Mon: Two Words for Gov Ab-Butt, "Willie Horton".

Kevin Had a Dream, He Got Everything He Wanted.  Not What You'd Think, and If He's Being Honest, It Might've Been a Nightmare.

Barely Speaker Kevin McCarthy is barely hanging on to his conference, Axios reported last week, because he’s been badmouthing his leadership team to other colleagues. That’s making prospects for any agreement on a debt ceiling solution even murkier.

A report in The New York Times last week started the latest brouhaha, in which McCarthy has been telling GOP members that he thinks Republican Rep. Joey Arrington of Texas, chair of the Budget Committee, is incompetent and not up to the job. He has also been telling people that Republican Majority Leader Steve Scalise of South Carolina is unreliable, “ineffective, checked out and reluctant to take a position on anything.”

Can you say “projection”?

Kevin McCarthy Being Honest? That's a Knee-Slapper.

Playing with Fire

An examination found that a two-decade, global expansion of risky research has outpaced measures to ensure the safety of the work and that the exact number of biocontainment labs handling dangerous pathogens worldwide, while unknown, is believed by experts to be in the thousands.

In scores of interviews, scientific experts and officials — including in the Biden administration — acknowledged flaws in monitoring the riskiest kinds of pathogen research. While the pandemic showcased the need for science to respond quickly to global crises, it also exposed major gaps in how high-stakes research is regulated, according to the interviews and a review of thousands of pages of biosafety documents. The source of the coronavirus pandemic remains uncertain. While many scientists and experts suspect it may have been caused by a natural spillover from animals to humans, the FBI, including Director Christopher A. Wray, and a recent Energy Department assessment concluded with varying degrees of confidence that its likely source was an accidental release from a lab in Wuhan.

Within the United States, government regulation has also failed to keep step with new technologies that allow scientists to alter viruses and even synthesize new ones. The Biden administration is expected this year to impose tighter restrictions on research with the kinds of pathogens that could trigger an outbreak or a pandemic, according to officials familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Governments and private researchers continue building high-containment laboratories to work with the most menacing pathogens, despite a lack of safety standards or regulatory authorities in some countries, science and policy experts said. Meanwhile, U.S. agencies continue to funnel millions of dollars annually into overseas research, such as virus hunting, that some scientists say exposes local populations to risks while offering few tangible benefits.