What liberal means.

Ron Howard

January 24 at 5:41 AM
I'm a liberal, but that doesn't mean what a lot of you apparently think it does. Let's break it down, shall we? Because quite frankly, I'm getting a little tired of being told what I believe and what I stand for. Spoiler alert: not every liberal is the same, though the majority of liberals I know think along roughly these same lines:

1. I believe a country should take care of its weakest members. A country cannot call itself civilized when its children, disabled, sick, and elderly are neglected. PERIOD.

2. I believe healthcare is a right, not a privilege. Somehow that's interpreted as "I believe Obamacare is the end-all, be-all." This is not the case. I'm fully aware that the ACA has problems, that a national healthcare system would require everyone to chip in, and that it's impossible to create one that is devoid of flaws, but I have yet to hear an argument against it that makes "let people die because they can't afford healthcare" a better alternative. I believe healthcare should be far cheaper than it is, and that everyone should have access to it. And no, I'm not opposed to paying higher taxes in the name of making that happen.

3. I believe education should be affordable. It doesn't necessarily have to be free (though it works in other countries so I'm mystified as to why it can't work in the US), but at the end of the day, there is no excuse for students graduating college saddled with five- or six-figure debt.

4. I don't believe your money should be taken from you and given to people who don't want to work. I have literally never encountered anyone who believes this. Ever. I just have a massive moral problem with a society where a handful of people can possess the majority of the wealth while there are people literally starving to death, freezing to death, or dying because they can't afford to go to the doctor. Fair wages, lower housing costs, universal healthcare, affordable education, and the wealthy actually paying their share would go a long way toward alleviating this. Somehow believing that makes me a communist.

5. I don't throw around "I'm willing to pay higher taxes" lightly. If I'm suggesting something that involves paying more, well, it's because I'm fine with paying my share as long as it's actually going to something besides lining corporate pockets or bombing other countries while Americans die without healthcare.

6. I believe companies should be required to pay their employees a decent, livable wage. Somehow this is always interpreted as me wanting burger flippers to be able to afford a penthouse apartment and a Mercedes. What it actually means is that no one should have to work three full-time jobs just to keep their head above water. Restaurant servers should not have to rely on tips, multibillion-dollar companies should not have employees on food stamps, workers shouldn't have to work themselves into the ground just to barely make ends meet, and minimum wage should be enough for someone to work 40 hours and live.

7. I am not anti-Christian. I have no desire to stop Christians from being Christians, to close churches, to ban the Bible, to forbid prayer in school, etc. (BTW, prayer in school is NOT illegal; *compulsory* prayer in school is - and should be - illegal). All I ask is that Christians recognize *my* right to live according to *my* beliefs. When I get pissed off that a politician is trying to legislate Scripture into law, I'm not "offended by Christianity" -- I'm offended that you're trying to force me to live by your religion's rules. You know how you get really upset at the thought of Muslims imposing Sharia law on you? That's how I feel about Christians trying to impose biblical law on me. Be a Christian. Do your thing. Just don't force it on me or mine.

8. I don't believe LGBT people should have more rights than you. I just believe they should have the *same* rights as you.

9. I don't believe illegal immigrants should come to America and have the world at their feet, especially since THIS ISN'T WHAT THEY DO (spoiler: undocumented immigrants are ineligible for all those programs they're supposed to be abusing, and if they're "stealing" your job it's because your employer is hiring illegally). I believe there are far more humane ways to handle undocumented immigration than our current practices (i.e., detaining children, splitting up families, ending DACA, etc).

10. I don't believe the government should regulate everything, but since greed is such a driving force in our country, we NEED regulations to prevent cut corners, environmental destruction, tainted food/water, unsafe materials in consumable goods or medical equipment, etc. It's not that I want the government's hands in everything -- I just don't trust people trying to make money to ensure that their products/practices/etc. are actually SAFE. Is the government devoid of shadiness? Of course not. But with those regulations in place, consumers have recourse if they're harmed and companies are liable for medical bills, environmental cleanup, etc. Just kind of seems like common sense when the alternative to government regulation is letting companies bring their bottom line into the equation.

