TRUMP SAYS NO DEAL TO NORTH KOREA: Don’t be surprised. I’m certainly not.

“It was all about the sanctions,” Trump said at a news conference after the talks were cut short. “Basically, they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, and we couldn’t do that.”

President Trump knows how to use American power. He’ll only make a deal that benefits the U.S. and its allies. Telling Kim see yah later is another act in his “Coordinated Coercive Diplomacy Operations to Denuclearize the Korean Peninsula.” Until that happens, let dismal North Korea strangle in sanctions.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: California’s Rendezvous With Reality.

California’s progressive government seems clueless how to deal with these issues, given that solutions such as low-cost housing and strict enforcement of health codes are seen as either too expensive or politically incorrect.

In sum, California has no margin for error.

Spiraling entitlements, unwieldy pension costs, money wasted on high-speed rail, inadequate water storage and delivery, and lax immigration policies were formerly tolerable only because about 150,000 Californians paid huge but federally deductible state income taxes.

No more. Californians may have once derided the state’s 1 percent as selfish rich people. Now, they are praying that these heavily burdened taxpayers stay put and are willing to pay far more than what they had paid before.

That is the only way California can continue to spend money on projects that have not led to safe roads, plentiful water, good schools and safe streets.

A California reckoning is on the horizon, and it may not be pretty.

As H.L. Mencken said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

And to prevent that fallout from eventually impacting states such as Nevada and Texas, as the middle class flee California, billionaire GOP contributors and libertarian-types like the Koch Brothers really need to get going on Glenn’s Welcome Wagon idea.

HUH. WHO KNEW? Harvard Law Faculty Use Blogs To Expand Their Influence: ‘The Audience And Impact Per Word Are Large Compared To Traditional Academic Work.’

BUT OF COURSE: European Parliament Mandates Speed Limiters on All New Cars.

UK based Evo.co.uk is reporting that, after approval by key members of the European Parliament of regulations proposed by the European Transport Safety Council, speed limiters and data loggers will now be mandatory equipment on all new cars. The European Parliament’s Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection voted in favor of mandatory vehicle safety standards that could be in force within three years. Negotiations between the Parliament, Member States and the European Commission will determine how the new regulations are implemented.

The speed limiters, which go by the euphemism Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA), use GPS data and possibly traffic sign recognition to determine a road’s speed limit and then limit engine power to match that speed. While it’s possible to just press harder on the accelerator and go faster, if the car exceeds the speed limit for several seconds, an audible warning signal will sound, along with a visual warning displayed until speed is reduced to the legal limit.

The new regulations also mandate data loggers, plus driver assist features like lane warnings and autonomous emergency braking with pedestrian and cyclist detection. It’s not clear if the data loggers would have any privacy protections.

The soft fascists continue their march through Europe.

K.C. JOHNSON: Title IX Has a Cross-Examination Crisis.

The Supreme Court has described cross-examination as the “greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth.” Until recently, that lesson had failed to permeate the nation’s Title IX tribunals. Obama-era guidance “strongly” discouraged direct cross-examination between students accused of sexual assault and those making the accusations. Nearly all colleges and universities went further and prevented lawyers or advocates for the accused from asking questions of witnesses.

Only in the last few weeks have academic leaders explained in detail why they support denying accused students who face the most serious offense to come before most campus tribunals—sexual assault—the procedural protections associated with cross-examination. These arguments appeared in response to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ proposed Title IX regulations, which would mandate live hearings with cross-examination, with questions asked by lawyers or advocates for the students, in all sexual misconduct cases.

After several technical glitches, the comment period on DeVos’ proposed regulations closed last week. Comments submitted by college or university leaders provided unintentional insight as to why so many accused students have had to go to court to get fair treatment from their schools. More troublingly, the comments implied that most university leaders see promoting safety or encouraging reporting as a more important function of the Title IX adjudication process than determining the truth of each allegation.

It’s almost like it’s a mechanism for punishing men simply for getting in the way.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: Wikileaks & Roger Stone Each Call Bullsh*t On Michael Cohen’s Phone Call Testimony.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: American University will up its diversity spending by $1 million in 2019 to $61 million.

