SO I GUESS IT WASN’T POLLING VERY WELL: Trump on Cruz feud: ‘I don’t care about that anymore’.

THE NEW RELIGION OF ANTI-RACISM CAN TURN DISAGREEMENT INTO HERESY.

Nietzsche believed he had killed God in 1883, but man is hardwired to believe in something. From the belief in the perfection of the bureaucratic state (and the concomitant cargo cult worship of the New Deal) to radical environmentalism to what Columbia’s John McWhorter recently dubbed “Antiracism, Our Flawed New Religion,” the entire 150-year old “Progressive” experiment can be seen as an extended experiment to build a new organized religion and/or to create “Heaven on Earth,” but as they said at National Review in the 1960s, “Don’t Immanentize the Eschaton.”

Related: “Liberals often claim that the little people, those without a college education or a subscription to the New York Times, are easy prey for demagogues. Lacking political nous and basic B.S.-resistance, apparently, these plain-thinking folk find themselves in thrall to frothing Fox News anchors and various other big-haired, well-known people who spout simple political messages. We can think independently, but they can’t, say snooty liberals,” Brendan O’Neill writes. “All of which makes the Cult of Ta-Nehisi Coates so ironic. The very liberals who mock rednecks for falling for the bluster of biblical or right-leaning nuts basically bow and scrape at the feet of Coates, treating his every utterance as a bolt from heaven.”

20 years ago, when the leftists at the Washington Post infamously declared that evangelical Christians were “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” I wonder if they had any inkling how much self-projection they were generating?

(Via Maggie’s Farm.)

JUST IN CASE YOU WONDERED, IF YOU DON’T SUPPORT HILLARY IT’S BECAUSE YOU’RE A MISOGYNIST OR SOMETHING: The sexist double standard behind why millennials love Bernie Sanders.

OUCH: Stacey Dash: Obama at mosque shows he’s actually okay with SOME Americans clinging to their guns and God.

NOTHING SAYS “VOTE DEMOCRAT IN 2016” LIKE A GOVERNMENT-MANDATED GAS PRICE INCREASE: Obama goes full YOLO: Proposes raising gas prices in final budget.

President Obama is expected to include a proposed $10 “fee” on every barrel of oil in his final budget. Obama suggests the “fee” (read: tax) will be paid for by evil oil companies (aren’t they just the worst?), but in reality, we all know the price will be passed along to consumers.

We just got low gas prices back, and this is what we get from the administration?

This is how big government operates. People are finally getting a break in their pocketbooks, so the government looks for a way to stick it to them. Obama knows that people did pay the higher price for gas, so why not go back to that again and make government the beneficiary?

Republicans should add a rider cutting limiting Presidential use of Air Force One to a single trip per month, effective immediately. For the environment!

GALLUP: Red States Outnumber Blue for First Time in Gallup Tracking.

Gallup’s analysis of political party affiliation at the state level in 2015 finds that 20 states are solidly Republican or leaning Republican, compared with 14 solidly Democratic or leaning Democratic states. The remaining 16 are competitive. This is the first time in Gallup’s eight years of tracking partisanship by state that there have been more Republican than Democratic states. It also marks a dramatic shift from 2008, when Democratic strength nationally was its greatest in recent decades.

The Competitive column includes formerly-blue Pennsylvania and the upper Midwestern states of Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. All five went for Barack Obama in the last two elections, and hold a total of 62 electoral college votes in 2016.

A SMALL CIVIL RIGHTS VICTORY: Kolbe v. Hogan: 4th Circuit requires strict scrutiny for Maryland ban on magazines and semiautomatics. “Today the 4th Circuit decided Kolbe v. Hogan, a Second Amendment challenge to a 2013 Maryland arms prohibition statute. The statute bans the sale of firearm magazines that hold more than 10 rounds and also bans many firearms, by labeling them as ‘assault weapons.’ In a 2-1 decision written by Chief Judge Traxler, the Fourth Circuit held that strict scrutiny is the proper standard of review for bans on common arms, such as those at issue in Kolbe. The case was remanded to the district court, which had applied the wrong standard, namely a weak version of intermediate scrutiny.”

SOMEONE TELL BERNIE: For Venezuela, the End Is Near.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is planning to cut 50 percent of the budget for aerial surveillance along the Southern U.S. border.

