Colin, revel in your newest accomplishment. Please be sure you know what you're doing. Only ignorance of readers of soc.culture.russian and maybe other groups allows Colin's claims about the possibility of a successful legal action against his critics and their employers go unchallenged. A tort, as Russian readers should know, is not a cake, but a violation of one's implicit obligation not to harm others. Victims of defamation can receive compensation for the harm that was done.
Law considers libel to be a more serious form of defamation than slander, for obvious reasons.
First, an absolute defense in libel cases is truthfulness of defendant's statements in question. This title represents an objective reality - results of Kook elections, and thus cannot be libelous, despite the fact that Colin does not like it. In brief, public persons are those who chose to make themselves objects of public interest. Hence, known actors, politicians and so on are public persons. The law reasons that First Amendment requires that discussions regarding matters of public interest should go as free as possible.