I'm tired of talking about the FAIL (which doesn't mean it isn't important to document the atrocities, just that I'm tired). I want to talk about the good things folks are doing and Sarah suggested I put this one in a post and sticky it, so here it is.

The website democrats.com, which is not an official party website but advertises itself as "aggressive progressives" (a sure sign it's not the party's website), asked the site's 600,000 subscribers to call members of the Energy & Commerce Committee to whip for Weiner's single payer amendment. You can see the results here. While the decision late Friday to take it to the full house obviously negates some importance of this info, I think it's still useful since all of these folks are, of course, House members.

More importantly, I fully expect these folks to also whip for the full floor vote given that they seem pretty strongly single payer. When they do, I'll post the info unless someone else beats me to it. And they've been working in other ways to add pressure. For example, they adeveloped an online petition that can be sent to Congress members.

So the question is how do we bring together the websites that are doing the work? I'm sure there are others.

That's Howard Zinn speaking in his new documentary, The People Speak, that's going to air on the History Channel and be released on DVD. I've recently been reading Zinn's A People's History of the United States, which forms a basis for the documentary, and it really has been changing the way I see current events (much more so than the way I see history).

Given the discussion this morning about our collective historical amnesia, these kinds of projects are critical. The challenges we face aren't new. Neither are the solutions (hint: Organize! Organize! Organize!). As the trailer below notes sometimes to know where you're going you have to look back at where you've been.

I think it's important that, as far as I can tell, none of these popular protests were aimed at whipping for a bill or electing a particular party. They were aimed at accomplishing something or resisting something and the politics followed. As I've noted before, Martin Luther King didn't march for democrats.

(h/t Tennessee Guerilla Women)