CHANGE: Merkel, to Survive, Agrees to Border Camps for Migrants.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, who staked her legacy on welcoming hundreds of thousands of migrants into Germany, agreed on Monday to build border camps for asylum seekers and to tighten the border with Austria in a political deal to save her government.

It was a spectacular turnabout for a leader who has been seen as the standard-bearer of the liberal European order but who has come under intense pressure at home from the far right and from conservatives in her governing coalition over her migration policy.

Although the move to appease the conservatives exposed her growing political weakness, Ms. Merkel will limp on as chancellor. For how long is unclear. The nationalism and anti-migrant sentiment that has challenged multilateralism elsewhere in Europe is taking root — fast — in mainstream German politics.

And all it would have taken to prevent that wave of sentiment was for her to have acted sensibly, instead of engaging in suicidal virtue-signaling. And she couldn’t do that.

RIMPAC: An Indonesian Navy guided-missile frigate enters Pearl Harbor in preparation for Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise 2018. Indonesia and several of its neighbors issues with China’s fake islands in the South China Sea.

OH, THAT MURDEROUS GANG OF ILLEGALS: MS-13 is ‘taking over the school,’ one teen warned before she was killed.

The old minivan appeared near the school on a Tuesday morning, its Illinois plates the only thing out of place in the blue-collar suburbs of central Long Island. But as backpack-toting teenagers passed by on their way to Brentwood High, the van’s doors suddenly swung open.

Out sprang members of the violent street gang MS-13, armed with baseball bats.

They attacked three 16-year-old students they suspected of being rivals before driving off. When police spotted the van in the same neighborhood the following afternoon and surrounded it at gunpoint, the MS-13 members were in the midst of trying to abduct a fourth.

“We were going to take him somewhere private and beat him to death,” said Miguel Rivera, 20, according to a Suffolk County indictment.

The Dec. 6 arrests of Rivera and four others thwarted what police say would have been the sixth murder of a Brentwood High School student by MS-13 in less than two years.

Read the whole thing — even though it comes from the Washington Post, which had previously assured me that publicly worrying about MS-13 was a racist dog whistle.

CHANGE: Harvard President Wants To Improve Diversity, Will Actually Visit Trump Country.

Harvard University wants to improve the diversity of its student body, and its newest president, Lawrence Bacow, is even willing to take an extreme step to recruit underrepresented minorities for the Ivy League school: he’s going to Trump country.

According to the Boston Globe, who reported on Bacow’s vision for one of the nation’s most prestigious schools over the weekend, Bacow “is out to shed Harvard’s image as a Northeast enclave for the country’s elite.” To do that, he’s ramping up Harvard’s outreach to the midwest, Rust Belt, and the flyover states. . . .

“The world has changed,” Bacow told the Globe. “We are well-represented already along the coasts. I’m not sure people in the part of the country where I grew up appreciate as much what institutions like this contribute to their welfare as well.”

It’s certainly an effort to applaud, though free speech advocates will be watching Harvard’s outreach program (and the subsequent culture shock) with keen interest. The Ivy League school isn’t a bastion of inclusion, at least when it comes to having center-right ideas.

What’s really sad is that it’s news when Harvard’s president leaves the coasts. But if Bacow’s really serious, he should do a ride-along with Salena Zito and Brad Todd.

HUGH HEWITT COMES OUT IN FAVOR OF JUDGE RAYMOND KETHLEDGE:

The search for Gorsuch 2.0 is underway at the White House. The best choice for the opening is Judge Raymond Kethledge of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. The 51-year-old judge from central casting — just like Neil M. Gorsuch — is not as well-known as front-runner U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh. But the longtime Michigan resident brings political upside to the process that Kavanaugh and several other contenders cannot.

The president sounds like a man who wants a second term, which means keeping his most high-profile and decisive campaign promises. During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump pledged his Supreme Court nominees would be thoroughgoing “originalists” in the mold of Justice Antonin Scalia. So the first question is: Has the nominee ruled steadily in a fashion consistent with the original intent of the Constitution and its amendments and faithful to the statutes passed by the executive and legislative branches?

Kethledge’s record shows that in his case, the answer is a resounding “yes.” He has stood strongly with free exercise rights, siding for example with a church and its volunteers against the Labor Department’s bureaucrats, writing a separate concurrence to emphasize “The Department should tend to what is Caesar’s, and leave the rest alone.” He has an exemplary record on Second Amendment rights, concurring with his colleague Judge Jeffrey Sutton’s declaration of the right to bear arms as “fundamental” in a crucial en banc case on the amendment. Kethledge has also dissented in a Fifth Amendment takings case from the decision of his colleagues to punt back an aggrieved party to state court in a way he concluded indicated that the court had “lost our constitutional bearings” on property rights. . . .

