David Lynch and Damian Paletta, WaPo this AM.

There are times when our federal government needs to be able to run deficits.  Elevating balanced budgets to an overriding priority regardless of circumstances, as the Pete Peterson crowd has seemed to, is foolhardy. 

What this development reflects, however, is a non-circumstantial refusal to find revenue to pay for what the current government intends to fund.  As such, it is highly lamentable.  It reflects an erosion of what should be a basic norm of our government to raise revenue to pay for what the government funds, to be sure usually honored in the breach, but a factor in budget policy and politics nonetheless. 

The late Senator Moynihan was eloquent and showed political courage in insisting that sometimes what a government needs to do is just raise more revenue and find ways to do it no matter how much those who have to pay it don't like it, full stop.  Given its exceptionally undisciplined, seat of the pants approach to "governing" (if that is what the current spectacle is), it comes as no major surprise from this Administration and GOP-controlled Congress.

Book review by Adam Gopnik @ NewYorker.com, for the Feb. 12-19 print issue

[....] In the United States over the past three decades, while people argue about tax cuts and terrorism, the wave of social change that has most altered the shape of American life, as much as the new embankments of the Thames changed life then (in 1858), has been what the N.Y.U. sociologist Patrick Sharkey calls “the great crime decline.” The term, which seems to have originated with the influential Berkeley criminologist Franklin E. Zimring, refers to the still puzzling disappearance from our big-city streets of violent crime, so long the warping force of American life—driving white flight to the suburbs and fuelling the rise of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, not to mention the career of Martin Scorsese. (“Taxi Driver” is the great poem of New York around the height of high crime, with steam coming out of the hellish manholes and violence recumbent in the back seat.) No one saw it coming, and the still odder thing is that, once it came, no one seemed adequately equipped to praise it.

Sharkey, who came of age in that safer era, intends to be its eulogist. He begins his remarkable new book, “Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence” (Norton), in the South Bronx, at a city block near Yankee Stadium, and recalls a time in the nineteen-seventies, whose climax was the fearsome blackout riots of 1977, when even the Stadium was sparsely attended [....]

By Jonathan Martin & Alexander Burns @ NYTimes.com, Feb. 10

[....] The president’s seeming indifference to claims of abuse infuriated Republicans, who were already confronting a surge of activism from Democratic women driven to protest, raise money and run for office because of their fervent opposition to Mr. Trump. “This is coming, this is real,” Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, said recently about the female-fueled wave of liberal energy [....]

“For members or anybody else who cares about keeping control of Congress, if you find yourself talking about anything but the middle-class tax cut, shut up and stop talking,” fumed Corry Bliss, who runs the primary House Republican “super PAC,” the Congressional Leadership Fund. “Any time spent on TV talking about anything but how we’re helping the middle class is a waste of time and does nothing to help us win in 2018.” [....]

Many Americans are still uncertain that they will benefit from the tax measure, Mr. Bliss conceded. He cited a wave of private polling and focus groups that his organization has conducted this year revealing much of the electorate to be skeptical that they would receive a tax cut from the bill, which was signed into law in December.

That is in part because of what mainstream Republicans describe as a destructive cycle of incentives: Mr. Trump reacts to Fox News segments about the Russia investigation or another controversy, encouraging more such coverage and prompting House conservatives from largely safe seats to make their own incendiary comments, which win them television invitations and attention from the president. Such notoriety might help those lawmakers in their deep red districts, but they do nothing for the party’s overall political standing.

“These guys are performing for the president when they go on TV,” said Jason Roe, a longtime Republican strategist who is consulting on a series of at-risk House districts in California. Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, a first-term Republican who is one of Mr. Trump’s most visible champions outside the White House staff, all but said as much [....]

By Edgar Sandoval, Thomas Tracy and Graham Ranham @ NYDailyNews, Feb. 8

With videos including the act caught on a surveillance camera run by a neighbor: teen black on Mexican immigrant hate crime in the south Bronx. Especially disturbing because it's so atypical, a new phenomenon, hope it's not a growing trend but a crazy outlier. (In the old days, one would attack someone from a rival gang, that's gone, so we move on to immigrants just because they are from a certain country? There's a lot of them to go through!)  One women from the hood taking her kid to school comments in the news video it's really crazy out there, people need to calm down, they need to crack down on all this as if she's been hearing too much anti-immigrant talk.

from the print:

“I’m worried that these type of attacks against immigrants are happening more and more,” Herrera said. “I’m still afraid, because police haven’t caught him yet. I’m nervous. Sometimes his grandma takes my son for a walk. What if (the attacker) recognizes him?”

