From Frank Bruni, NYT...

I’ll let you in on a little secret about media coverage of prime-time political debates: What happens in the first half, even the first quarter, gets much more attention than what happens as the night drags on.

We all have deadlines bearing down on us and must produce our stories immediately after the debate’s end, so we start formulating thoughts and fashioning sentences before then. If there are fireworks early in the event, we say a cheer of gratitude and let them light up our commentary. So it was with Mike Bloomberg’s miserable performance in Las Vegas. He established his awfulness right off the bat. We ran with it. I know I did.

But in the case of this debate, what happened at the bitter end was probably most meaningful. All six candidates onstage were asked to envision a situation — utterly plausible this year — in which none of them went into the Democratic convention in Milwaukee in July with a majority of pledged delegates and, therefore, an unequivocal claim to the nomination. Should the politician with a plurality of delegates be the nominee?

Only Bernie Sanders, who currently has the best shot at being that person, said yes. The others said no. That would mean a brokered convention, in which the votes of uncommitted “superdelegates” or alliances formed among certain candidates are necessary to put someone over the top. And it would be a nightmare scenario for the Democratic Party, which is deep into a bad dream already, because it would invite further cynicism, second-guessing, cries of illegitimacy and irresolution in a country that’s paralyzed by all of that.

Something unsettling is going on in American politics — in America, period — and the chaotic Democratic race exemplifies it. The rules are all blurry. The processes are all suspect. Or at least they’re seen that way, so more and more judgments are up for debate and more and more defeats are prone to dispute. President Trump is a prime player in this, but it didn’t start with him and isn’t confined to him. He’s exploiting and accelerating a crisis of faith in traditions and institutions, not causing it. He’s improvising, and he’s hardly alone.

Everywhere I look: incipient or latent pandemonium. The Iowa caucuses were a mess that motivated some candidates to press self-aggrandizing grievances, and there are concerns that the Nevada caucuses are headed for the same fate. Bloomberg’s rivals argue (understandably) that he’s using his billions to game the system and pervert the whole shebang. And in a reprise of four years ago, Sanders’s supporters fume that the media, the Democratic National Committee and other supposed pillars of the establishment are conspiring against him in some underhanded, corrupt way. I’m no soothsayer, but I foresee intensifying quarrels over whether whoever is leading the field deserves to be in that position and whether his or her competitors got a raw deal.

It’s 2016 all over again, except maybe worse. Back then both Sanders and Trump, who was braced to lose, insisted that the process was rigged. Sanders’s supporters questioned the legitimacy of Hillary Clinton’s victory in the Democratic primary before Clinton’s supporters questioned the legitimacy of Trump’s victory in the general election. There were good reasons all around, but it was striking nonetheless how fervently the disappointed rejected the denouement.

It was also corrosive. I’m not recommending a pliant surrender to injustice, but I see more value in plotting carefully for the next fight than in raging boundlessly over the last one. At some point, doesn’t everyone have to move on?

Not anymore. In Washington, there’s the prospect of impeachment beyond impeachment, of new hearings to supplement the old ones, of additional evidence that will spiritually nullify the president’s ludicrous acquittal by the Senate. John Bolton continues his national-security version of a strip tease; he’s both a man of — and a metaphor for — an era in which nothing finishes, everything festers and all can be revisited and revised. Bill Barr junks sentence recommendations. Trump commutes sentences. There are investigations into investigators. Cries of cheating and fraudulence fly in every direction.

I blame the internet, because I like to and because it’s true.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/21/opinion/brokered-convention-democrats...

George Soros: ‘Remove Zuckerberg from Facebook now…He’ll get Trump re-elected’

The warning comes from none other than billionaire leftist George Soros himself. Soros wrote a scathing letter to Financial Times in which he argues that both Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg should be removed from their leadership roles at Facebook, because of they are allegedly “engaged in some kind of mutual assistance arrangement with Donald Trump that will help him to get re-elected.”

In his letter to Financial Times, Soros argues that he actually supports “more government regulation of social media platforms,” and makes the case that “Facebook does not need to wait for government regulations to stop accepting any political advertising in 2020 until after the elections on November 4.”

Read more:

https://saraacarter.com/george-soros-remove-zuckerberg-from-facebook-now-hell-get-trump-re-elected/

Obviously Soros could not take on the other billionaire, Mr Rupert Murdoch, who will get Trump re-elected. But fear not, despite The Donald being a trump as elevated as a two of clubs, he has a better chance with no help, to beat the aces like Warren, Sanders and Bloomberg... The only Democrat who could have a chance at unsitting Trump is Pete... Why? Because Pete is young, smiles and knows a lot and is a nice joker... It worked in Ukraine: the comedian got the gig versus the chocolate man. 

And please know that Soros is a leftist like Gus is a billionaire...

Pass this on for your friends' smartphones:

From Chris Floyd

Due to the American political system's in-built, fundamental, anti-democratic nature, it is entirely possibly that Donald Trump could be re-elected in 2020 even if he loses the popular vote by millions of votes AND also loses the Electoral College (the 18th-century system-rigging gimmick that gave the vote-loser his "victory" last time). And it would all be perfectly fair and square under our unfair, unsquare system, as the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics reports.

How is this possible? Simple. If neither candidate wins the required 270 Electoral College votes, then the House of Representatives must choose the president from the candidates who won electoral votes. But here's the trick: it wouldn't be a vote of all the elected representatives in the House. No; each state delegation gets only one vote. So even though the Democrats now have a strong majority in the House and (as in the Senate) actually represent many millions more people than the Republicans, the GOP controls a majority of the state delegation: 26 to 23. (The Pennsylvania delegation is evenly split between the parties.)

