Recent events give us four powerful examples of why we desperately need to take back our elections from the big-money interests that are buying our politics. The solution is to clean up election funding through voluntary public financing, so that candidates can run without needing to grovel for donations from wealthy individuals and corporate lobbies. [...]

Ryan Grim reports that a bipartisan group of Senators is backing an amendment that will restore the Grayson-Paul “audit the fed” language to the Senate Financial Reform bill after Chris Dodd gutted it. An amendment by Bernie Sanders would restore the teeth of the Paul-Grayson language, and he’s joined by Republicans John McCain (Ariz.), Jim [...]