He said he hasn’t experienced any violence since he moved to New York from Guerrero, Mexico, in 2009. Now he fears his only child may need therapy.

By Matthew Rosen @ NYtimes.com, Feb. 9

BERLIN — After months of secret negotiations, a shadowy Russian bilked American spies out of $100,000 last year, promising to deliver stolen National Security Agency cyberweapons in a deal that he insisted would also include compromising material on President Trump, according to American and European intelligence officials.

The cash, delivered in a suitcase to a Berlin hotel room in September, was intended as the first installment of a $1 million payout, according to American officials, the Russian and communications reviewed by The New York Times. The theft of the secret hacking tools had been devastating to the N.S.A., and the agency was struggling to get a full inventory of what was missing.

Several American intelligence officials said they made clear that they did not want the Trump material from the Russian, who was suspected of having murky ties to Russian intelligence and to Eastern European cybercriminals. He claimed the information would link the president and his associates to Russia. Instead of providing the hacking tools, the Russian produced unverified and possibly fabricated information involving Mr. Trump and others, including bank records, emails and purported Russian intelligence data [....]

By John Bowden @ TheHill.com, Feb. 8

Nearly half of Iowa voters said they wouldn't vote for President Trump in the 2020 election, according to a poll of likely voters released Thursday.

The Des Moines Register poll found that 48 percent of voters said they would "definitely" vote for a candidate besides Trump, while 20 percent said that they would consider it. Just 26 percent of likely voters said they would definitely vote for Trump in 2020.

Iowa traditionally holds the first caucuses of the presidential nominating process, and is set to be the first battleground for Democrats looking to run in 2020 [....]

By David Masci @ Factank @ PewResearch.org, Feb. 7

For Black History Month, here are five facts about the religious lives of African Americans.

Informed insider speculation on the budget negotiations, from Greg Sargent, who as many of you know worked with Josh at tpm some time ago.  WashPost, earlier this morning.  This is not a "news" piece, I readily acknowledge, but is offered as a window into current state of play at the federal level.  

By John Bowden @ The Hill. com, Feb. 7

Israeli police chiefs will recommend to the country's attorney general that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be indicted on corruption charges, according to reports in local media.

The Times of Israel reported Wednesday that police chiefs, including the general commissioner of Israel's police force, were in "unanimous agreement" that Netanyahu should be indicted for allegedly accepting bribes and receiving lavish gifts from wealthy benefactors, including Israeli-born Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan [....]

By Cynthia McFadden, William M. Arkin & Kevin Monahan @ NBCNews.com,  Feb. 7

The U.S. official in charge of protecting American elections from hacking says the Russians successfully penetrated the voter registration rolls of several U.S. states prior to the 2016 presidential election.

In an exclusive interview with NBC News, Jeanette Manfra, the head of cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security, said she couldn't talk about classified information publicly, but in 2016, "We saw a targeting of 21 states and an exceptionally small number of them were actually successfully penetrated." [....]

Trump's military parade draws bipartisan rebuke

By Bryan Bender @ Politico.com, Feb7

Members of Congress from both parties joined retired military leaders and veterans in heaping scorn Wednesday on President Donald Trump’s push to parade soldiers and weaponry down the streets of the nation's capital — calling it a waste of money that would break with democratic traditions [....]

"I think confidence is silent and insecurity is loud,” Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, told reporters in expressing opposition to the idea. “America is the most powerful country in all of human history; you don’t need to show it off.”

"This is definitely not a popular idea," added Paul Rieckhoff, the CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, describing the feedback he is getting from members of the largest group of post-Sept. 11 veterans. "It's overwhelmingly unpopular. Folks from all political backgrounds don't think it is a good use of resources. “We are very aware of anything that politicizes the military,” he told POLITICO.

Former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), now a conservative radio talk show host, also attacked the idea on Twitter: “Obama wasn't a King. Trump isn't a King either. My side needs to quit treating him like one. We don't elect Kings in this country, remember? No military parade.” [....]