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LCAC WITH A ROOSTER TAIL: A landing craft air cushion from the amphibious transport dock ship USS John P. Murtha blows away an otherwise calm stretch of the eastern Pacific Ocean.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: NorK summit cut short and much, much more. “President Trump and Kim Jung Un were unable to reach an agreement and the president has left Vietnam early. The media and pundit class were concerned that Trump would lower our standards for denuclearizing and make a deal because he’s a big dummy who wants to yap about his negotiation skills. Not so much.”

What will be fun is watching the backflips of people who yesterday said Trump shouldn’t have been at that summit in the first place, and who today will criticize him for cutting it short.

CHANGE: On Prostitution, Another Kamala Harris Reversal: Harris wants to decriminalize prostitution, previously called idea ‘completely ridiculous.’ Her new position is right. Her old position was wrong. Neither was deeply held.

ART OF THE DEAL: New York Sun: ‘Sometimes You Have To Walk.’

The collapse of President Trump’s summit with the North Korean party boss, Kim Jong Un, certainly takes us back — to October 12, 1986. That’s when President Reagan stood up and walked out of the Reykjavik summit with another party boss, Mikhail Gorbachev, of the Soviet Union. We can remember it like it was yesterday. The long faces, the dire predictions, the Left’s instinct to blame the Americans.

“What appears to have happened in Iceland is this,” the New York Times editorialized. “Mr. Reagan had the chance to eliminate Soviet and U.S. medium-range nuclear weapons in Europe, to work toward a test ban on his terms, to halve nuclear arsenals in five years and to agree on huge reductions later. He said no.” The Times just didn’t see that the Hollywood actor turned president had just won the Cold War.

It’s too early in the morning — this editorial is being written at 3 a.m. at New York — to know whether that’s the kind of thing that just happened at Hanoi, whence news reports are just coming in. Messrs. Trump and Kim were supposed to have a working lunch, to be followed by the signing of some sort of agreement. The next thing you know, Mr. Trump is heading home.

It’s all part of the process. Trump is demonstrating that, unlike previous American presidents, he won’t go for a deal just to announce that he has a deal. He’ll get what he needs out of the deal or he won’t do the deal at all.

THIS IS CNN? Cohen Lied When He Told Congress He Never Wanted White House Job.

When you’ve lost Dana Bash, Jake Tapper, Wolf Blitzer…

THE NEW CUBANS? Salena Zito: Trump’s anti-socialist strength could turn Venezuelan-Americans into Republicans for decades.

EZRA LEVANT EXPLAINS Canada’s Constitutional Crisis. Key bit: “Trudeau was detonated today by his former Attorney General, Jody Wilson-Raybould, Canada’s first Aboriginal A-G. She just testified in Parliament, in meticulous detail, how Trudeau and his staff tried to get her to drop criminal charges against a corrupt company that he liked. She refused to bend the law for Trudeau’s cronies. But they didn’t stop. Trudeau; his chief of staff; his principal secretary; even the finance minister. They met her ten times, phoned her ten more. trying to get the charges dropped. She wouldn’t. So Trudeau fired her as A-G.”

Compare this to the nothingburger that was Cohen’s testimony.

WE REALLY SHOULDN’T HAVE TO TEACH WOMEN NOT TO DO THIS: Teacher Brittany Zamora had sex with boy in classroom while other student watched.

JOHN PODHORETZ: Cohen’s Testimony Actually Helped Trump.

It turns out his lawyer-fixer doesn’t have the goods.

Early reports on what Cohen might say suggested he was ­going to tell the committee that Trump told him to lie to Congress about his alleged porn-star payoffs. That would have meant the president had suborned perjury — a serious crime. Such testimony would indeed have amounted to a smoking cruise missile aimed directly at the White House.

But that is not what Cohen said.

This is what he said: “Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates. In conversations we had during the campaign, at the same time I was ­actively negotiating in Russia for him, he would look me in the eye and tell me there’s no business in Russia and then go out and lie to the American people by saying the same thing.” Cohen added: “In his way, he was telling me to lie.”

If a president is to be ­impeached when an associate says he intuited that the president wanted him to lie under oath, there is no president following Trump who wouldn’t be ­vulnerable to the same charge and to impeachment under the same standard.

That is why subornation of perjury has a high evidentiary standard and one that mustn’t be lowered just because liberals and Never Trumpers are determined to see Trump ­humiliated.

