat.

Better still to destroy missiles in their vulnerable boost phase — but that’s also trickier still.

ON THE PLUS SIDE, THERE SHOULD BE NO SHORTAGE OF GUITAR PICKS FOR THE NEXT DECADE: From American Assassin to Hampstead: the worst movies of 2017 (so far).

(Classical reference in headline.)

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 1589: The Better IRS Reform.

DAVID HARSANYI: Reminder: Susan Rice Lied About Her Role In The Obama Admin Unmasking Scandal.

UPDATE: “[I]t sure looks like members of an incoming Republican administration were spied on by a Democratic political operative who happened to find a meeting suspicious.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: iPhone X’s Facial Recognition Fail—and Other Takeaways from Apple’s Big Launch Event.

3D facial recognition will get really useful when it’s on both sides of the phone, so that the camera will be able to perform digital lighting tricks far beyond even the new “Portrait Lighting” feature.

BETSY MCCAUGHEY: Democrats’ latest bid to rig election rules.

Democrats claim Wisconsin’s election map puts them at a disadvantage by packing their voters into too few election districts, “wasting” their votes and allowing Republicans to win the majority of districts.

But the real problem isn’t an unfair map. It’s that Wisconsin Democrats are concentrated in cities. In many states, Democrats tend to win urban voters and do less well with suburban and rural voters. Wisconsin Democrats want the lines redrawn so their urban voters can capture a majority of the state’s legislative seats — and they’re asking the Supreme Court to help them.

It’s a brazen political gambit disguised as fairness. They claim to be victims of gerrymandering — drawing election districts to favor one party. But they’re not opposed to gerrymandering. They just want it to favor them.

They hope a Supreme Court victory will restore their political fortunes after the 2020 Census, when states have to redraw their electoral maps.

If Democrats prevail in court, the nation’s political map could change significantly after the Census, with many statehouses flipped to Democratic control.

Give credit where it’s due: Democrats play hardball, and they play it for keeps.

HAVE YOU HUGGED A FRACKER TODAY? Even When OPEC Wins, It Loses.

In August, for the first time in four months, OPEC finally managed to follow through on its promises when its production fell from the previous month’s totals. The drop was modest—just 79,000 barrels per day—and it was driven in large part by Libya’s continued struggles to get its output back online, but starting the slide in production is an accomplishment. 79,000 bpd won’t cut it, but on the demand side there’s more working in the favor of a rebalanced market, as OPEC expects oil demand will increase by more than previously expected in 2018.

However OPEC may be like the dog chasing the car, not sure what it would do if it ever caught it: if prices do rise with any real significance as a result of the cartel’s actions, it will be American shale producers, not petrostates, that will be quickest to pounce. Fracking occurs on a smaller scale, and it’s easier to ramp up (or down, as the case may be) as a result of global prices. And U.S. suppliers aren’t just capable of seizing the opportunity for a rebound, they’re chomping at the bit—low oil prices have put a significant dent in the shale boom, and there’s already a backlog (or “fracklog”) of drilled but not yet completed wells just waiting for the economics to change.

Well, darn.

ENROUTE TO THE KUIPER BELT: The New Horizons spacecraft wakes up, for awhile.

FLASHBACK FROM ANDREW MCCARTHY: Where Would Trump Be If He Had Run as What He Is: the Amnesty Candidate?

PROGRESSIVISM IS HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH:  The Corruption of Public Health. Of all the crazy left-wing junk-science crusades I’ve written about, the war on vaping is the craziest. Progressives are effectively protecting Big Tobacco and Big Pharma by misleading the public about the risks of vaping, as I write in City Journal:

How could a profession dedicated to health oppose the most promising method of saving smokers’ lives? The immediate answer involves progressive activists whom the Obama administration appointed to government health agencies; with the change of administrations, their departure gives Republicans a chance to undo the damage. But the vaping story is part of a much bigger and longer-running scandal. It is the most flagrant example of how a once-noble enterprise became corrupted by ideology and self-dealing.

The public-health profession now cares about more growing government than promoting solid research or public health. Millions of lives could be saved if smokers switched to e-cigarettes or smokeless tobacco, but when it comes to nicotine, progressives insist on an abstinence-only policy (also known as “quit or die”) rather than the “harm-reduction” approach they promote for heroin addicts.

This inconsistency can be explained partly by the Left’s preferences in virtue-signaling. Like fundamentalists who object to dancing because it looks like sex, they’re repulsed by vaping because it looks like smoking. A more cynical explanation is the difference in employment opportunities for public-health workers and bureaucrats. There’s no role for them when people get nicotine through snus or e-cigarettes, but they can get jobs running needle exchanges and antismoking campaigns. Prohibitionist activists have received long-running support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which helped create the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids (a leader of the anti-vaping movement) and has spent nearly $700 million toward its goal of a “tobacco-free society.”

Republicans have a chance to to combine sound science and good politics by protecting the 10 million American vapers, a demographic that’s projected to double in the next decade. “These contemptuous nanny-state jerks want to take away the products that are saving their lives,” says Grover Norquist, the GOP strategist. “Believe me, this is a vote-moving issue.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: The Latest (Dim, Distant) Hope for Health-Care Reform.

