With Tight Grip on Ballot, Putin Is Forcing Foes Out : Allies acknowledge harks back to Soviet era

Source: New York Times

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
Published: October 14, 2007

MOSCOW, Oct. 13 — Balloting for Parliament will be held across Russia in December, and this much is already clear: Vladimir A. Ryzhkov, who was first elected in the turbulent yet hopeful days after the Soviet Union’s fall and then blossomed into a fervent advocate for democracy, will lose.

So will Viktor V. Pokhmelkin, who used his seat to crusade against corruption in the police and other law enforcement agencies. Swept away, too, will be Anatoly A. Yermolin, a K.G.B. officer turned liberal stalwart who has been a lone voice in rebellion against President Vladimir V. Putin’s expansive power.

Nearly eight years after Mr. Putin took office and began tightening his control over all aspects of the Russian government, he will almost certainly with this election succeed in extinguishing the last embers of opposition in Parliament.

Strict new election rules adopted under Mr. Putin, combined with the Kremlin’s dominance over the news media and government agencies, are expected to propel the party that he created, United Russia, to a parliamentary majority even more overwhelming than its current one. The system is so arrayed against all other parties that even some Putin allies have acknowledged that it harks back to the politics of the old days.

Sergei M. Mironov, a staunch Putin supporter and the chairman of the upper house of Parliament, suggested recently that United Russia seemed to have been modeled on a certain forerunner. “I think that the television broadcasts from the United Russia convention reminded a lot of people of long-forgotten pictures from the era of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” said Mr. Mironov, leader of another pro-Putin party, Just Russia....

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/world/europe/14russia.html?hp

Bushler must be so jealous of putin that he can go so much further and open in his variety of BushPutinism than Bushler himself can over here.

Often a post like this, about another country, is met only with responses critical of our own government. I don't like crackdowns on freedoms anywhere.

from the Democratic and Republican parties on how to keep others off ballots and news channels?

I hope he ends up in a drafty shack in Northern Siberia.

I hope the Russian people can make it happen.

It would be great if he had to share his shack with his soulmate GW Bush, who "saw Putin's soul" when he looked into his eyes.

Bush must have been too much of a wuss to play with snakes when he was a kid. Then he would have known what he was seeing.

Is that the way it works here? What a load of horseshit. When do we get some stories about how Bush is "tightening his grip" on the US government? And how that "harks back to the Watergate Era"?

Pooty-Poot has approval ratings in the 70s; democratically speaking he can do anything that does not violate the Russian constitution. Compare that with the illegitimate and un-elected usurper Bush, with approval ratings in the low 30s, if not less, and who violates the Constitution he is sworn to defend on a daily basis.

a good number of them having been posted by me. I don't think Bush's power-mad, illegitimate rule here in our country excuses denial of freedoms in other countries. But I acknowledge, and accept, that I appear to be in the minority here.

ON EDIT: In fact, sometimes I'm a "glutton for punishment":

In China, party's tight grip on display: "Troublemakers" warned, under house arrest or detained
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3027864

x(

I am well aware that you can find anything you like on the Internet, but I am not talking about the Internet, I am talking about the MSM, AKA "The Mighty Wurlitzer" or "the State Propaganda Organs".

I don't think anything Bush does excuses anything anyone else does. Other people's actions are to be judged on their own merits, just like Bush's. I'm not really interested in defending Pooty-Poot, that is a matter for the Russian people to judge, I'm just asking for something like the same treatment for everybody. If we are to talk about Pooty-Poot "tightening his grip" on Russia, we ought to also talk about Bush-Cheney "tightening their grip" on the USA, and similarly with the many propaganda terms that litter our public media. Stupid talk leads to stupid actions, and stupid actions lead to bad things happening.

by our own dear Brightest and Best West in the West and its hireling MSM, a patriotic leader, i.e. for the whole country - in the case in point, Putin - needs time to restore some measure of sanity in terms of social stability and justice.

Hillary will have to set the record straight

...for life ;)
viva Chav-Putin

/sarc