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It was nothing like the sea of orange-clad protesters who brought a new government to Ukraine in 2004, but for Russia's locked-down political climate, the rally on Sunday, Oct. 31, in the center of Moscow was a landmark of public discontent. Over the past 18 months, members of the sidelined opposition had tried nine times to gather on Moscow's Triumphal Square to defend their constitutional right to assemble and to call for the ousting of Vladimir Putin's government, and nine times the protesters had been beaten up, shoved away or arrested by riot police. This time, the government, apparently fed up with the bad publicity involved in dragging elderly demonstrators into police vans, allowed an hour of public catharsis Sunday night. But as the demonstration showed, the kind of outrage that arises in Russia when the gag is loosened may be more than the authorities are ready to permit.

This was clear first of all in the size of Sunday's rally. The nine previous events, all of which were banned on various pretexts (such as a state-funded blood drive using the square that same day), had attracted a few hundred people at best. So the 800-person limit the government set for Sunday's event seemed reasonable; it even had a chance of embarrassing the opposition if it produced a meager turnout. But despite Russia's docile political culture, about 2,000 people showed up to listen to speeches from dissidents and chant slogans like "Russia without Putin." The sudden emotional release it provided seemed so exhilarating that hundreds of the demonstrators, mostly younger activists, refused to disperse when riot police warned over loudspeakers that the party was over. (Much more at http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2028810,00.html#ixzz14G1
vU9SI )

Our little internal political broo-ha-ha is all the MSM cares about, while the rest of the world rolls on, sometimes with things more important than the good old U.S. of A. Does that count as censorship?


Hippie Operative Nikovich Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
Contracted Agent of Veritas Oilspillus, code name “Nike”,
signing off