11. I believe our current administration is fascist. Not because I dislike them or because I can’t get over an election, but because I've spent too many years reading and learning about the Third Reich to miss the similarities. Not because any administration I dislike must be Nazis, but because things are actually mirroring authoritarian and fascist regimes of the past.

12. I believe the systemic racism and misogyny in our society is much worse than many people think, and desperately needs to be addressed. Which means those with privilege -- white, straight, male, economic, etc. -- need to start listening, even if you don't like what you're hearing, so we can start dismantling everything that's causing people to be marginalized.

13. I am not interested in coming after your blessed guns, nor is anyone serving in government. What I am interested in is the enforcement of present laws and enacting new, common sense gun regulations. Got another opinion? Put it on your page, not mine.

14. I believe in so-called political correctness. I prefer to think it’s social politeness. If I call you Chuck and you say you prefer to be called Charles I’ll call you Charles. It’s the polite thing to do. Not because everyone is a delicate snowflake, but because as Maya Angelou put it, when we know better, we do better. When someone tells you that a term or phrase is more accurate/less hurtful than the one you're using, you now know better. So why not do better? How does it hurt you to NOT hurt another person?

15. I believe in funding sustainable energy, including offering education to people currently working in coal or oil so they can change jobs. There are too many sustainable options available for us to continue with coal and oil. Sorry, billionaires. Maybe try investing in something else.

16. I believe that women should not be treated as a separate class of human. They should be paid the same as men who do the same work, should have the same rights as men and should be free from abuse. Why on earth shouldn’t they be?

I think that about covers it. Bottom line is that I'm a liberal because I think we should take care of each other. That doesn't mean you should work 80 hours a week so your lazy neighbor can get all your money. It just means I don't believe there is any scenario in which preventable suffering is an acceptable outcome as long as money is saved.
Copy & paste if you want.

Wouldn't it be lovely?

The Blame Game

Afraid of women voters.

The Girl Scouts org will accept trans girls.

I love this woman's face.

Give to the one you love.

An honest reply to the question,"Why are you liberal?"

Islam v feminism.

Cats v Aquarium and other such matters

Cat v aquarium.

A cure for Alzheimer's?

Gary Younge:  be careful of a polarizing debate over the causes of terrorism.  Nothing is that simple.

Ahmed Merabet's eulogy of his policeman brother:

One must not confuse extremists with Muslims. Madness has neither color nor religion. I want to make another point: stop painting everybody with the same brush, stop burning mosques or synagogues. You are attacking people. It won't bring back our dead, and it won't appease our families.

How long would you survive on other planets without a spacesuit?

BooMan: Why we are not Norway.  (Excellent list of questions)

Does there have to be historical accuracy in movies?

Sleepy time.

Blog sprinkles

Phila of Bouphonia's Friday hope blog.

Blackwater(Xe) gets to stay in Afghanistan.

A satisfying answer to idiot racism.

New Study: The American Public Prefers LIBERAL Policies Which Would Cut Budget By $437 Billion

Excellent graphic of the tax breaks and budget cuts....

We owe our hands to rocks.

Good. Wis. Dems File Ethics Complaint Over Walker's Comments On 'Koch' Call

Krugman continues to scare me:

Yes, we need to fix American education. In particular, the inequalities Americans face at the starting line — bright children from poor families are less likely to finish college than much less able children of the affluent — aren’t just an outrage; they represent a huge waste of the nation’s human potential.

But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.

The story of an abortion provider.

J. K. Rowling acknowledges the support structure

That saved her when she was a desperately poor single mother. And she'll never vote Tory even though she's now one of the richest people in Britain:

But wait, some will say. Given that you have long since left single parenthood for marriage and a nuclear family; given that you are now so far from a life dependent on benefits that Private Eye habitually refers to you as Rowlinginnit, why do you care? Surely, nowadays, you are a natural Tory voter?

