The Polling Booth: Et tu, Chris? New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie crossed the mainstream Republican line yesterday and endorsed Donald Trump for president, saying the most important thing is to beat Hillary Clinton in November. Christie is the first politician to board the Trump train after being run over by it.

It’s a shock to the Republican system.

While lifting Trump, Christie put down Marco Rubio saying, “He’s a desperate guy. He is not presidential material. He doesn’t have the demeanor. He is a nervous Nellie.”

Heading into today’s South Carolina Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton leads Bernie Sanders in the delegate count by 502 to 70. Clinton is 1,881 delegates short of the nomination; Bernie Sanders, 2,313.

The former secretary of state leads so dramatically because of the Democratic Party’s “Super Delegates” who can commit to any candidate they wish. There are 713 of them and 451 so far have committed to Clinton, only 19 for Sanders.

Clinton has the potential to nail it on Super Tuesday next week when 865 Democratic delegates are up for grabs.

As for the Republicans, Trump hopes to suffocate his main rivals in next week’s Super Tuesday contests, particularly across the Deep South, and to knock them off with wins in their home states. In his Las Vegas victory speech after the Nevada caucuses Tuesday night, Trump predicted he would secure the nomination in less than two months and taunted his opponents by trumpeting his high poll numbers in Florida, Ohio, and Texas.

Outbreak: An American woman who was pregnant when she contracted the Zika virus while travelling out of the country has delivered a baby with microcephaly, an unusually small head, according to the Centers for disease control.

The woman was one of nine identified by the CDC. Of the others, two had miscarriages, two had abortions, and two had healthy children.

The Obit Page: Former Miss America Yolande Betbeze Fox, the thinking woman’s beauty queen who refused to pose in bathing suits and became a social activist, died this week in Washington at age 87.

In 1951 Fox was the first Miss America to stroll the catwalk in a gown rather than a bathing suit after she was crowned. Her refusal to make public appearance afterwards in a bathing suit caused the swimsuit maker Catalina to abandon its sponsorship of the pageant and create the Miss USA contest.

Born in Alabama and educated in Catholic Schools, she used her fame to protest the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and racial discrimination at the Woolworth chain’s lunch counters.

>Lennie Baker, the longtime member of the Doo-Wop revival group Sha Na Na has died at age 69. Baker toured with the group for 30 years and was the voice for “Blue Moon,” one of their most popular songs. It’s the second death for the group in months. Dennis Greene died in September.

The NewsBiz: Fledgling television news network Al Jazeera America shut down its web operation yesterday. The television network is expected to close in April. Staffed by television news veterans who knew what they were doing, the network was has been commanded and run by a bunch of oil billionaires and newsocrats who did not.

>In a public spat with her employers, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry is boycotting her own show today after being repeatedly pre-empted for other programming in recent weeks. “Here is the reality: Our show was taken — without comment or discussion or notice — in the midst of an election season,” she wrote in an email released yesterday. “After four years of building an audience, developing a brand and developing trust with our viewers, we were effectively and utterly silenced.”

Harris-Perry, who is black, wrote, “I am not a token, mammy or little brown bobble head.”

-30-