To protest Vladimir Putin's actions in arresting and prosecuting a blogger who dared to satirize him as Russia's "Phallic Symbol," La Russophobe has cancelled the "Sunday Funnies" feature for today. The blogger, Vladimir Rakhmankov, publisher of Kursiv, is one of Neo-Soviet Russia's first true dissidents and a symbol both of tremendous courage and the depths to which Neo-Soviet Russia has sunk.

Vladimir Putin looks like a penis!

If La Russophobe were publishing from Russia, she'd be in jail now for writing that. Think about it. What kind of country is Russia?

Where is the public outrage over this case? Who's next? The blogger's wife and childeren?

And let's not forget that this blogger is getting off easy so far. The Committee to Protect Journalists says that 12 reporters have been murdered in contract hits since Putin took power and not a single killer has been brought to justice.

If La Russophobe were in Russia she could be dead now.

If you want to feel cold chills run up your spine, try to Google up the text of Rakhmankov's story about Putin in English. It should be child's play. La Russophobe still hasn't managed it. Can anyone help? How much do we really care about democracy and freedom of speech?

Here's an excerpt for the time being: ". . . even beasts in Russian zoos responded to his call to breed immediately. Putin looks like the country's phallic symbol, in all senses. So why not secure the symbolism officially.... We can now start producing new souvenirs with the president's head as a penis head." If you can be put in prison for saying this, nobody is safe. Welcome to the Neo-Soviet Union.

You can send e-mail letters of support to Mr. Rakhmankov at vladimir@cursiv.ru

You can send an e-mail to "President" Penis to protest his actions against Mr. Rakhmankov by clicking here.

There's actually even more malevolence here than meets the eye. As the eXile reported, in a prior post Rakhmakov had written about "an aging, privatized water heating plant in Ivanovo that was staying afloat only due to payoffs at the highest levels of Ivanovo's bureaucratic circles." He wrote "that the heating plant artificially inflated local heating costs and accused the former governor of Ivanovo region, Vladimer Tikhonov, of getting 70 million rubles in annual payoffs. Four days after he wrote the article, he got called in for an official meeting by Parnov, the region's press secretary, to discuss 'possible future cooperation.'" He was then assaulted by a gang of goons; so the local officials were just waiting for a chance to lock him up, and killed two birds with one stone when he wrote about Putin. The eXile issued a satirical editorial in support of Rakhamkov in which it wrote about future articles such as "Putin Is A Balding Gaylord, Putin's Petite Penis Plays On, and German Gref Shocker: My Goatee Is Molded From A Cleveland Steamer Putin Laid On My Face. And this is just the tip of the iceberg." Are the eXile's editors next on Putin's hit list? Or are they too obscure and English-speaking for him to bother with until all the Russians are rounded up?

Interestingly, Mr. Rakhmankov penned an article in 2004 which caused an uproar over its alleged anti-Semetic content. But this resulted in no criminal charges. Apparently, the Kremlin has no objections to anti-Semitism, only to anti-Putinism.