No, I’m afraid not. The 2010 election campaign, more than any other, has underscored the continuing gulf between Tory values and my own. It is not only that the renewed marginalisation of the single, the divorced and the widowed brings back very bad memories. There has also been the revelation, after ten years of prevarication on the subject, that Lord Ashcroft, deputy chairman of the Conservatives, is non-domiciled for tax purposes.

Now, I never, ever, expected to find myself in a position where I could understand, from personal experience, the choices and temptations open to a man as rich as Lord Ashcroft. The fact remains that the first time I ever met my recently retired accountant, he put it to me point-blank: would I organise my money around my life, or my life around my money? If the latter, it was time to relocate to Ireland, Monaco, or possibly Belize.

I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.

A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft’s idea of being a mug.

Child poverty remains a shameful problem in this country, but it will never be solved by throwing millions of pounds of tax breaks at couples who have no children at all. David Cameron tells us that the Conservatives have changed, that they are no longer the “nasty party”, that he wants the UK to be “one of the most family-friendly nations in Europe”, but I, for one, am not buying it. He has repackaged a policy that made desperate lives worse when his party was last in power, and is trying to sell it as something new. I’ve never voted Tory before ... and they keep on reminding me why.

Now this is something we can use!

Use this quote, Obama administration!

...Churchill’s oft-quoted distinction between socialism and liberalism: “Socialism seeks to pull down wealth. Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests—Liberalism would preserve private interests in the only way in which they can be safely and justly preserved, namely by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference.”

20 of the best

Peter Scheer lists The 20 Best Socially Conscious Movies of the Decade. ... I agree with most, but how on earth is Borat in there?!

One way to try to prevent education from working

Is to deny that knowledge is both liberal and liberating. Cease questioning! Stop realizing there are more ways than one to find a solution! Stop it!

Because it's been very handy that stupid people obediently follow leaders like sheep....

You can't have it both ways, you guys!

Was FDR a good conservative or a dangerous liberal?

Steve Benen of the Washington Note:

So, as far as conservatives are concerned, FDR was both an ineffective liberal who made the crisis worse in the 1930s and an effective conservative who helped address the crisis with conservative ideas. The New Deal failed because it was liberal and it succeeded because it was conservative.

Good to know.

It's not center right, nor center center nor center left...

It's a liberal mandate.

David Neiwert of Orcinus:

I keep hearing from a lot of conservatives that McCain lost because he wasn't conservative enough -- that is, he was essentially a center-right candidate. And I think that's the consensus about where he sat on the political spectrum.

So if America is a "center-right country," then why didn't they elect the center-right candidate?

It's all bullshit, of course. As a CAF/Media Matters study found last year: "Media perceptions and past Republican electoral successes notwithstanding, Americans are progressive across a wide range of controversial issues, and they're growing more progressive all the time." In fact, as CAF's Robert Borosage points out, "Voters didn't just elect Democrats, they elected progressives." This is a liberal mandate.

Yet it's probably true that the election doesn't necessarily reflect an all-out embrace of all things liberal. Obama largely succeeded by making clear that he has a moderate temperament on a number of issues, and more importantly, in his style of governance. So a certain caution is probably wise.

No, this election was about one thing primarily: a sweeping repudiation of movement conservatism.

The breadth and depth of Democrats' victory was a loud shout from the American public: We have had enough of this crap.

Specifically, we've had enough of two things: conservative governance, and conservative politics.

