This is really interesting news. Is this the future? Can we effectively work around the corporate media and the political establishment by going directly to social media? Go post this on your Facebook page or Twitter, see what we can do to help it along. (And email it to your relatives.) I gotta say, this sure looks promising:

Democratic Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern last Tuesday proposed two Constitutional amendments on the House floor that would overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which lifted limits on political spending and unleashed a flood of funding into political organizations starting in 2010.

Speaking with HuffPost Live on Wednesday, McGovern said his two amendments received an outpouring of attention after his staff posted them on the social media site Reddit.

"We're trying to reach out in different ways to communicate with people and posting it on Reddit was suggested to me by my staff as a way to reach a whole new audience," McGovern told HuffPost Live's Jacob Soboroff. "We did it and the response was incredible -- we've gotten calls from all over the country."

McGovern's first proposed amendment would tackle campaign finance reform, while the second would overturn Citizens United outright.

From McGovern's press release announcing the proposed amendments:

The first amendment, HJ Res 20, advances the fundamental principle of political equality for all by empowering Congress and the States to regulate political spending. It will allow Congress to pass campaign finance reform legislation that will withstand Constitutional challenges.

The second amendment, HJ Res 21 , would overturn Citizens United and put a stop to the growing trend of corporations claiming first amendment rights. This “People’s Rights Amendment” not only addresses corporate rights as they pertain to campaign finance, but is broader in scope to clarify that corporations are not people with Constitutional rights. Importantly, the amendment clearly protects the people’s rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free exercise of religion, freedom of association, and all other such rights of the people.

Don't forget, spread it around!

I would like to officially announce that Susie Madrak has been promoted to Managing Editor of C&L. Although she's already been at the job for a few weeks, I decided to wait until the new year to make the announcement. As you know, David Neiwert took over in the interim to replace Tina Dupuy last year, but that was a temporary solution until the craze of a general election passed and we had a chance to catch our breath.

Susie has been with C&L for many years now and she's earned her new position. It was an easy decision to make and as you've already seen-- C&L has been chugging away with awesome content. Her transition has been as seamless and effortless as it appears. And I'm happy to report that she's already come up with some new ideas of ways we can expand and grow C&L's content. I'm very happy to have my friend managing the site so well. Well done, Susie.

John Amato, Publisher

We know money's tight, even if you're still lucky enough to have a job. Odds are, your house is underwater, your 401K has bottomed out, your savings are gone. Believe me, we get it.

But there's a really easy way for you to support Crooks and Liars, and it won't cost you anything but a few minutes. Click on the headline and go to the full post. See those "share" buttons? The ones with the Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Google, "Share" and "email"? That's how you can help.

If you don't already have one, please open accounts with the main social networking sites -- especially Twitter, Reddit, Digg, and/or Stumbleupon. (We appreciate it when you share posts on Facebook, or even Pinterest, too. We don't see much traffic from other networking sites, but feel free to try.)

Plus, social networking sites are fun! You come across all kinds of interesting stuff. (Just make sure you come back here eventually.)

We're not asking you to push posts you don't like. We just want you to recommend the ones you do! We get a lot of extra traffic when something goes viral, and we wanted to ask your help. So if you like something you read here, please share it with one of these sites. And thanks for showing your support.

(P.S. Reddit and Digg drive the most traffic in the short term, but Stumbleupon links are great, because they seem to last forever. I still see hits from three-year-old links.)

This video tells you how to use Reddit. Vulgar language, probably not suitable for work!

Digg video here. Stumbleupon video here.

After National Journal, Huffington Post, Crooks and Liars and others expressed outrage that TED Chair Chris Anderson refused to post a TED Talk by Nick Hanauer that questioned the idea of the wealthy as job creators, Anderson responded:

The National Journal alleged we had censored a talk because we considered the issue of inequality "too hot to handle." The story ignited a firestorm of outrage on Reddit, Huffington Post and elsewhere. We were accused of being cowards. We were in the pay of our corporate partners. We were the despicable puppets of the Republican party.

Here's what actually happened.

At TED this year, an attendee pitched a 3-minute audience talk on inequality. The talk tapped into a really important and timely issue. But it framed the issue in a way that was explicitly partisan. And it included a number of arguments that were unconvincing, even to those of us who supported his overall stance. The audience at TED who heard it live (and who are often accused of being overly enthusiastic about left-leaning ideas) gave it, on average, mediocre ratings.

At TED we post one talk a day on our home page. We're drawing from a pool of 250+ that we record at our own conferences each year and up to 10,000 recorded at the various TEDx events around the world, not to mention our other conference partners. Our policy is to post only talks that are truly special. And we try to steer clear of talks that are bound to descend into the same dismal partisan head-butting people can find every day elsewhere in the media.

We discussed internally and ultimately told the speaker we did not plan to post. He did not react well. He had hired a PR firm to promote the talk to MoveOn and others, and the PR firm warned us that unless we posted he would go to the press and accuse us of censoring him. We again declined and this time I wrote him and tried gently to explain in detail why I thought his talk was flawed.

So he forwarded portions of the private emails to a reporter and the National Journal duly bit on the story. And it was picked up by various other outlets.

And a non-story about a talk not being chosen, because we believed we had better ones, somehow got turned into a scandal about censorship. Which is like saying that if I call the New York Times and they turn down my request to publish an op-ed by me, they're censoring me.

For the record, pretty much everyone at TED, including me, worries a great deal about the issue of rising inequality. We've carried talks on it in the past, like this one from Richard Wilkinson. We'd carry more in the future if someone can find a way of framing the issue that is convincing and avoids being needlessly partisan in tone.

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