"The coronavirus plunged a knife in the heart of our raging bull market last week. So did Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

"That's what some top investors are saying, suggesting the stock sell-off reflected anxieties about the spreading disease, to be sure, but also real alarm that the socialist ideologue could actually become our next president. That possible outcome to the chaotic Democratic primary season was viewed as a 'black swan' event; few took the Vermont senator's candidacy seriously.

"That has changed.

"Investors worry that the coronavirus could slow growth in the U.S and trash earnings for a quarter or two; of course, everyone is alarmed at the possible loss of life. But some market-makers are much more anxious that a President Bernie Sanders could impose massive taxes and new regulations which would undermine our long-term prospects and even our free enterprise system."

"Joe Biden captured 61 percent of the African-American vote in South Carolina on Saturday, allowing him to beat Bernie Sanders easily statewide. Biden now has a chance to do well on Super Tuesday and could soon consolidate the anti-Sanders vote. But make no mistake, Bernie Sanders remains the clear front-runner. ...

"The radical Vermont senator would be viewed as a millstone around the neck of every moderate Democrat running in a swing state or district this fall. With Sanders at the top of the ticket, the party could fail to take back the Senate. Even more alarming to Democrats, it could lose the House and a slew of state legislatures in key states that, next year, will begin the once-in-a-decade process of redrawing most of the nation's political maps.

"Democrats are paying a high price for their successful kneecapping of Sanders when he ran against Hillary Clinton in 2016. They stopped him from getting the nomination, but Hillary's surprising loss allowed Sanders to create the myth that he would have won because his left-wing populism would have proved more popular than Trump's right-wing brand of populism.

"Now Sanders is back, with an even higher name ID than he had in 2016, an army of loyal small-dollar donors, and the enthusiastic support of the increasingly vocal radical wing of the Democratic Party. For now, he is the front-runner for the nomination. But what party leaders fear is that he is also a doomed underdog if he is their candidate in the fall."

"With the revelation that superdelegates and party officials may stop Sen. Bernie Sanders at the Democratic convention this July should he only have a plurality of delegates, candidates trailing in the primary race are more incentivized to continue their campaigns, which helps Bernie even more as he plows ahead to cement an insurmountable delegate lead over a divided field.

"Everyone is afraid of Sanders and unwilling to try to block him, despite the fact that he isn't a Democrat, a socialist can't win a general election, and he is fraudulently selling his voters an agenda he knows will not, and cannot, become reality. ...

"The impotence of the Democratic Party has reached near fatal levels -- it's indefensible that party operatives couldn't see this coming, couldn't imagine the possibility that Sanders, having come close in 2016 and successful in getting the party to change the superdelegate rules, wouldn't master the system, out-organize everyone, clean up in caucuses, and nail down the nomination in a nightmare scenario.

"The DNC's denial is pitiful. Though Democrats knew nearly three years ago they would face a well-moneyed incumbent president, they somehow have arrived at 2020 without adequate funds to fight back against the power and finances of the Trump campaign, the Trump-aligned super PACs and the Republican National Committee's permanent, data-driven ground game. The latter is working its magic in all the right battlegrounds in numbers the Democrats cannot dream of catching up to post-convention."

"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday that she would be comfortable with Senator Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee for president despite hesitation among some lawmakers in her party.

"'Yes,' Pelosi responded as she left a closed-door meeting in the House when asked whether she would be comfortable with the self-described democratic socialist leading the ticket.

"'I think whoever our nominee is, we will enthusiastically embrace and we will win the White House, the Senate and the House,' the California congresswoman added.

"A day earlier, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer indicated he too would be comfortable with Sanders as the party's nominee. ...

"Sanders this week sought to fend off bipartisan flack over comments he made praising aspects of the regime of late Cuban Communist leader Fidel Castro."

"House Republicans have found evidence that Russia Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team may have misled the courts and Congress and are considering making criminal referrals asking the Justice Department to investigate those prosecutors, a key lawmaker says.

"Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told Just the News that his team has been scouring recent documents released by the FBI, including witness reports known as 302s, and found glaring evidence that contradicts claims the Mueller team made to courts and Congress.

"'We're now going through these 302s, and we're going to be making criminal referrals on the Mueller dossier team, the people that put this Mueller report together,' Nunes said during an interview ...

"Nunes remains the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee and is widely credited for exposing evidence that the FBI submitted false and misleading surveillance warrant applications targeting the Trump campaign in the Russia case."