Because there has been a hilariously ham-handed attempt

To jam the label of fascism onto the progressive philosophy, here is David Neiwert of Orcinus to clarify the term. I have chosen two from the many definitive quotes he cites:

Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, p. 218:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

And:

Roger Griffin:

Fascism: modern political ideology that seeks to regenerate the social, economic, and cultural life of a country by basing it on a heightened sense of national belonging or ethnic identity. Fascism rejects liberal ideas such as freedom and individual rights, and often presses for the destruction of elections, legislatures, and other elements of democracy. Despite the idealistic goals of fascism, attempts to build fascist societies have led to wars and persecutions that caused millions of deaths. As a result, fascism is strongly associated with right-wing fanaticism, racism, totalitarianism, and violence.

Anyone who tries to say liberals are fascists will immediately expose his IQ, reading level and ignorance and should be mocked severely and often.


(Stolen from Sadly No, click pic to go to site).

Update 1/25: Austin Bramwell reviews DP's 'book' and very intelligently.

Update 1/25 9:49: David Neiwert pulverizes the last of the Dough.

What made you as you are today politically, part two

Asked this question: (updated)

OT, if anyone would like to suggest movies or books that made a huge impact in their progressive attitudes today, I'm interested in making a list.

Not only to share what resonated with you but also to have as a reference for those who do not know American history, have no clue about WWII, the Geneva Convention, Habeas Corpus and why the Bush administration is so horrifically awful.

http://rantsfromtherookery.blogs...-are- today.html
ellroon |

in a thread over at Eschaton and got some amazing replies. I'm sure I've missed a few, but here are some responses: (I'm not repeating them if they're noted in the first post.)

Movies:
Grand Illusion
Paths of Glory
Forbidden Games
Lawrence of Arabia
Winterset
A Hard Day's Night
Fail Safe

Television:
Star Trek
Twilight Zone
M*A*S*H the series
PBS- The World at War
Have I Got News For You series
Drop the Dead Donkey
Chris Morris: The Day Today, Brass Eye
The commercial with Iron Eyes Cody weeping over pollution

Cartoons or Comics:
Dan O'Neill's Odds Bodkin
Walt Kelly's Pogo
Mad Magazine
Doonesbury

Books:
Johnny Got His Gun
Ken MacLeod: The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal
Richard Morgan: Market Forces
Grapes of Wrath and other works of John Steinbeck
The Octopus
The Jungle
Philip K. Dick: all works
Thoreau's Walden Pond
Simone Weil: all works
Brave New World and other works of Aldous Huxley
1984
Animal Farm and other works of George Orwell
Kurt Vonnegut: all works
Richard Brautigan: all works
A History of teh Arab People: Albert Hourani
Anatomy of Fascism: Robert O. Paxton
Blair's Wars: John Kampfner
Noam Chomsky: all works
The Handmaid's Tale, Alias Grace: Margaret Atwood
The Bible: New Testament: Jesus teaching helping the poor and forgiveness
Kevin Carson: all works
John Kenneth Galbraith: all works
Marx
The Golden Notebook: Doris Lessing
Breathing Lessons: Anne Tyler
Catch-22
The Missionary Position: Christopher Hitchens
Mother Country: Marilynne Robinson
The Urantia Book
Woman on the Edge of Time and other works of Marge Piercy
Les Guérillères: Monique Wittig
Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Slavoj Zizek
James Thurber (with other Algonquin stylists)
Add:
"What's the Matter with Kansas" and "Blinded by the Right" (David Brock).
"The Chalice and the Blade" by Rhianne Eisler

Letters, articles:
Letter from Birmingham Jail: Martin Luther King

Events, situations:
Vietnam War
Kennedy's Assassination
Watergate
Fundamentalism
Reagan
The need for girlfriend to have an abortion

And of course music:
To quote Wikipedia:

In the 1960s and 1970s, during the War in Vietnam, many protest songs were written and recorded, most notably "War," (1970) by Edwin Starr, "Ohio" (1970) by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young", "Give Peace a Chance" (1969) and ""Imagine"" (1971) by John Lennon. Cat Stevens left his mark on the genre with "Peace Train" in 1971, as did Black Sabbath with "War Pigs" (1971). The Rolling Stones protested against police brutality with "Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)" (1973).
[snip]

