the rubble in a desperate search for survivors. meanwhile here in washington president joe biden will deliver the state of the union address tonight. we ll go through what we will and won t hear from the president. and we ll have the latest from ukraine where more signs are pointing to a major offensive campaign coming from the russian army. good morning and welcome to way too early on this tuesday, february 7th. i m jonathan lemire. thanks for starting your day with us. the death toll following that powerful earthquake in syria and turkey has now passed 5,000 people, and it continues to climb. a 7.8 magnitude tremor hit the region early yesterday along with multiple after shocks including a 7.5 magnitude quake that struck just hours later. tens of thousands have been injured, and search and rescue efforts are under way to find people who may still be trapped under the rubble. more than 6,000 buildings collapsed in turkey. some of that footage was caught by bystanders
open to an alternative in 204 with 14% saying they d support kennedy for the democratic nomination while a new harris poll finds that 63% of voters think the president would not be able to finish a second term if he was reelected and that vice president kamala harris would wind up taking over at some point. let s bring in wall street journal columnists dan henninger and kim strassel. so, dan, what do you think of joe biden s decision to run for a second term? i think that if in terms of the good of the country, it s a big mistake. for sure. in terms of joe biden s apparently boundless ambitions, if he thinks donald trump is going to be the opposition, he believes he can beat trump. paul: you think that s the main motivation for biden at this stage, beat trump? well, no. i think the main motivation is he likes to be president [laughter] paul: okay. air force one, all the rest of it. [laughter] his entire career was dedicated to this spot, and it s tough to give it up
chairman of the council of economic advisers at the white house and a distinguished visiting fellow at the hoover institution. kevin, welcome. thanks for coming in. so do you think this strategy by the republicans to use the debt ceiling despite the potential risks of a default to get concessions on spending is a good one? is that a good strategy? if. yeah, i think it is a good strategy. and you might remember, paul, that it was about, gosh, almost a decade ago that you ran an op-ed that abby mccluskey and i wrote where we went through the history of debt limit debates, and we pound they have this thing called a dirty debt limit increase and then a clean one is the debt limit only, and we found that the majority of debt limit increases that happened were dirty, and that was even true when the democrats controlled all three branches of government. and there have been a lot of policies that are pretty good including spending cuts and the cigarette tax, for example, was passed in a debt
up and really want to take medicare and medicaid and social security in these entitlement programs off the table. one of the problems i think for democrats is that you did have while president obama really talk about perhaps putting medicaid and medicare and social security on the table during these debt limit debates. he proposed putting you know, 650 billion in entitlement cuts on table. in some kays you almost he expect that republicans will say, well president obama said these things should be on the table. that s what we will look at. we will see at that point whether he is saying put it on the table it end it. i think as we have heard from his representatives on the show, that they are saying that those that need them could not be heard. let me ask you this, matt, the republicans didn t get the message from that new york race, that to even bother this, to even talk about bothering these