CHARLOTTE, N.C. — After all the debates and forums, after the candidate surges, withdrawals and endorsements, voters in large numbers across the country finally had to land on a choice on Tuesday.

But for Democrats who had long hoped for the field to narrow and the options to sharpen, there was still mass uncertainty as people in 14 states from the Eastern Seaboard to the Pacific Coast went to the polls.

Voters picked among five candidates, and many made last-minute decisions — some on the way to the polls — and expressed doubts and anxieties about whether their choice was the right one.

The hesitations reflected the weaknesses of the candidates, who were exposed by 10 debates and four sometimes indecisive state caucuses and primaries, not to mention the prospect that the eventual winner will face the break-all-the-rules style of President Trump, who on Monday night in Charlotte, N.C., mercilessly taunted Joseph R. Biden Jr. for his age and verbal misfires.

“I’m worried about our country, I don’t think we have a perfect candidate this time — we don’t have a Barack Obama,” said Justin Faircloth, a real estate investor and musician in Charlotte. He made up his mind on Tuesday morning to vote for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Doubts lingered. “I’m concerned with Biden, Warren or Sanders, whether they can really make it happen,” he said.

In Massachusetts, less than a mile from Senator Elizabeth Warren’s home, Sibylle Kim said she deeply admired her senator but doubted Ms. Warren’s electability, so she voted for Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City.

But even as Ms. Kim entered her polling place in Cambridge, she acknowledged that she wasn’t sure that Mr. Bloomberg was the right choice, either. “I’ve never felt this unconvinced,” she said.

The questions to be answered on a day with nearly a third of delegates at stake were whether Mr. Biden’s comeback was real, whether the Sanders juggernaut would prove unstoppable and whether a new top contender — Mr. Bloomberg or Ms. Warren — might arise.

Mr. Biden’s commanding victory in South Carolina on Saturday and his endorsement by three former presidential candidates on Monday — an effort to bring moderates together and halt Mr. Sanders — swayed some voters.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/03/us/politics/super-tuesday-election-vo...

Time for Warren and Bloomberg to arrest their campaign and get behind Bernie...

Today’s Democratic primaries will go a long way to signalling who the DNC will put forward to run against Donald Trump in November. The fourteen states holding votes today are considered vitally important.

…but are they?

Because the Democratic establishment has made it pretty clear that the number of votes a candidate gets doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on who the DNC will pick to run for President.

The signals are all there – if Bernie wins, it doesn’t count.

In a possible effort to put-off having to go against the wishes of the voters, the Democratic race has seen some casualties fall well before the finish line. Both Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out this weekend, narrowing the field considerably. Both quickly endorsed Biden.

The obvious plan being to unite the anti-Bernie vote and save the DNC’s blushes.

Pressure is being piled on Warren to drop-out too, and endorse Bernie. Thus reducing the choice to one “progressive” and one “establishment” candidate (obviously nobody considers Bloomberg has a chance, he’s just there to insult Bernie and make Joe look like a “centrist” by comparison).

For her part, Warren seems to be pitching herself as the middle-ground, hoping to parlay that into a nomination at a contested convention.

No matter who comes away with the nomination, it has to be asked “was any of this process legitimate?”. We know from a plethora of examples that US elections are not fair. They border on meaningless most of the time. The DNC’s doubly so, having argued in court they have no duty to be fair.

Any result, then, you could safely assume was contrived, for one reason or another.

If the Buttigieg-Klobuchar-Biden gambit works, we end up with Trump vs. Biden. And, realistically, that means a second Trump term. 

Biden is possibly senile and definitely creepy. Watching him shuffle and stutter through a Presidential campaign would be almost cruel. 

Politically, he has all of Hillary’s weaknesses, being a big-time establishment type with a pro-war record, without even the “I have a vagina” card to play. 

He’ll get massacred.

Is that the plan? 

There’s more than enough signs that Trump has abandoned all the policies that made him any kind of threat to the political establishment. Four years on: no wars ended, no walls built, no swamp drained. Just more of the same. He’s an idiot who talked big and got co-opted. It happens.

The Senate and other institutions might talk about Trump being a criminal or an idiot or a “Nazi”, but the reality is he’s barely perceptibly different from any other POTUS this side of JFK.

#TheResistance was a puppet show. A weak game played for toy money. When it really counts, they’re all in it together. Biden getting on the ticket would be a public admittance of that. It would mean the DNC is effectively throwing the fight. Trump is a son of a bitch, but he’s their son of a bitch. And that’s much better than even the idea of President Bernie.

Which raises the question: What if Bernie get the nomination?

If Bernie wins the chance – and it’s highly unlikely – the intentions behind letting him on the ticket would need to be questioned.

The Deep State would never allow even someone of Bernie’s flexible character to walk into the White House under the banner of “socialism”. Whether or not the man himself poses a threat, his ideas do. And the system can’t afford to see them legitimised.

You’d have to think his run for President would be a disaster designed to undermine his movement (see: Corbynism) and smother “American socialism” in its cradle.

The wildcard here is Warren. Up until she’s out of the race, I wouldn’t rule out a Hillary-like push for the “first female President”. But they’ll likely buy her off with a promise of “next time”. It’s the Democrat’s turn in again in 2024, after all.

So, some questions arise:

• Who will win the most votes tonight?
• Will it matter in the end?
• Who will win the nomination at the convention?
• Will Trump win a second term?
• ….did you know Tulsi Gabbard was still technically running for President?