Neil Young continued the theme in the twenty-first century with his song, "Let's Impeach the President" - a stinging rebuke against President George W. Bush and the War in Iraq, as did Pink with her appeal to Bush in "Dear Mr. President". Pearl Jam also included two anti-Bush songs ("World Wide Suicide", "Marker In The Sand") in their 2006 album Pearl Jam. Not to forget the band Dispatch and the anti-war underground hit "The General". Utah Philips, and David Rovics, among many other singers have continued the folk tradition of protest. In John Mayer's 2006 release CONTINUUM, the lead single " Waiting on the World to Change", Mayer is critical of the desensitizing of politics in youths. He goes on to say in "Belief", "What puts a hundred thousand children in the sand? Belief can. What puts the folded flag inside his mother's hand? Belief can."

Also, Rage Against the Machine have been one of the most popular bands in recent times with songs such as "Bullet In The Head" and "Bulls On Parade". Paris also released the song 'What Would You Do?' referencing everything from false flag operations and the "elite's" grip on the worlds' governments to 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Add to the music list: Paul Simon's American Tune from 1973

What made you as you are today politically?

(Note: I'll be updating this as I get suggestions.)

What made you decide war (the Iraq war or all wars) was wrong? What made you decide politics was government for the people rather than people for the institutions? What made you a progressive, a liberal, a Democrat? How would you convey that to others who don't have any history to ground themselves on?

What movies or books or any other teaching material can we recommend to those who have no historical reference to previous wars or political overviews, to those who have believed the Bush administration's propaganda?

In comments, Steve Bates of The Yellow Doggerel Democrat mentioned this:

...I engaged today in a polite debate with ReaganConservative (one of my regular commenters, emphatically not a troll, a GOPer who has come to distrust Bush) about Snow's expressed analogy between Iraq and the Koreas that left us all drop-jawed yesterday. I found that RC was himself young enough to have had no direct or parental connection with W.W. II, and hence no real understanding of Germany's Nazis and what they did.

Our educational task is tougher than at first I imagined: first we have to get younger folks to understand what happened; only then can we urge them to avoid it. American aversion to tyranny is not, after all, inborn.

I want to collect a list of movies, books and anything else that is not daunting for an easily distracted generation. We are awash with information, so to find items with the clearest message will be hard.

An example: my husband watches WWII movies where captured American soldiers cite the Geneva Convention. And I think: that won't work anymore thanks to Bush. Torture? We are now the bad guys. Disappearing people? We do that, too.

What items would you recommend to people that would teach them why the Bush administration's actions have been so egregious?

Movies I have seen off of Wikipedia's list of anti-war films:
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Coming Home (1978)
Das Boot (1981)
The Deer Hunter (1978)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)
Flags of Our Fathers (2006)
Gallipoli (1981)
The Great Dictator (1940)
The Killing Fields (1984)
Lord of War (2005)
M*A*S*H (1970)
On the Beach (1957)
Platoon (1986)
The Sand Pebbles (1966)
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Schindler's List (1993)
Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)
The Thin Red Line (1998)
Two Women (1960)
From the Amazon list:

Born on the Fourth of July
Wag the Dog
The English Patient

Nuclear Age Peace Foundation's list:
Breaker Morant
Cold Mountain
Gandhi
King of Hearts

Books I have read from Wikipedia's list of anti-war books:
All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
Lysistrata
On the Beach - by Nevil Shute
The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
The War Prayer - Mark Twain

Nuclear Age Peace Foundation's list:
A Farewell to Arms (1929) by Ernest Hemingway
Hiroshima (1946)
The Diary of Anne Frank (1947) by Anne Frank
War and Peace (1869)

For the best of what politics and governments could be:
Mr. Smith Goes To Washington
Any of the early West Wing tv series.
Dave
The American President

For the worst or how to fight it:
All The President's Men

For showing the best of human nature:
To Kill a Mockingbird (book and movie)

These are just pulled from lists or from my memory. I know there are more. What ones would you recommend?