Kethledge is also not another Harvard Law or Yale Law attendee , and with eight of those remaining on the court — Ruth Bader Ginsburg got her J.D. from Columbia , but her first two years were spent in Cambridge — the University of Michigan Law School credential sends an important message to the country.

Yes, the Harvard/Yale duopoly on the Court needs to change.

HUH: Nevada Traffic Deaths Plunge 10% Following Marijuana Legalization.

Correlation is not causation of course, but this report would seem to counter at least one anti-legalization worry.

BLUE ON BLUE: Starbucks Urged to Pay for Police Training, Change Hiring Practices.

The report was released Monday by Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and Heather McGhee, distinguished senior fellow of the think tank Demos.

The pair came on as advisers to Starbucks after an incident in April when a store manager in Philadelphia called the police after two black men who hadn’t purchased anything didn’t leave the store when asked.

Ms. Ifill and Ms. McGhee urged Starbucks to revamp how it hires, trains and promotes staff, including evaluating managers on goals around “cultural competency and management of diverse teams.”

“Bluntly, some managers and even corporate leadership may not have a future with the company under the new standards,” they wrote.

“Cultural competency” sounds like HR’s revenge for all the awful things everybody else says behind their backs.

THE HILL: Dem generation gap widens.

Socialism is the Axe Body Spray of political ideologies: It never does what it claims to do, but people too young to know better keep buying it anyway.

MAYBE THIS WILL TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE: College student sues woman for $6million claiming her false rape accusation at a frat party has destroyed his life.

Catherine Reddington, 22, has claimed repeatedly via social media that Alex Goldman raped her following a party in April last year at Syracuse University’s Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity in upstate New York.

She informed police and the university of the rape accusations in the days after the party and has taken to social media several times in the past month to reveal the details of her alleged assault.

Goldman, also 22, was expelled from Syracuse University after the claims surfaced and more recently was fired from his summer internship with an engineering firm when his accuser informed them of the allegations.

He was never arrested or charged over the incident.

‘During the early hours of April 23, 2017 I was raped and sodomized. I woke up in Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity in Alex Goldman’s bed confused, bloody, bruised, with ripped clothing and splinter,’ Reddington wrote on Facebook on June 4.

‘Alex Goldman is a rapist.’

A police investigation into the allegations found no evidence that Reddington had been raped or even had a sexual encounter with Goldman that night.

The investigation, which involved a medical exam and rape kit within 26 hours of the alleged incident, found Reddington had no internal cuts or abrasions in her vagina and that there was no traces of Goldman’s DNA.

Six million dollars would be nice, but where does Goldman go to get his reputation back?

GOOD ADVICE. Israel To US: Don’t Sell F-35s To Turkey. “Until the roll-out ceremony of the first Turkish F-35 last week, many in the Israeli defense establishment were sure that Washington would stop the sale. Now that it’s unclear if the US will act, official Israeli sources are speaking out: ‘Turkey is a member of NATO on paper only, and now cooperates with countries that are against the U.S., not only in words. This delivery is something that Israel cannot understand’.”

Me either.

UNHINGED: New York Times: Hey, Let’s Kill The First Amendment. It’s Helping Conservatives Too Much.

TONI AIRAKSINEN: Stanford U. Teaches ‘Male Privilege’ With Its ‘Men and Masculinities Project.’ “We acknowledge that male identity is a social privilege, and the aim for this project is to provide the education and support needed to better the actions of the male community rather than marginalize others.”

We can’t have men feeling good about themselves when their are so many “aggrieved” people who prefer misery for themselves and others.

SCIENCE: Some science journals that claim to peer review papers do not do so: One estimate puts the number of papers in questionable journals at 400,000.

BECAUSE THE DEMOCRATS KEEP TELLING THEM THEY’RE THE ENEMY? WHY YOUNG WHITE MEN ARE ABANDONING THE DEMOCRATS.

Democrats are clearly yet to come to terms with their defeat in the 2016 presidential election. Since then, the party has devoted a great deal of energy to pushing allegations of Russian meddling – a story of little interest to ordinary voters, who have long since accepted the outcome of a fair and free election. Similarly, baseless and shrill accusations that Trump is a fascist have clearly been ineffective in drumming up support for an alternative. Opposition to Trump is one thing, but most voters are none the wiser as to what the Democrats actually stand for.

But while the Democrats may be uninspiring to millennials as a whole, the party is actively alienating young, white men. Today’s identity politics is impossible for millennials to avoid, whether they are confronted with it on campus or through clickbait comment pieces. In the identitarian worldview, ‘white men’ are responsible for all the world’s woes – the phrases ‘white people’ and ‘white men’ are practically shorthand for evil. Listicles reveal the ‘37 things white people need to stop ruining in 2018’, magazines declare that ‘white men must be stopped’, while even respectable outlets like the Washington Post ask ‘why can’t we hate white men?’.