That balance, by state, is not expected to change in the 2020 election. Thus, the 26 GOP state delegations – which, again, are here reduced to a single vote, no matter how large or politically diverse the delegation actually is  – could vote for Trump. Therefore, even if Trump loses the popular vote by five million votes or more, and also loses in the Electoral College, he could still be the "legitimate" president of the United States.

Of course, this is still a very unlikely scenario – although it's happened once before, in 1828, when John Quincy Adams was chosen by the House despite losing the popular vote by 11% and finishing 15 votes behind in the Electoral College. But anyone who's seen the lockstep extremists of the modern GOP in action knows they would be perfectly capable of re-installing Trump even if he had (once again) been repudiated by the voters at the ballot box. (And who would pick the VP? The Senate – although in this case, all 100 individual senators could vote as they pleased.)

I defy anyone to look at such a system and declare it is the "greatest democracy on earth." It was expressly designed to put as many obstacles as possible in the way of ordinary citizens expressing their will through the electoral process. And of course, the Founding Fathers originally excluded the vast majority of the populace from voting altogether; they openly intended for wealthy elites (like George Washington, the richest man in America) to rule. A broader democracy was wrung from the elites – grudgingly, bit by bit – through generations of struggle. Now we are watching it be stripped away, bit by bit, as we sink back to the Founders' ideal of a nation controlled by white, wealthy elites.

So today, even as we fight to keep the last vestiges of that hard-won broader democracy, we should bear in mind the urgent necessity of making deep the kind of structural changes in our undemocratic electoral process that will ensure that this ludicrous and sinister situation never arises again.

Read more:

http://www.chris-floyd.com/home/articles/thanks-founding-dads-how-trump-...

We did not need a university degree to know that the US electorate system was crook... We mentioned this many times since the inception of this site... Read from top.

US officials have told Bernie Sanders that Russia is trying to help his campaign, prompting the frontrunner in the Democratic race to strongly condemn any interference.

Republican Donald Trump and US lawmakers have also been informed about the Russian assistance to Sanders, said a report in the Washington Post, which cited unnamed people familiar with the matter and first broke the news.

It was not clear what form the Russian assistance had taken, the paper added.

Facebook said it had seen no evidence of Russian support for Sanders on its platform.

However, the Vermont senator denounced the reported efforts by Moscow to interfere with the 2020 election on his behalf.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/21/bernie-sanders-russia-ai...

I actually saw it: when Putin wears his hair one way, it means to his boffins to support Trump and when he parts it the other in means to support Bernie so he's the one to loose to Trump... What is this shit? Com'on! Guys of the media! You can do better than report rumours about "Russia" from the CIA and other "disinformation" agencies...

Read from top.

Russia’s overarching goal in all its overseas disinformation work is to destabilize its rivals. That was true with its meddling in the 2016 US campaign — and it’s just as true for 2020.

So it was maddening to see media coverage last week suggesting that the US intelligence community had determined that Vladimir Putin’s hackers aim to reelect President Trump — period.

It’s now indisputable that this was a serious distortion — the product of partisan leaks out of a classified hearing, spin readily accepted by Trump-hating media.

After all, it fits into the denialist explanation for how Trump won and offers an excuse for any defeat this November.

But come on: Moscow has to prefer a Bernie Sanders win. Sanders is determined to defund the US military, end most economic sanctions and pull troops away from any overseas engagement — and his policies are guaranteed to sink the US economy, too.

Above all, he’s dead-set on banning fracking — which has made the United States the world’s No. 1 energy exporter and pushed down global energy prices, depriving Putin of billions in income. Indeed, the biggest single theme of Russia’s overseas propaganda is encouraging the Free World to shut down oil and gas production.

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2020/02/21/actually-putin-would-prefer-a-president-be...

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The Russians are back, alongside the American intelligence agencies playing deep inside our elections. Who should we fear more? Hint: not the Russians.

On February 13, the election security czar in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) briefed the House Intelligence Committee that the Russians were meddling again and that they favored Donald Trump. A few weeks earlier, the ODNI briefedBernie Sanders that the Russians were also meddling in the Democratic primaries, this time in his favor. Both briefings remained secret until this past week, when the former was leaked to the New York Times in time to smear Trump for replacing his DNI, and the latter leaked to the Washington Post ahead of the Nevada caucuses to try and damage Sanders.

Russiagate is back, baby. Everyone welcome Russiagate II.

You didn’t think after 2016 the bad boys of the intel “community” (which makes it sound like they all live together down in Florida somewhere) weren’t going to play their games again, and that they wouldn’t learn from their mistakes? Those errors were in retrospect amateurish. A salacious dossier built around a pee tape? Nefarious academics befriending minor Trump campaign staffers who would tell all to an Aussie ambassador trolling London’s pubs looking for young, fit Americans? Falsified FISA applications when it was all too obvious even Trumpkin greenhorns weren’t dumb enough to sleep with FBI honeypots? You’d think after influencing 85 elections across the globe since World War II, they’d be better at it. But you also knew that after failing to whomp a bumpkin like Trump once, they would keep trying.

Like any good intel op, you start with a tickle, make it seem like the targets are figuring it out for themselves. Get it out there that Trump offered Wikileaks’ Julian Assange a pardon if he would state publicly that Russia wasn’t involved in the 2016 DNC leaks. The story was all garbage, not the least of which because Assange has been clear for years that it wasn’t the Russians. And there was no offer of a pardon from the White House. And conveniently Assange is locked in a foreign prison and can’t comment. 

Whatever. Just make sure you time the Assange story to hit the day after Trump pardoned numerous high-profile, white-collar criminals, so even the casual reader had Trump = bad, with a side of Russian conspiracy, on their minds. You could almost imagine an announcer’s voice: “Previously, on Russiagate I…”

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-intelligence-commun...

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