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TODAY'S HEADLINES:

It is Super Tuesday, perhaps the biggest day of the primary election.

Bernie Sanders’s lead over Joe Biden will be tested in 14 different states, as the growing centrist coalition of former candidates throw all their might behind Biden to stop Sanders winning the nomination.

Meanwhile, a new report shows that Bernie Sanders fought to preserve prescription drug legislation in the 90s that would have stopped big pharma companies from charging huge prices for things like vaccines. And guess who voted against it: Joe Biden.

And lastly, Chris Matthews, the long-time MSNBC host with a penchant for sexism and generally being a moron, abruptly announced his retirement on Monday’s episode of his show Hardball, following several weeks of criticism for overtly insensitive comments regarding Nazis, Communism, and other televised embarrassments.

THESE ARE THE STORIES YOU NEED TO KNOW:

The centrist’s plan to take down Bernie Sanders is in full swing, just in time for Super Tuesday. Following Joe Biden’s commanding win in the South Carolina Primary, the remaining centrist candidates almost immediately consolidated behind the former vice president.

Pete Buttigieg was the first to drop out, almost immediately making plans to join Biden in Dallas for a rally. Amy Klobuchar, perhaps out of spite, followed shortly after.

And, as icing on the Dallas-rally cake, dark horse former candidate Beto O’Rourke showed up to lay a final knife in the progressive movement’s back by also endorsing Biden.

This makes the primary essentially a two way race, between the newly united centrist mega-campaign behind Biden and Bernie Sanders’ grassroots movement.

Michael Bloomberg’s effect on the race is still unclear, although he’s not competitive in most of the states voting today. Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, is hanging on for dear life, stubbornly refusing to give the progressive wing of the party the same unity by dropping out and endorsing Sanders.

The new centrist block and Biden’s post-Carolina bump is already affecting polls across the country in states like Virginia. While Bernie is still favored to win big states like California and Texas, the more Biden closes the margins the lower Bernie’s chances of winning the primary outright become. And if it comes down to a contested convention, Sanders will be going up against the full might of his own party even if he enters July with a plurality of votes.

In other words, the race could all come down to today. It’s clear where the lines have been drawn. It’s on all of us in a voting state today to decide which side of them we’re on.

Here’s a quick story about why the United States is the way it is, which provides the core of a story published by the Intercept on Monday.

In 1995, Bill Clinton’s administration caved to pressure from big pharma and rescinded a key piece of drug-pricing legislation, known as the “reasonable pricing” rule.

The rule, when it was in place, required companies to sell drugs that they’d developed with the help of federal research funds for, well, reasonable prices. Seems sensible, right? But Clinton’s party had just lost big to the Republicans in the midterms, and so the rule hit the chopping block.

House-member Bernie Sanders did not agree with the change, and sent up an amendment that would reinstate the rule. It failed in the House. In the Senate, concurrent legislation was also pushed to the floor, where it was shot down by a vote to table. Guess who voted to shoot it down? Joe Biden.

Both of those politicians are running for president, at a time when a new virulent disease threatens to sweep across the country. If and when a company discovers a vaccine for the coronavirus, it will then hit the chaotic, unequal markets of the U.S. healthcare system.

But as the Intercept notes, there is a way to make sure Americans have some chance of getting a vaccine without going bankrupt -- reintroducing Sanders’ resolution from all those years ago as part of a funding package Congress is considering to combat the disease. Will they do it? Probably not. But it’s good to know that if things do get bad, we know who was trying to save lives years before this crisis even started.

Chris Matthews has pitched his last hard ball. The 74-year-old MSNBC anchor abruptly announced his retirement at the beginning of his Monday evening show, which, if we’re sticking with the baseball metaphor here, has been throwing wild pitches all over the place for the past several weeks.

Matthews has for years carried a reputation as a sexist creep, but his recent performances on politically-charged live television finally pushed him into a position so tenuous that MSNBC likely suggested he go out to pasture.

Some of these performances have been outrageous, like Matthew’s comparison of Bernie Sanders’ success in the Democratic Primary to the Nazi invasion of France.

Others have been largely par for the course, like his condescending interview of Elizabeth Warren about Michael Bloomberg’s sexual harassment allegations.

And some have been purely farcical, like when he mixed up the identities of a sitting black Senator and a black candidate for Senator on live TV.

In short: pretty much every time Matthews has been on TV in the past few weeks, he’s been a complete embarrassment, and NBC decided to pull the plug.

Matthews’s departure is at least a token acknowledgement that the mainstream liberal news network may have overstepped in its efforts to criticize the more progressive wing of the party.

The network was reportedly on the hunt for “smart, pro-Sanders” voices to anchor the network in the reality that we currently live in, and not whatever Cold-War fever-dream Matthews was apparently living in. We’ll see how that goes for them.

AND NOW FOR SOME QUICKER QUICKIES:

A 22-year-old California man was sentenced to five and a half years in prison after cyberstalking and harassing survivors of the 2018 Parkland shooting, as well as victims’ families.

The World Meteorological Organization now predicts that the warm-weather effects of climate change will be as strong as the famed El Niño phenomenon, as many traditionally-cold regions have experienced unusually winters ever this year.

Some Americans who have been held in government quarantine after brushes with the coronavirus say they’ve received surprise medical bills after being forced into mandatory medical procedures.

Just two days after it was signed, America’s peace treaty with the Taliban in Afghanistan is already dissolving, after the terrorist group immediately resumed attacking Afghan government forces on Monday.

And lastly, workers at Trader Joes are attempting to unionize, according to a rapidly-growing Twitter account that is attempting to jumpstart the process at chains nationwide. The major grocery company prides itself on social good and caring for its employees -- we’ll see how that holds up.

That’s all for the AM Quickie today. Make sure you’re with us later today for the Majority Report’s full coverage of the Super Tuesday madness.

#AMQuickie - March 2, 2020

HOSTS - Sam Seder & Lucie Steiner

WRITER - Jack Crosbie

PRODUCER - Dorsey Shaw

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER - Brendan Finn