Just don’t expect them to love you in response.

THIS DAY IN HISTORY: Pickett’s Charge. It … uh … didn’t work.

THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED. Hey, look: It’s Jordan Peterson and Boy George facing off over HuffPost’s 10-year-old drag queen.

Perhaps there’s a glimmer of hope for sanity to prevail, however. Amazingly, Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life remains #1 most read on Amazon.

TWO WASHINGTON POSTS IN ONE!

● Shot:

Will Democratic outrage finally eat itself? The Washington Post’s Michael Scherer, arguing that hysteria over Donald Trump may well start backfiring on them. Last week’s retirement of Anthony Kennedy has created an environment of such high drama within the Beltway and the media bubble that it threatens to fracture the party from just about everyone and everywhere else.

—”WaPo: Dems about to outrage themselves out of midterm win,” Ed Morrissey, Hot Air, today.

● Chaser:

On Sunday’s AM Joy, MSNBC contributor and Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin declared that Sarah Huckabee Sanders deserves a “life sentence” of being harassed publicly as she asserted that the White House press secretary “has no right to live a life of no fuss, no muss” because of her negative interactions with the press.

—“Rubin: Sarah Huckabee Sanders Should Be Harassed Publicly as a ‘Life Sentence,’” Brad Wilmouth, NewsBusters, yesterday.

All the left has to do is not be crazy, and they can’t even do that, to coin a phrase.

WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES: Chicago-based medical association cancels San Francisco convention.

San Francisco’s last Republican mayor left office a month before the Beatles landed at JFK.

(Classical reference in headline.)

Update: What a town — ’20 pounds of human waste’ dropped on San Francisco street corner, the San Francisco Chronicle reports today.

CHANGE: Libertarian Party Adopts New Sex Work Plank, Becomes Only Notable U.S. Party to Endorse Prostitution Decriminalization: The LP’s move comes the same week the Green Party explicitly rejected a platform that protects sex worker rights. The Greens aren’t about liberty or free enterprise.

OPEN THREAD: Make it a great one.

I GOT EXCITED FOR A MINUTE BEFORE I REALIZED THIS WASN’T ABOUT THE SPACE FORCE: HII contracted for additional materials for USS Enterprise construction.

THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST IS TURNING INTO A DUMPSTER FIRE: Measles case confirmed in Portland, about 500 people possibly exposed.

ANDREW KLAVAN ON THE TOXIC RACE-MONGERING OF THE LEFT:

Imagine a world in which leftists, by some magic, were unable to accuse their political opponents of racism. Racism, sexism, all of the various make-believe phobias — these charges were suddenly somehow off-limits during political discussion. Instead, at all the leftist venues — The New York Times, the TV network news departments, CNN and the rest — the commentators had to accept that their political opponents were people of good will with the best interests of the country at heart. They had to ask themselves — and even possibly ask actual conservatives — what it was about border security that seemed important to them, why social spending might be destructive, why Islam might be incompatible with western thought, why teachers’ unions were impeding the rise of the poor and so on.

If that magical moment ever occurred, we might start to have an intelligent political debate in this country. But don’t hold your breath.

Read the whole thing.

LUKE ROSIAK IS ON TOP OF THIS STORY, BUT ALMOST EVERYONE ELSE IS IGNORING IT FOR SOME REASON: In Newly Obtained Memo, Congress’ Top Cop Said House Democratic Caucus Server VANISHED.

A secret memo marked “URGENT” detailed how the House Democratic Caucus’s server went “missing” soon after it became evidence in a cybersecurity probe. The secret memo also said more than “40 House offices may have been victims of IT security violations.”

In the memo, Congress’s top law enforcement official, Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving, along with Chief Administrative Officer Phil Kiko, wrote, “We have concluded that the employees [Democratic systems administrator Imran Awan and his family] are an ongoing and serious risk to the House of Representatives, possibly threatening the integrity of our information systems and thereby members’ capacity to serve constituents.”

The memo, addressed to the Committee on House Administration (CHA) and dated Feb. 3, 2017, was recently reviewed and transcribed by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The letter bolsters TheDCNF’s previous reporting about the missing server and evidence of fraud on Capitol Hill.

It details how the caucus server, run by then-caucus Chairman Rep. Xavier Becerra, was secretly copied by authorities after the House Inspector General (IG) identified suspicious activity on it, but the Awans’ physical access was not blocked.

And by “for some reason,” I mean: