Earthquake: As many as 1500 people are dead today in Turkey and Syria after two major earthquakes and dozens of aftershocks. It’s estimated that thousands of buildings collapsed and that the death toll will certainly rise.

    The first quake was a 7.8 that that struck at 4:17 am, followed by a second 7.5 about nine hours later.

  Pictures show one apartment tower collapsed into its foundation and video captured a seven-story residential building as it dropped. One woman posted video of herself trapped in rubble. The event is a humanitarian crisis even before the full impact is assessed. In Syria, the quake damage and deaths stretch through an area already wracked by civil war.

China Syndrome: Navy divers have begun the work of recovering remains of the Chinese spy balloon shot down Saturday six miles off South Carolina in 47 feet of water.

  China released a statement saying, “For the United States to insist on using armed force is clearly an excessive reaction.” As if they would not have done the same a lot sooner.

  The incident released a huge amount of hot air all over the country, none of it coming from the balloon. President Biden’s choice to stall shooting the balloon until it was over the Atlantic has his political opponents fulminating.

  Florida Rep. Ronny Jackson tweeted, “Joe Biden is letting China HUMILIATE us!”

  Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor  Greene tapped out, “I just spoke with our GREAT America First President Trump. He would have never allowed China to fly a spy balloon over our country and our military bases and assets.”

  Actually, he did. Administration officials now say Chinese balloons flew over parts of the US at least three times while Trump was president.

  The latest floated in from the Aleutian Islands and traversed southeast across the US. Biden said he always planned to shoot it down when the wreckage would not drop on American heads.

  What China is or was thinking is a mystery. The balloon had limited intelligence value. One theory has it that they were just poking America to see what kind of political division and uproar they could seed. If that’s the case, the mission was a great success. 

It’s Political: Few Americans are enthusiastic about a 2024 election re-match between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

  Fifty-eight percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said they would prefer someone other than Biden. 

  Trump does a little better with Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. Forty-nine percent say they want someone new compared to 44 percent who favor the former president. 

Poor Marjorie: Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s gained a lot of power under the new leadership, is whining about the job.

  Speaking on the podcast of conservative Glenn Greenwald, Greene said,

“The nature of this job, it keeps members of Congress and senators in Washington so much of the time—too much of the time, to be honest with you—that we don’t get to go home and spend more time with our families, our friends, all in our district, or maybe just be regular people.” 

  Greene makes $174,000 a year, but she said, “Becoming a member of Congress has made my life miserable. I made a lot more money before I got here. I’ve lost money since I’ve gotten here.” She said, “It’s not a life that I think is like something that I enjoy because I don’t enjoy it.”

The Obit Page: Pervez Musharraf, the former military ruler of Pakistan who promised the US critical support for the fight against Al Qaeda after the September 11^th terrorist attacks while facing anti-Western resistance from within, died yesterday in Dubai. He was 79.

  Musharraf took over the nuclear-armed country with a bloodless coup in 1999 and resigned to a self-imposed exile in 2008. Pakistani Muslims were not happy to have him helping a campaign to fight fellow Muslims.

— Charles Kimbrough, the actor who played the wooden anchorman opposite Candice Bergen’s irreverent reporter in the television news sitcom “Murphy Brown,” has died at age 86. 

  Kimbrough was anchor-man handsome with comic timing. He also delivered  a Tony nominated performance in the original 1970 Broadway production of the Steven Sondheim musical “Company.” 

The Spin Rack: A freight train carrying hazardous chemicals that derailed late Friday in East Palestine, Ohio continues to burn, spewing potentially poisonous black smoke. The cars are all accordioned and charred. An evacuation order has been issued. — A man who applied to work for Rep. George Santos has filed a complaint saying the truth-challenged member of Congress made an unwanted sexual advance then denied him a job. — “Queen B” Beyoncé last night became the winner of the most career Grammy awards, 32.

Below the Fold: One of the longest running dumb arguments in the world is whether in the movie “Titanic” Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack could have climbed onto the hatch cover with Kate Winslet’s Rose and survived instead of slipping into the depths of the Atlantic.

  Twenty-six years after the debut of his movie, director James Cameron has conducted tests to see whether Jack and Rose both could have fit on the hatch and lived together into a happy old age.  

  Cameron is going to show the results in a documentary. He told the Toronto Sun, “We took two stunt people who were the same body mass of Kate and Leo and we put sensors all over them and inside them and we put them in ice water and we tested to see whether they could have survived through a variety of methods and the answer was, there was no way they both could have survived,” 

  Of course, Cameron could have had Jack survive but — here’s the big reveal for people obsessed with this  — the movie was a tragic love story and Jack’s death was written into the script. It’s only a movie. It’s only a movie.

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