O’Rourke disrupted an Abbott press conference on Wednesday in which the governor was giving updates on the shooting.

MY TAKE: Here he goes, about to raise another ruckus. Isn’t this called inciting violence?  Hello DOJ…. hello….?

2 – Paul Ryan says people thought Biden was going to be a centrist, ‘That’s Not What He Was’
Breitbart reports: On Thursday, former House Speaker Paul Ryan weighed in on the state of the country under President Joe Biden’s leadership.

Ryan told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that voters thought Biden was going to be a”centrist” and a “common ground guy” but acknowledged “that’s not what he was.” He lamented that Biden “gave the keys” to the left.

“[L]ook, Joe Biden and I have been friends for years,” Ryan outlined. “I think people thought they were going to get a centrist in office, you know, a common ground guy. That’s not what he was. He gave the keys to the left, the progressives. They steered the country far-left. They tried to go so far left on so many issues, and they didn’t have the majorities to do that. That’s what always confounded me — is they acted as they had these massive majorities with these leftwing ideas.”

He continued, “Tax reform, it works. These policies work, so that’s the thing that I’m excited about. We actually put a lot of good policies in place that have proven to work. I mean, who expected a global pandemic?”

MY TAKE: He just lost me at “Joe Biden and I have been friends for years.”

3 – Democrats aim for modest deal on guns
The Hill reports: Senate Democrats say they are ready to accept a modest deal on gun-control legislation as they are eager to get something done in response to mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, even if it falls below their ambitions of previous years.

A bipartisan group of nine senators met Thursday afternoon to chart out a path for negotiations.

They say their top priorities are proposals to expand background checks and encourage states to set up red-flag laws to prohibit people deemed dangerous to themselves or others from owning firearms.

Democrats acknowledged from the outset that whatever deal they get is likely to be modest since it needs at least 10 Republican votes to overcome a filibuster.

“If they’re successful, and I hope they are successful, I hope I’ll support it, I expect I will but I’m certainly not going to be satisfied,” Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) said of the bipartisan negotiations on gun-control legislation.

“I know the dynamics here. The assault weapons [ban] is not going to be in that package,” he said.

Another proposal favored by many Democrats, to ban high-capacity magazines, is also off the table in the bipartisan negotiations.

MY TAKE:  This is how it starts, folks.

4 – Socialist running for Congress realizes calling for people to break into homes may not be winning strategy
Fox News reports: Rebecca Parson, a democratic socialist running for Congress in the state of Washington, posted a video last week saying if she wins her race, people should occupy empty homes across the country to help her advance a potential housing bill.

Now she’s sending a very different message.

In an interview with Fox News Digital, Parson said she was referring to houses “owned by banks and Wall Street corporations like Zillow and BlackRock.” After a Fox News report identified the potential legal issues involved with occupying property owned by someone else, Parson said that is not what she wants after all.

“I don’t want people to commit a crime,” Parson said. Instead, she says, she wants governments to purchase these homes and then use them to help the homeless.

“The idea is there’s this crisis situation with people who need homes and then there’s 28 empty homes for every homeless person in the country,” said Parson, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. “So let’s have the federal government or city and local governments use money to buy these properties and use them for what they’re actually intended for.”

“I want people, local and state governments to purchase the homes so people can live in them,” she said.

(But, here’s the video she released:)

MY TAKE: Now she says she isn’t calling for anyone to commit a CRIME, but she posted a video showing someone’s fence being cut with wire clippers…!!  To the voters in Washington, you’re NUTS if you elect this woman!

5 – World Economic Forum ‘Press Freedom’ Panel Calls for Algorithmic Suppression of Hate Speech, Rumours
Breitbart reports: Rumours, falsehoods, division, and hate speech should be suppressed by social media algorithms, according to a “freedom of the press” panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday.

The WEF panel, which was held in collaboration with Time magazine, featured the head of Soros-backed Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, who argued that social media should not focus on banning or overt censorship but rather on algorithmic manipulation in order to promote content from a “subset of society… journalists” to convey information as “carefully as possible” to the public.

“The algorithms are written to promote engagement because engagement is profitable, engagement is more eyeballs, and what is engaging? The provocative, rumours, falsehoods, hate speech, divisiveness.

“I don’t focus so much on what should be taken down, the overt censorship, but rather what is being promoted. If algorithms are promoting information that in essence is false or divisive because it is profitable, there I think there is accountability that is quite warranted for these companies”, Roth said.

Roth went on to argue that social media has undermined journalistic strictures by empowering “autocrats” to speak directly to the public without the filter of news editors and journalists.

“Social media has become a way for autocrats and others to evade journalistic accountability. It used to be that to get information out you would need to pass through an editor,” he said.

“Social media, great as it is for allowing anyone to speak, great as it is for hidden corners of the world to be magnified, it has the downside of letting powerful institutions or governments speak directly to the people and evade efforts to present information responsibly.”

MY TAKE: Sounds like something Merrick Garland dreamed up.  Speaking of censorshiip, Libs of TikTok just got suspended from Instagram: