Watch Matt Welch Talk Phoenix Mohammed Protest on CNN International at 2 p.m.

Just after 2 p.m. ET, I will be on CNN International discussing last night's Phoenix mosque draw-Mohammed protest/counter-protest thingie. For open-threaders, I propose converting this Popehat list of free-speech media tropes into a drinking game!

Comments

[adolphowisner]

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[mr lizard]

If you don't like our religious hate speech, then how about some classic "fuck you, you fucking fucks"?

[AlmightyJB]

You're getting around Matt:)

[Aloysious]

Matt, I will donate monies to the Reason Foundation if you show up in an opera cape. (Some day this is going to work.)

[Viscount Irish, Slayer of Huns]

Venezuela gets even shittier.

"Milk, flour, and toilet paper may be hard to find, but money can always be located for public employees: "Maduro also announced a 30-percent increase in public wages on Friday."

Cash is always easy to find when you're printing enormous quantities of it ? and while 68.5% inflation might sound high, the government is lying about that too: the real rate, based on black market exchange rates, is more like 327%.

Food and toilet paper aren't the only necessities in short supply: basic medicines are also increasingly hard to find. The regime has tried to counter the shortages with rationing. "

[Aloysious]

I was going to make a snarky comment, but that whole situation is just too sad for words.

[lap83]

Also sad because the socialists over here are too dumb to learn from any of it.

[Robert]

They're paying att'n, but only to insignificant details, not the big picture. It's as portrayed in the World Research, Inc. movie The Inflation File, where, at least until the end, the detective investigates many notorious cases of inflation, but hilariously takes as clues all sorts of particular artifacts of the times & places rather than thinking abstractly. Like, he'd visit Venezuela now & take some toilet paper for later examination to see if there was something peculiar about it.

[Ted S.]

The hoarders, wreckers, and kulaks took all the words.

[lap83]

One of anything is just too many choices.

[Harun]

Note that progressives only support some of these positions, like mandatory wage hikes and price controls on medicine.

So don't call them socialists.

[Notorious G.K.C.]

As has been noted before, socialism is a *system* of bad ideas. I doubt progs could systematize anything, they just jump after any shiny object that gets their attention.

[R C Dean]

The regime has tried to counter the shortages with rationing

Rationing doesn't counter shortages. It just redistributes them.

[Harun]

People aghast at the mosque protests would probably honk in support of a gay protest outside a Mormon temple that was against gay marriage.

If you can force Christian bakers to bake cakes for gay weddings, then we can force Muslims to accept people drawing cartoons of their religious leaders.

Note, we're not forcing them to actually draw anything.

I think the best counter-protest to this would be no counter protest and just come out and say "We don't like it, but its a free country."

[Aloysious]

Exclusive: Rand Paul: 'I will force the expiration' of the PATRIOT Act

http://www.politico.com/story/.....18443.html

Rand Paul plans to force the expiration of the PATRIOT Act Sunday by refusing to allow Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to expedite debate on a key surveillance bill.

In a statement to POLITICO Saturday, Paul warned that he would not consent to any efforts to pass either an extension of current law or the USA Freedom Act, a reform bill passed overwhelmingly by the House earlier this month.

"So tomorrow, I will force the expiration of the NSA illegal spy program," Paul sa

I really, really don't like Mitch McConnell.

[Ted S.]

I wish reason would cover this story.

[Notorious G.K.C.]

Americans traditionally haven't liked being told what to do, even if its something to which they were previously indifferent.

Ask them a few years ago about Mohammed pictures and they might shrug and say, "hmmm...interesting," and do nothing.

But tell them "we'll shoot you if you draw our sacred and revered Prophet, PB&J," there is a hard core of Americans - call them *real* Americans - who would be happy to do the very thing they were ordered not to.

And it's a nonviolent way to show the fence-sitters in the Muslim community that threatening people over these pictures is a surefire way to get more pictures drawn, and to have those pictures all over the internet.

Message: Crack down on the violent elements if you want a reduction of these "disrespectful" pictures.

[Robert]

I think this may be operating in the case of some of the police abuse. You tell police not to be mean, some of them will be encouraged to respond by being mean just to get your goat.

[Notorious G.K.C.]

Oh, and it would be nice if the MSM followed up on Pamela Geller's claims that the mosque they're protesting taught radicalism to the two attackers in Texas. Geller called out the media for focusing just on the protesters.

Why not a debunking story showing that the mosque is actually a bunch of Unitarian Universalists with beards. If that's where the evidence leads. Now, if the MSM *isn't* running such stories, maybe that shows that the evidence doesn't show the mosque to be all sweetness and light.

[GILMORE]

Is CNN International even part of most basic cable?

I glanced at my directory and don't even see it.

[Fist of Etiquette]

Yeah I have every channel known to man but this is nowhere to be found. I think it was some cable access channel in Wolf Blitzer's home town. Too bad. The topic seemed like it would have been ripe for live blogging.

[Robert]

Who's Phoenix Mohammed?

[adolphowisner]

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