The latest bedside miracle is the Graham-Cassidy-Heller proposal, which would cut spending, cap spending, and shift spending away from states that expanded Medicaid to those that haven’t. At the same time, it would give states considerable discretion to design local solutions for health-care provision, something that, as I’ve noted before, is likely to be the key to getting us out of the morass in which we’re currently mired with Obamacare.

Is this the turn? Has the fever broken? Or is this just a stalling tactic, before more agonizing months and years, before the patient is finally pronounced truly and utterly dead?

Well, the political math certainly looks difficult. Republicans hold a majority in both houses, but their Senate majority is narrow enough to give them precious little wiggle room when it comes to passing a bill. Considering that Rand Paul has already been pretty negative about the bill, that wiggle will have to be more like a tremor: If Rand won’t back the proposal, they’ll need either Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski, who have so far proven unwilling to vote for previous iterations of GOP reform ideas.

Moreover, they’re going to have to shimmy pretty quick. This bill is not, needless to say, going to garner Democratic votes. Democrats don’t want to do anything to Obamacare except pour more money into it.

When all you have is somebody else’s checkbook, everything looks like a spending problem.

THEY FAILED, SO THEY DESERVE MORE POWER: The Equifax security breach happened on the CFPB’s watch, which has been regulating credit reporting bureaus since 2012. Yet despite this failure, progressives are arguing that the breach proves that the Senate should allow the Bureau to go ahead with a power grab aimed at enabling more trial lawyer shakedowns. Will GOP Senators grab this opportunity to vote for more bureaucracy and more money for their political opponents? I don’t even know why I bother to ask the question…

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University promises ‘disciplinary action’ for students who engage in ‘hateful demonstrations.’ Campus official implies that ‘hate speech’ is not protected by the First Amendment. Anyone that constitutionally illiterate should be fired from a position of any responsibility.

Related: Professors told to report students who make campus ‘less inclusive’ to Behavior Assessment Team.

Weird how polls show that Americans have a lower opinion of higher ed than they used to.

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BAAD: A B-2 Spirit sits on the flight-line at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam. BAAD is an acronym for Bomber Assurance and Deterrence Deployment.

The military has a lot of acronyms. It also uses a lot of jargon and slang. This guidebook will help those unfamiliar with milspeak.

BRUCE BAWER: Rewarding Terrorists in the Nordic Countries.

HMM: Trump Denies He Made A Deal With Democrats On DREAMer Protections.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A lot of folks have come out of meetings with Trump thinking they had a deal, only to find they were wrong. That may be what happened here, or the Dems may have been trying to spin the press coverage. Stay tuned and don’t believe every headline.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. On authoritarianism, Hillary Clinton was the greater threat.

When Hillary Clinton, who was almost our president, riffed on President Trump and what she saw as his “authoritarianism” she displayed an odd definition of the idea. She said that at the “core” of authoritarianism is “to sow mistrust toward exact the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence…”

So, authoritarianism involves sowing distrust in the people in power?

Clinton fitting invokedly Orwell in her perverse definition of authoritarianism. We could wave off her backwards understanding to sloppiness or partisanship. But this is a small shadow of something far bigger: Clinton has a fundamentally authoritarian mindset, and she had built around her a circle of sycophants who enabled that mindset.

Events since the election have confirmed my suspicion during the campaign that, whichever of the two major party candidates would be worse overall, Hillary Clinton was the greater threat on the score of authoritarianism.

This was obvious to anyone who was paying attention.

THE HILL CALLS THEM “ACTIVISTS:” Antifa Terrorists Say Violence is Necessary. It’s sad but the quality of journalism at The Hill seems to have been declining lately.

IT’S COMPLICATED: Is there really a Turkey-Iran rapprochement?

A number of common concerns have recently emerged between Turkey and Iran, which has facilitated the recent thaw in relations. Two factors have been particularly important.

First of all, the struggle to establish a post-Arab Spring regional order has generated anxiety in both Ankara and Tehran. The most obvious manifestation of this struggle was on full display during the latest Gulf crisis. Neither Iran nor Turkey regarded this crisis as an isolated confrontation between Qatar and the Gulf-Arab coalition.

The Saudi-Emirati-Egyptian axis is trying to establish a new regional order supported by the Trump administration and Israel, and condoned by countries like Jordan. The logical other of this alliance is political Islam, and by extension Turkey, and the publicly announced enemy is Iran. Therefore, this new regional order, if imposed, would be detrimental to the interests of both regional powers.

If there’s one thing both nations share, it’s disdain for their Arab neighbors — and I suspect that someday Turkey will use Iran’s nuclear program (or a theoretical Saudi bomb) as a justification for its own.

POLAND STANDS UP TO THE GERMANS: Poland could seek war reparations from Germany, say parliament researchers. This is a response to Merkel’s bullying over refugee policy, I think. It’s not likely to go anywhere, but it’s enough to give the Germans a sour stomach.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Freshmen say Clemson safe space is ‘divisive,’ ‘misguided.’