Related: Border Patrol Agent: We Will Be Terminated If We Try To Enforce The Law.

More: The Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest released a new chart on Thursday exclusively to Breitbart News that shows that the number of fugitive criminal aliens in America outnumbers the populations of every city in New Hampshire.

DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY: Is an Audit on the Way for Iowa Caucuses?

Iowa Democrats are facing increased pressure to re-examine Monday’s incredibly close and uncomfortably messy vote, especially after the Des Moines Register called for “a complete audit of results.”

But party leaders say it may be hard to recreate what happened at hundreds of small precinct gatherings, where voters can arrive supporting one candidate and leave backing another.

In an editorial published late on Feb. 3 and in today’s print editions, the state’s newspaper argued, “What happened Monday night at the Democratic caucuses was a debacle, period. Democracy, particularly at the local party level, can be slow, messy and obscure. But the refusal to undergo scrutiny or allow for an appeal reeks of autocracy. The Iowa Democratic Party must act quickly to assure the accuracy of the caucus results, beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

Delays in reporting vote totals on Monday night prompted the state party to reach out to the campaigns to help register the tally. While 100 percent of precincts had reported by the next day, critics of the process pointed to reports of under-staffed precincts and inconsistencies and were calling for the party to take a closer look, including releasing raw vote totals in Hillary Clinton’s razor-thin victory over Sen. Bernard Sanders.

Sam Lau, communications director for the Iowa Democratic Party, said the structure of the caucuses make it difficult to recreate exactly what happened.

How convenient for Hillary.

THE HEAT IS ON, at last, at last night’s Democratic debate:

“I think it’s time to end the very artful smear that you and your campaign have been carrying out in recent week,” Clinton said after Sanders talked about getting money out of politics.

Sanders has boasted about not receiving money from Wall street, and has pointed out in recent weeks that Clinton has received large sums in exchange for speaking.

“Sen. Sanders has said he wants to run a positive campaign. I’ve tried to keep my disagreements over issues, but time and time again, by innuendo and by insinuation there is this attack that he is putting forth,” Clinton said.

“Which really comes down to anyone who ever took donations or speaking fees from interest groups has to be bought, and I absolutely reject that Senator. I really don’t think those attacks by insinuation are worthy of you,” Clinton continued.

It doesn’t take much in the way of “art” or “innuendo” or “insinuation” to point out that Clinton bashes Wall Street while taking millions in donations and up to $675,000 a pop in speaking fees from too-big-to-fail firms like Goldman-Sachs.

NOT DEAD ENOUGH: Mocked, resented, and now dead: De Blasio’s horse debacle makes history.

As Kathy Shaidle quipped back in 2014, de Blasio really is the second coming of Rick Moranis as the “Keymaster” in Ghostbusters, isn’t he?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON’S Lessons From the California’s Drought:

Government failure was not just due to acts of commission, but of omission as well. In four years, not a single new reservoir was begun, despite warnings that the state’s reservoir capacity long ago was fossilized—designed for a state of 20 million people, not the present 40 million.

Had the state begun work on a few of the long-planned tertiary reservoirs of the now neglected California Water Project—the Sites, Los Banos Grandes, and Temperance Flat projects—the reservoirs would now be nearing completion and ready to capture nearly four-million acre-feet of additional water runoff, should 2016 prove to be a “wet” year.

If Californians have learned anything, it is that droughts are survivable only to the degree that the state’s reservoirs have water, that water projects must follow their original and contracted purposes (irrigation, flood control, hydroelectric power, and recreation), and that finite aquifers are replenished only by surface irrigation water deliveries that both recharge the water table and preclude the need for subterranean pumping. Because of the state’s failure to initiate a new reservoir, the next drought will hit 50 or 60 million state residents—with the ability to survive only a year or two, not four years, of reduced rain and snowfall.

The environmental movement helped to intensify rather than alleviate the drought. Both Governor Brown and President Obama—contrary to the exegeses of reputable climatologists and meteorologists—ignored the demonstrable and historical role of the El Niño effect. Instead they quickly politicized the drought by blaming generic global warming as the culprit, and then suggested that the cure was a reduction in carbon emissions. There is some irony in the fact that what seems to cause California’s frequent droughts is not the supposed man-caused global warming of recent years, but a natural and slight cooling of the Pacific Ocean that, as its centuries-long wont, helps to alter storm pathways over Western North America.

