Bill Hobbs has posted the YouTube video of that Manchester anti-free speech meeting:

He has also posted his account on Facebook.

My thoughts on the Muslim community event in Manchester on June 4, 2013:
I was there for the whole thing, to take pictures and video. The crowd was mostly angry about the federal prosecutor’s prior statement that some anti-Islamic speech could be criminal. (This is what talk radio and various right-wing websites focused on to urge people to attend the meeting – not Islam, but the implied threat to prosecute people for speech deemed by the government to be offensive to Muslims.) The crowd inside became increasingly agitated as it became clear the event would not be permitted to become a discussion of that important First Amendment issue, but instead was set up as a lecture in which two federal officials and several Muslims lectured the crowd about how great Muslims are.

The lecture format was confirmed when, at the end, they announced they would take only TWO questions – and the prosecutor quickly ducked out the side door (after hilariously bragging he held the same job once held by Andrew Jackson).

Listening to the first ten minutes, the crowd sounds like it has its share of annoying troublemakers. It also sounds like most people wanted to listen, but were disturbed by the handful of loudmouths. I don’t know if this holds after the first ten minutes, and I have too much to do right now to watch the whole thing tonight.

It sounds like Killian wimped out of talking about how he was going to prosecute inflammatory speech, which is a shame but predictable, I suppose, once attention began to focus on the talk. It’s harder to stamp out freedoms in the light.

I was sent some photos by a reader from last night’s event about the federal government’s thoughts about prosecuting you for your inflammatory speech against Muslims. I called for citizen coverage of the event in this post. Some of them need to be rotated and I can’t figure out how to do that right now, so I may publish some later, but here is a shot of a protest outside the event:

Apparently Pam Geller and Victoria Jackson were both present, and the reader sent me some shots of Geller, which I will try to provide later.

The reader tells me she has video, which I asked her to upload to YouTube.

Bill Hobbs covered it; if you want details, check his Twitter account. He also promises a YouTube video later, and links local coverage here.

I’m sure we’ll be hearing much more.

Eric Turkwitz recently wrote me to and offer this as a short guest post:

If Gov. Christie picks a Republican to fill Lautenberg’s Senate seat, Democrats will be (rightly) pissed at him.

If Gov. Christie picks a Democrat to fill Lautenberg’s Senate seat, Republicans will be (rightly) pissed at him.

What’s a Governor to do if he has aspirations for the oval office and grabbing swing voters?

He will pick a respected and retired judge, currently doing mediations/arbitrations to resolve litigation, that promises not to run for the seat in the special election. The politics of the judge won’t matter as much because of the (somewhat) insulating effect of the robe and the view of such individuals as relatively fair arbiters.

Interesting take, but one that has been overrun by events — because Christie has already decided, and his choice is the most selfish response possible: calling a special election in October, but setting it two weeks earlier than his own. Christie thus rejected the option of appointing someone (a retired judge, or whomever) to serve through November 2014 — which would give a GOP challenger time to raise money and campaign. As Allahpundit explains, holding an election this soon is certain to fatally hobble the GOP candidate — but will help Christie’s image, while also conveniently shielding his own re-election prospects from the ruinous spectre of the horde of Democrat voters who will turn out to support the Democrat replacement for Lautenberg:

[I]n order to protect his own ass electorally, he decided to schedule the Senate special election in October, not on election day in November. Now he gets the best of both worlds, all but handing the seat to Booker ASAP to burnish his “bipartisan” brand while ensuring that he himself doesn’t have to face the extra Democratic voters who’ll turn out to vote for Booker.

Having a separate election will cost $12 million more, we are told — but what’s $12 million when it comes to Chris Christie’s public image?

P.S. I think Christie easily could have justified picking a Republican, on the basis that this is what the system calls for. In a situation where such a vacancy arises, the governor makes the call — and the electorate, by electing a Republican governor, implicitly approves his choice.

ISN’T IT IRONIC: The irony of this, of course, is that by electing a self-centered blowhard as governor, the New Jersey public has implicitly approved the kind of choices that self-centered blowhards make — meaning that the choice Christie has made here does indeed, in a very real sense, have the blessing of New Jersey’s political system. So I’m at peace with it: New Jersey gets what it deserves, and we get more evidence of the type of President that Christie would make. If anyone was confused before about why he should be opposed, that cloud of confusion should be lifting.