The Party of Crooks and Thieves has responded to our nice, cozy Good Machine of Truth: “libel” has been returned to the Criminal Code. State Duma Vice Speaker Sergei Zheleznyak has already admitted that one of the first people charged under this article could be politician Alexei Navalny, if he does not stop spreading what United Russia members consider false information about United Russia, Vladimir Putin, and his inner circle. So the GMT is working, and the crooks-and-thieves crowd are afraid of it — and I congratulate all of us on that. Here is NTV’s report on the subject from yesterday, with a small appearance by me as well.
http://youtu.be/5iXjOs1C-ds If I were not afraid of the new libel law, I would say this: Members of the United Russia party are idiots and layabouts, uselessly living off taxpayers’ money. After all, just six months ago these donkeys removed libel from the Criminal Code and turned it into an administrative offense. Their donkey leader Medvedev told them the carrot was over there, and the herd mooed and moved in that direction: According to Boris Reznik, deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Information Technology and Communications, the bill is needed first and foremost to “decriminalize the profession of journalism.” The bill was also supported by the legal community. Defense lawyers had their own arguments: judges are overburdened, and it is simply more выгодно for the state to transfer insult and libel articles from criminal proceedings into administrative ones. Here is why: criminal proceedings cost the budget money, whereas administrative fines, on the contrary, replenish the budget. http://rg.ru/2009/07/21/kleveta.html Vladimir Gruzdev, first deputy chairman of the Duma committee on civil legislation, believes the amendments would make punishment “fair and inevitable.” “Over 20 years, we have put 20 million people through prisons and camps,” he told Kommersant, while over the last two years, thanks to the “modernization” of legislation, the number of prisoners has been reduced from 870,000 to 811,000. Mr. Gruzdev believes the result of the changes to the Criminal Code will be not only a reduction in the “prison population,” but in crime itself. http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1655939 The Criminal Code article on “Libel,” like the one on “Insult,” was effectively dead, notes Olga Kostina, a member of the Civic Chamber (a state consultative body). She considers its transfer into the category of administrative offenses correct, but says that not only fines are needed, but also specific administrative punishments, for example dismissal if the offense was committed through abuse of official position (for instance, by a journalist). http://www.gazeta.ru/politics/2011/03/15_a_3555089.shtml The presidential amendments provide for a new type of criminal punishment for Russia — forced labor, Andrei Nazarov, first deputy chairman of the State Duma committee on civil, criminal, arbitration, and procedural legislation, explained in a comment to ER.RU. “A number of Criminal Code articles — such offenses as libel and economic smuggling — are being moved into the category of administrative offenses. The idea is to rely primarily on financial penalties multiplied in scale for economic crimes, including tougher punishment for commercial bribery. We are talking about code changes unprecedented in the number of innovations, which is why the joint work of the government, the presidential administration, and deputies on clarifying the wording of individual provisions and identifying possible conflicts with other laws continued right up to the second reading. http://er.ru/news/2011/11/1/gosduma-reformiruet-ugolovnoe-zakonodatelstvo/ and so on
This is what libel-proof but truthful campaigning might look like. Now the leader of the herd of United Russia donkey-idiots has said they need to go in the other direction, and they are just as convincingly mooing that libel shouuuuld, of couuuurse, be punished under criminal rather than administrative law. But I will not say that: after all, I do not have a medical certificate stating that all United Russia deputies in the State Duma are idiots, which means that would be knowingly false information. ...Wait, the amendments have not yet come into force, so I will say it: members of the “United Russia” party are idiots and layabouts, uselessly living off taxpayers’ money. And when “libel” returns to the Criminal Code, I will say: “Looking at all this, I am beginning to think that members of ‘United Russia’ are idiots, layabouts, and thieves, uselessly living off taxpayers’ money. I may not have seen their medical certificates, but some things are just obvious at a glance.” The United Russia deputies in the Duma have long since stopped feeling either shame or embarrassment, but the most pathetic nonentity in this whole situation is, of course, Prime Minister Medvedev.
After all, this immensely powerful and independent politician heads the party that is repealing his supposedly principled amendments to the Criminal Code, adopted six months ago. I wonder if they slap him on the back of the head at party congresses? An excellent article with a substantive critique of this United Russia initiative by Genri Reznik. And now I would like to remind you of one wonderful libelous act, while first trying out a style of presentation suited to the new legislative innovations: A certain group of wrongdoers continues to distribute a leaflet from the website http://er.mashina.org/ The leaflet has already been downloaded 72,718 times, and if the accomplices of these wrongdoers fulfill the minimum target by distributing just 10 leaflets each, then it has circulated in nearly a million copies. This is very bad. It causes bitterness both to Vladimir Putin and to his neighbors in the dacha cooperative, who became billionaires by honest means. Of course the leaflet is libel. After all, it was not “United Russia” that voted for higher utility rates; after all, it is not “United Russia” that encourages inequality between regions through politically motivated subsidies; after all, it is not “United Russia” that sits in tariff agencies approving fake investments while driving rates upward; after all, it is not United Russia members who sit all over the country in housing maintenance offices and district housing administrations, stealing residents’ payments and paying for the opportunity to keep stealing by falsifying elections while serving on local precinct commissions. Therefore it is only right that honest and courageous United Russia members have already complained to the prosecutor’s office about this leaflet twice. One of the complainants is the wonderful deputy and former governor of Vologda Region, Pozgalyov, who certainly cannot be called “some freak who crawled out of nowhere, looted and ruined the entire region, enriched his son-in-law, and was thrown out of the governor’s office by his own United Russia colleagues because the public hated him.” Certainly not. Many people may see him that way, but that is not true. So a request: please do not harm “United Russia.” Do not spread, as widely as possible and wherever you can, the leaflet from the website http://er.mashina.org/ , if you do not want to tell the public negative things about “UR.” After all, the public already knows from television what it is supposed to know. Do not visit http://er.mashina.org/ Do not print http://er.mashina.org/ Do not distribute http://er.mashina.org/ Support “United Russia” so that it can keep doing what it does for a very, very long time. Update. *In connection with the appearance of the leaflets in Vyatskiye Polyany, an appeal to law enforcement agencies is being prepared, and the press service of the Kirov regional branch of United Russia once again reminds everyone that the information contained in the leaflets is not the official or unofficial position of the United Russia party, and asks all residents of Kirov Region who have already encountered Navalny’s “information letters” to report them to the party’s regional executive committee. *http://www.nabludatel.ru/new/2012/07/12/edinorossy-gotovyat-obrashhenie-v-pravooxranitelnye-organy-po-povodu-rasprostraneniya-v-vyatskix-polyanax-listovok-navalnogo/ Heh-heh-heh