But building a $100 billion-plus high-speed rail or mandating that California public utilities over the next four years meet targets of 33% renewable energy use will not prevent a periodic drought. Such boondoggles will only ensure less funding for proven drought solutions, such as building more reservoirs, pipelines, and canal transfer systems.

The California legislature has dealt with a number of issues since the beginning of the drought in 2012—mandating transgendered restrooms, outlawing the use of hunting dogs in the pursuit of bobcats and bears, and proposing a vast increase in the state gas tax in a state that currently suffers the continental United States’ most expensive gasoline prices. Yet reservoir construction was not among such high priority considerations, despite voters’ overwhelming passage in 2014 of a $7.4 billion water bond that included the building of one or two new reservoirs—none of which are even close to being started.

Read the whole thing; alas no one in Sacramento ever will.

THE HILL: Limbaugh: Obama ‘constantly denigrates Christians.’

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh said Thursday he wonders why President Obama is a Christian given how often he discusses Islam instead.

“President Obama is routinely defending [Islam], talking it up, promoting it,” he said on his broadcast that afternoon. “He says it’s the most peaceful, giving religion out there, that the mosque’s call to prayer is one of the most beautiful sounds in the world.”

“My question is, given all this, why did he choose to become a Christian,” he added. “I’ve always wondered that. He’s such a defender and promoter of Islam, and, on the other hand, he and his party are constantly denigrating Christians.”

Limbaugh argued that Obama does not hold Christianity in high regard.

“He says he is one, [but] at the same time, he’s out there, and look what he says about Christians,” he said. “Look, he talks about them as ‘bitter clingers’ and [says that] they hold onto their guns when they’re nervous.

“I don’t care what the issue is, whether it’s guns, whether it’s gay marriage, any cultural or social issue, or the ‘bitter clinger’ comments. How did he end up choosing Rev. [Jeremiah] Wright’s church given his public statements on all this?”

How, indeed?

WHY DO DEMOCRATS HATE THE POOR AND MIDDLE CLASS SO? Obama to propose $10-a-barrel oil tax.

Should be fun hearing what Hillary has to say about this, since in the spring of 2008, she “lined up with Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, in endorsing a plan to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for the summer travel season:”

(Curious how high American gas prices were in that period after Democrats retook both houses of Congress in 2006, and before the oil industry adopted the policy of “drill, baby dill,” to coin a phrase from the fall of 2008.)

GEORGE ORWELL, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Rep. John Conyers (D-MI): Illegal Aliens ‘Are Not Engaging in an Illegal Act.’

To be fair, Conyers knows his illegal acts — he’s seen them up close and personal.

MARK RIPPETOE: Doctors And Exercise Advice. “I won’t bore you with the specifics of the physiology, but every word of this is complete bullshit – of the kind you’d expect from a bartender, not a doctor.”

QUESTION ASKED: Who decided to investigate Colin Powell and Condi Rice’s emails?

“Get back to us when you find Powell’s unauthorized, personal home-brew email server with its own domain. Attorney and writer Gabriel Malor had another concern: What was the State Department doing investigating Powell’s email while blowing off a court-ordered deadline for Clinton’s emails?”

Related: “In a stinging new article, Jeb Babbin outlines how 16 different intelligence agencies must have known about Hillary Clinton’s private email server. So far not one of them has publicly objected.”

THE SERVER IS THE SMOKING GUN. John Cornyn: Clinton ‘Likely Violated Multiple Criminal Statutes.’

150 YEAR OLD AUTHOR A BESTSELLER AGAIN: ‘Peter Rabbit’ vs. ‘Polar Bear’s Underwear’: The Revenge of the Classics.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Don’t Be Hacker Bait: Do This One-Hour Security Drill.

THE IDEAL SPOKESPERSON FOR THE HILLARY CAMPAIGN: Lena Dunham: The Manchurian Girl.

EXCUSE #250 I’VE SEEN: Is CTE what made Henry VIII kill all those wives?

NEVER TOO YOUNG TO BE COMMERCIALLY EXPLOITED: How Young is Too Young to Become a Viral Video Sensation?

ELITE EDUCATION IMPLOSION UPDATE: Creeping Totalitarianism at Harvard.