But as with lawyer/client confidentiality — which every Right-Thinking Person would be solemnly invoking here if the parties were reversed — no standard, however well-established, can survive contact with Trump Derangement Syndrome.

INDIA/PAKISTAN: Heavy shelling at forward posts in Poonch, Rajouri.

WORST BOSS UPDATE: Many Staffers Defending Klobuchar Did Not Work in D.C. Where Abuse Occurred: Nearly half were never in the Washington office.

Related: Amy Klobuchar Emerges From Team-Building Exercise Caked In Blood. Yeah, it’s parody — maybe.

FINALLY: This kit will solve gender inequality in breastfeeding by making men lactate.

Marie-Claire Springham explained on Good Morning Britain. . . .

“So, basically the way I designed it is new couples when they find out they’re expecting sign up to basically a pre-natal course,” she explained.

“And they receive a kit in which it contains a nine months of a drug called progestin,” she added, “which we know as the non-estrogen based birth control pill.”

That drug is meant to “stimulate the production of milk-producing glands” in the males who take it. Another drug regimen would then result in lactation.

First problem: Men’s nipples aren’t built for suckling. Second problem: What the hell else is taking progestin going to do to a man? Third problem: Good luck getting men to even want to “solve” this “problem.”

ENDGAME: Venezuela soldiers who choose defection hope more join their ranks.

#NARRATIVEFAIL: Joel Kotkin: Where Millennials Really Go for Jobs: Contrary to media hype, tech firms and young workers aren’t flocking to “superstar” cities.

When Amazon decided to locate its second headquarters in New York, it cited the supposed advantages of the city’s talent base. Now that progressive politicians have chased Amazon out of town, the tech booster chorus has been working overtime to prove that Gotham, and other big, dense, expensive cities, are destined to become “tech towns” anyway, because of their young, motivated labor pools. That argument may sound great to New York Times readers or on local talk shows, but it is increasingly untrue.

In fact, as a new Brookings study shows, millennials are not moving en masse to metros with dense big cities, but away from them. According to demographer Bill Frey, the 2013–2017 American Community Survey shows that New York now suffers the largest net annual outmigration of post-college millennials (ages 25–34) of any metro area—some 38,000 annually—followed by Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Diego. New York’s losses are 75 percent higher than during the previous five-year period.

By contrast, the biggest winner is Houston, a metro area that many planners and urban theorists regard with contempt. The Bayou City gained nearly 15,000 millennials net last year, while other big gainers included Dallas–Fort Worth and Austin, which gained 12,700 and 9,000, respectively. Last year, according to a Texas realtors report, a net 22,000 Californians moved to the Lone Star State.

The other top metros for millennials were Charlotte, Phoenix, and Nashville, as well as four relatively expensive areas: Seattle, Denver, Portland, and Riverside–San Bernardino. The top 20 magnets include Midwest locales such as Minneapolis–St. Paul, Columbus, and Kansas City, all areas where average house prices, adjusted for incomes, are half or less than those in California, and at least one-third less than in New York.

Perhaps even more significant has been the geographic shift within metro areas. The media frequently has exaggerated millennial growth in the urban cores. In reality, nearly 80 percent of millennial population growth since 2010 has been in the suburbs.

Weird how the press is always so eager to advance a narrative that isn’t true.

NOAH ROTHMAN: Michael Cohen’s Morality Play. “Michael Cohen is emotionally manipulating the Resistance in the most transparent fashion, and they’re falling for it.”

Cohen has been throwing himself upon the mercy of The Resistance ever since it became clear that he would face criminal charges related to his personal misconduct. To avoid an excessive sentence, Cohen had to share with federal prosecutors all he knew about the president. But in turning on his former employer and the party he leads, Cohen sacrificed his relationships on the right. He needed a new set of friends, to say nothing of donors to his legal defense fund. And so Trump’s attorney has embarked on a nakedly cynical campaign of emotional manipulation stimulating all the anti-Trump left’s pleasure centers.

Taken at face value, Cohen emerged from his plea agreement with federal prosecutors born again. With the convert’s zeal, he immediately began to preach not just against the sins of his former employer but in support of all things Democratic.

Much, much more at the link.