Update: from comments here:
Phila: Walt Kelley's "Pogo"
Philip K. Dick (especially his story "Human Is")
Simone Weil's "The Poem of Force" and "Reflections on War"
Marilynne Robinson's "Mother Country"

As far as movies go, "Forbidden Games"

Tengrain:
Pacifica Radio was pre-set on my very first new car and never was turned off, Gore Vidal, and A Peoples History of the US (Howard Zinn)

Morse: Vietnam War, Watergate, Christian Fundamentalism, Reagan.
As for books and media, "All the President's Men", is the one I remember most clearly. Like Tengrain (again, dammit) I discovered Howard Zinn, and it all clicked.

Whig:
Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy, Douglas Hofstadter's article, "Dilemmas for superrational thinkers" in his book Metamagical Themas, Albert Jay Nock, Philip K. Dick, Philip Jose Farmer.

Music: especially Peter Gabriel. He is the conscience of the world when he focuses his attention on injustice.

Do not contaminate the word liberal by trying to say Bush is one

Bush is no liberal, even though the next decade will be filled with neocons saying Bush was too much of one to fulfill the neoconservative agenda. Chester of Vanity Press takes apart one of the first of many such articles, this one by Richard Cohen:

Uh-oh, he's back and he's dumber than ever.

Years ago, someone coined the term "neoliberal." I was never sure what it meant.

I know. It's really hard to find out what words mean, isn't it? In brief, "neoliberalism," a word not often used in the USA, refers to the belief that the so-called "free market" should provide the basis for absolutely everything -- that the structure of the market should dominate all other interests including the democratic rights of the people. It's only been the dominant political ideology worldwide for the past quarter century, so there's really no reason for a Washington political columnist to know anything about it, is there?

Anyhow, the most important thing to realize about "neoliberalism" is that it is the direct opposite of liberalism. Liberalism, after all, is the belief that society's structures are there to serve people; conservatism, on the other hand, is the belief that people are there to serve society's structures. So really, "neoliberalism" is just a specialized form of conservatism, which is hardly surprising given its pedigree: Thatcher ran the world's first neoliberal government, one that for some reason has been the model for all others since.

So, Richard, are we clear on this now?

I'd like to revive (and mangle) the term and apply it -- brace yourself -- to George W. Bush. He's more liberal than you might think.

Oh dear. No, Richard, no. The word "neoliberal" and the word "liberal" are different. They are in fact polar opposites of each other -- no, Richard, stop!

After all, the conventional wisdom is that Bush is the most conservative of all presidents....But consider this: An overriding principle of conservatism is to limit the role and influence of the federal government.

No it isn't. Conservatism only began to advocate for limited government in response first to the Progressives and then to the New Deal, when it became clear that the institution of government was becoming more democratic and had been harnessed to serve the people's interests. Because conservatism believes that people should serve institutions and not the other way around, conservatives began to advocate for limited government so that other institutions, such as corporations, could rule in its stead. When conservatives are actually in charge of government and can wrest it away from democratic functions, they never have any problem with expanding its power.

Chester continues to shred Cohen's thesis and leave little confetti bits all over Cohen's head. Yet this quote of Chester's:

Liberalism, after all, is the belief that society's structures are there to serve people; conservatism, on the other hand, is the belief that people are there to serve society's structures.

Makes me want to ask where Bush actually fits in all this when his belief is that people and society are there to serve him and stand around being impressed by the actions of Commander Guy and the Deciderer?

When liberal penguins attack!

Shakespeare's Sister's Paul the Spud compares The March of The Penguins with Happy Feet. Conservative values when you don't dare discuss global warming, overfishing, and the invasion of wilderness areas, liberal values when you do.

Lovely.

Watertiger has the ultimate evil Penguin.