Bring on Super Thursday…I mean Tuesday.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/04/discuss-super-tuesday/

Next time will be (could be) Ivanka Trump vs the DNC... We know who woud win this fight... Not Warren...

Between Bernie, Bloomberg, Biden and Trump, we have the battle of the senior citizens for the ultimate piece of cake at the local bolo (Aussie term for a Bowling Club where half the oldies are on valium tablets to be more accurate with their shots by minimising the tremors)... Trump is sitting on the cake, Bloomberg tried to buy it whole and failed... Biden is apparently getting a bit "senile" and forgets what he is campaigning for — the Presidency or a spot in the Senate — but the adoring Democrat crowds want him to have the cream as well anyway, rather than Bernie who is prepared to share the cake equally for free...

So, whoever gets away with the biggest slice, will go to battle against something — the senior citizens in their wisdom will be sending the young kids to war to defend their billions made by manufacturing and selling weapons. At this level, we hope that Bernie is not too anti-Russia...

Note that Mr Leonisky is also an old kook who drinks too much...

Read from top.

Former Vice President Joe Biden told a group of voters Monday that all men and women are created by “the thing.” It’s one of Biden’s many gaffes as he speaks to voters on the campaign trail ahead of super Tuesday.

In the video posted to Twitter, Biden says, “We hold these truths to be self evident. All men and women created by the, you know, you know, the thing.”

Read more/see more:

https://saraacarter.com/biden-all-men-and-women-created-by-the-thing/

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Is "the thing" part of the new modern bible studies?

With this kind of oration, no doubt about it: Biden has to win the presidency in November 2020, unless they take him away to a home for old Vice-Presidents before the elections — unlike Ronald Reagan, who apparently had dementia in office, but was only diagnosed five years after 1989 when he left... One must say that Ronald, despite burning a few dollars as if tomorrow never came, through generous tax cuts, was more on song with the bible-thingy than Biden, who is about the same age trying to enter the Presidency than when Ronald was leaving it.

Reagan spent the first few years of his Hollywood career in the "B film" unit, where the producers "didn't want them good; they wanted them Thursday". Now with super "Tuesday" over, is Biden suffering from mild senior moments that could lead to falling asleep on the red button and starting WW3, telling porkies with elegance and warmongering with dedication —or is he loosing his pigeon loft? 

Read from top.

There has been the feeling of an invisible hand in the miraculous comeback of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Biden lost all three of the first races in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, then spiraled to a long series of state victories despite a lackluster and sometimes rambling performance in the presidential debates.

Since the invisible hand in unlikely elections always has a money trail somewhere, we decided to pull back the dark curtain using campaign financing data at the Center for Responsive Politics (OpenSecrets.org). The name of the giant Wall Street law firm – Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP – emerges as a common denominator.

Paul Weiss has not only been a major donor to the Biden campaign but it was simultaneously a major donor to the campaigns of the four presidential candidates who dropped out of the race and then endorsed Biden at critical moments in his miraculous resuscitation. (As the Center for Responsive Politics notes on its website, the law firm itself is prohibited from making donations under federal law. The money came from the law firm’s partners, employees, their immediate family members or its PAC.)

Donors from Paul Weiss rank as the 12th largest donor to the Joe Biden campaign with a tally of $168,412. Paul Weiss was the top donor to Senator Cory Booker’s presidential campaign, sluicing $151,102 into his campaign coffers. Senator Amy Klobuchar, who hails from Minnesota – pretty far from the law firm’s Wall Street focus – received $76,932 from Paul Weiss, making it her third largest donor in her presidential bid.

Pete Buttigieg, who was the former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana – about as far from Wall Street as one can get, received $133,261 from those generous folks at Paul Weiss, making it his seventh largest donor.

And, finally, there was presidential candidate Kamala Harris, the junior Senator from California, who received the sizeable sum of $193,873 from the folks at Paul Weiss, ranking them her second largest campaign contributor.

Just how statistically likely is it that one law firm would show up in the campaigns of five different Democratic candidates for president without there being an agenda?

Adding to the suspicion is this. On March 2, the day prior to the make-or-break Super Tuesday primary elections on March 3, which guaranteed maximum media coverage, Senator Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg endorsed Joe Biden for President, giving him a critical lift.

One day before this week’s Super Tuesday II elections, Senator Cory Booker endorsed Biden, which followed by one day the endorsement of Biden by Senator Kamala Harris.

Paul Weiss gained notoriety in May of last year when the Chief Judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York wrote a decision finding that the U.S. Justice Department had outsourced a criminal investigation to the target of the investigation – Deutsche Bank – and Deutsche Bank’s outside law firm (wait for it) Paul Weiss. (See our full report: Judge Issues Scathing Rebuke of DOJ and Law Firm, Paul Weiss.)

Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest lender, is struggling after years of sagging profits, multiple CEOs, police raids, and a series of big fines for market abuses including money laundering. Last year, Congress subpoenaed documents from Deutsche Bank related to its dealings with Donald Trump. The New York Times reported in May that senior Deutsche Bank executives had blocked employees from alerting a federal government watchdog about suspicious money activity linked to Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Deutsche Bank has been one of Trump’s largest bank lenders, continuing to make loans to him when other mega banks refused, following a series of bankruptcies by Trump’s businesses.

Paul Weiss has also been outside counsel for decades to Citigroup, another serially charged Wall Street bank. (See our previous article: Meet the Lawyer Who Gets Citigroup Out of Fraud Charges.)

Both Deutsche Banks and Citigroup have been suffering severe stock market losses over the past two weeks.

Read more:

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2020/03/role-of-a-wall-street-law-firm-in...