Read entire article here.

"Rival candidates have just a week to stop Sen. Bernie Sanders if they hope to prevent the Independent from Vermont from taking the party's presidential nomination.

"Sanders is the undisputed front-runner in the race after his thumping victory in Nevada's caucuses on Saturday.

"His current trajectory is set to carry him to at least a top-two finish in South Carolina's primary Saturday. From there, he looks likely to roll through Super Tuesday on March 3, harvesting huge numbers of delegates from California and other large states.

"It is eminently plausible that, by the end of that night, Sanders will have jumped out to a delegate lead that none of his rivals can reel in -- especially given the likelihood that more than a half-dozen other major candidates remain in the race."

"The fearmongering over Russian election 'interference' might be the most destructive moral panic in American political life since the Red Scare. Then again, to be fair, those who prosecuted the post-war hunt for Communists had the decency to uncover a handful of infiltrators. We've yet to meet a single American who's been brainwashed or had their vote snatched away by an SVR Twitterbot. Probably because no such person exists.

"Nevertheless, millions of Americans believe that a handful of terrible memes - and I mean the most amateurish and puerile efforts imaginable - on social media were enough to overturn a presidential election in the most powerful nation on earth. Or, more likely, most pretend to believe it. As Donald Trump's fortunes have turned somewhat in recent weeks, and socialist Bernie Sanders looks poised to take the Democratic Party nomination, the Russians are once again coming to snatch your vote. ...

"But the Russian hysteria plays into a long-standing liberal conviction that feeble-minded conservatives vote against their own interests only because they've been hoodwinked. It might be the doing of a foreign power. It might be the plutocrats. It might be 'special interests.' It might even be domestic tricksters, like the ones in the much-discussed recent McKay Coppins piece in The Atlantic, 'The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President' - a piece that offers over 8,000 chilling words describing traditional political operations as something dark, undemocratic, and new. Be prepared for a flood of similar pieces. Democrats never lose elections. Elections are only stolen from them. Nothing but Trump stepping down and admitting he's a Putin asset will stop Democrats from questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

"Of course, if you can't handle some memes or misleading ads, you probably shouldn't be voting, anyway. You're clearly not prepared for the civic responsibilities that come with an open debate, which is often messy and ugly, rather than hermetically sealed in a media-approved bubble."

"For those who can do simple arithmetic, here are some fun numbers on Bernie Sanders' harebrained socialist schemes:

"Bernie Sanders said at the debate last night that he wants minimum wage to be $15 per hour.

"15$ X 40 per week = $600

"600$ X 52 weeks per yr = $31,200

"Bernie Sanders wants free health care for all and was asked how he would pay for it. His answer was raise taxes to 52% on anybody making over $29,000 per year.

"52% of $31,000 = $16,224 in tax

"$31,200 - $16,224 = $14,976 is your pay

"$14,976 / 52 weeks = $288 per week

"$288 / 40 hr week = $7.20 per hour"

"The upshot of this two-hour brawl was that the front-runner, Sanders, didn't take too much damage. The quickly rising Bloomberg took it on the chin, but he can probably erase most of the damage with another $400 million or so in television ads. Bloomberg isn't leaving the race any time soon, and Sanders is, at least right now, on track to get to Milwaukee with the most delegates. These two guys really disdain each other, and tonight suggested that the next few months will be an epic slugfest between two septuagenarians who vehemently oppose everything the other man represents.

"The gargantuan winner of the night was the Trump campaign. Tonight's debate shone a bright spotlight on the weaknesses of the candidates most likely to be the nominee, and it provided a ton of fodder for Trump ads in the general election."

"And on the 8th day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, 'I need a tiny, soulless technocrat to tell everyone else how to live their lives.' So God made a Bloomberg.

"God said, 'I need a know-it-all Wall Street banker who made more money by getting fired than most men will make their entire lives working an honest job.' So God made a Bloomberg. ...

"God said, 'I need somebody with no charm, no charisma, and no compelling reason to ever serve in government to nonetheless buy his way onto the ballot, then buy his way into the mayor's office, then buy off the city council to eliminate the two-term limit on mayoral service. And then I need him to spend nine figures buying his way into the Democrat primary, because there would be nothing more hilarious than watching a broken down old socialist get robbed, again, by yet another New York crony who is the life-size poster child for everything that's wrong with modern capitalism.'

"So God made a Bloomberg."