"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."

"For once, common sense has won the day in Virginia politics. And yes, even a few Democrats deserve credit this time.

"On Monday, the Mike Bloomberg and Gov. Ralph Northam-backed 'assault weapons' ban that passed the Virginia House of Delegates died in the state Senate Judiciary Committee. The bill would have outlawed future sales of so-called assault weapons, including popular firearm models such as the AR-15, and forced gun owners to turn in certain magazines or face criminal penalties, even jail time. It was a draconian measure that would have cracked down on the rights of law-abiding Virginians without meaningfully improving public safety in any way.

"The vote failed after four moderate Democrats broke with their party to kill the bill. Bravo to these four brave souls, who will have undoubtedly earned the ire of the anti-gun lobby, but ultimately, did the right thing. After all, there was no compelling evidence supporting this proposal to begin with."

"Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is requesting interviews with a slew of current and former Justice Department and FBI officials as part of his panel's probe into the department's handling of the investigation into Russia's election interference and the Trump campaign.

"Graham sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr on Friday asking that he make 17 officials, many of whom are identified only by title, available for interviews. ...

"Graham has said he plans to call former FBI Director James Comey, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to testify as part of his investigation. ...

"'I'm going to get to the bottom of the FISA work process because it was an abuse of power of the Department of Justice, the FBI,' Graham told CBS News on Sunday."

"To young liberals, Bernie Sanders is a hero. The senator of Vermont speaks truth to power and rattles cages. His win in Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, while narrow, makes him a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

"To President Donald Trump and his supporters, however, 'Crazy Bernie' is a godsend, a guy they'd love to run against. South Carolina GOP leaders have urged Republicans to vote for him in the state's open Democratic primary. And Republican senators have refrained from investigations into his background.

"One big reason for this is Republicans know that large segments of the electorate would be repelled by Sanders' vast expansion of government spending at a time when Uncle Sam is already running $1 trillion annual deficits and is more than $23 trillion in debt.

"According to the liberal Progressive Policy Institute, Sanders' proposals would increase federal spending by a whopping $51.5 trillion over a decade. That's seven to eight times what relative moderates like Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg are pushing. It is also more than 50 times the size of Obamacare, which the Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2010 would cost less than $1 trillion over 10 years."