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One of Georgias 16 presidential electors cast her Electoral College vote for Joe Biden but says, if she had it her way, the United States would do away with theconstitutional election process altogethera radical and dangerousposition.

I support abolishing the Electoral College, former Atlanta City Council President Cathy Woolardsaidduring a recent interview. I think all too often the popular vote has been overturned by the Electoral College and that doesnt seem right to me.

It may not seem right to Ms. Woolard, but the Electoral College purposefully forces would-be presidents tobuild nationwide coalitions, courting diverse voters across the country. Itshould remain in place. Otherwise, politicians would ignore the needs of people inflyover countryand focuseven moreonbig cities andthe coasts.

Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clintonwas another elector who, like Ms. Woolard,called for eliminatingthe Electoral Collegeeven as she cast one of New Yorks electoral votesfor Democrat President-elect Joe Biden.

I believe we should abolish the Electoral College and select our president by the winner of the popular vote, same as every other office, she said in atweet. But while it still exists, I was proud to cast my vote in New York for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Clinton is missing the fact that the presidency is not like other offices. Most major democratic nations use a two-step process (usually a parliamentary system) to elect their top executive. Our Electoral College, like those other systems, balancesthe interests of everyone acrossadiverse country while limitingthe power of big-cityelites.

Our system also limits the power of Washington, D.C.As Thomas S. Kidd,historyprofessor at Baylor University,says, 2020 has shown that the states still possess powerful checks on national executive power. Thats a good thing, and we should be exceedingly cautious about cutting the states out of the process of electing the president (i.e. the Electoral College).

Complaints about the Electoral Collegeoftenstem from Clintonslossin 2016. At various times, Clinton hasblamedformer FBI Director James Comey, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), President Barack Obama,Russiaand, of course, the Electoral Collegefor her loss.

Really it wasClintonsowndecisionsthat cost her the presidency, and the Electoral College worked just right. By design, the Electoral College rewards candidates who do the hard work of winning over Americans in many states, not just winning huge margins in a few states or giant cities. The American Founders believed the president should be a national candidate, not a regional one.

In 1888, Grover Clevelandwon the popular vote but was blown out in the Electoral College because his support was concentrated in the South; he won huge margins there but lost almost everywhere else. Similarly, Clinton ran up huge margins in coastal states while failing to connect with middle America.

Clinton dismissed struggling voters asdeplorablesand lost their votes as a consequence. Marc Thiessen of The Washington Postargues,Clinton still cant seem to tell the difference between a white nationalist and working-class voters who are upset because their family incomes are stagnant or falling, they feel shut out of the labor force, and their communities are mired in substance abuse and despair. Theseforgotten Americanshad legitimate grievances that Democrats ignored.

The Clinton campaign also squandereditsmonetary advantageby failing to invest enough instates like Michigan and Pennsylvania.Accordingto one liberal activist, the candidates team was,very surgical and corporate. Their thing was,We dont have to leave [literature] at the doors, everyone knows who Hillary Clinton is.

Joe Biden corrected Clintons errors,cultivating a working man persona andinvesting heavilyin turning out the vote inkeystates.He received the Democratic nominationin partbecause primary votersbelievedhe wouldappeal to those forgotten Americans who Clinton had ignored and demeaned.

In both 2016 and 2020, the Electoral College worked as intended. Serious presidential candidates were forced to build diverse coalitions rather than relying on one region or demographic group. For close to 250 years, the Electoral College has fostered a healthy and vibrant electoral system, and we shouldnt throw that away because Hillary Clinton mismanaged her campaign.

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Opinion: What's the True Agenda Behind the Movement to Abolish the Electoral College? - Prescott eNews

West Vancouver billionaire Frank Giustra has been given the go-ahead to sue Twitter in a B.C. courtroom over the social media giant's publication of a series of tweets tying him to baseless conspiracy theories involving pedophile rings and Bill and Hillary Clinton.

In a ruling released Thursday, Justice Elliott Myers found that Giustra's history and presence in British Columbia, combined with the possibility the tweets may have been seen by as many as 500,000 B.C. Twitter users, meant a B.C. court should have jurisdiction over the case.

It's a victory not only for Giustra whose philanthropic activities have earned him membership in both the Orders of Canada and B.C. but for Canadian plaintiffs trying to hold U.S.-based internet platforms responsible forborder-crossing content.

In a statement, Giustra said he was looking forward to pursuing the case in the province where he built his reputation as the founder of Lionsgate Entertainment.

"I hope this lawsuit will help raise public awareness of the real harm to society if social media platforms are not held responsible for the content posted and published on their sites," Giustra said.

"I believe that words do matter, and recent events have demonstrated that hate speech can incite violence with deadly consequences."

Giustra filed the defamation lawsuit in April 2019, seeking an order to force Twitter to remove tweets he claimed painted him as "corrupt" and "criminal."

He claimed he was targeted by a group who vilified him "for political purposes" in relation to the 2016 U.S. election and his work in support of the Clinton Foundation.

The online attacks allegedly included death threats and links to "pizzagate" a "false, discredited and malicious conspiracy theory in which [Giustra] was labelled as a 'pedophile,'" the claim stated.

Twitter has not filed a response to Giustra's claim itself applying instead to have the case tossed because of jurisdiction.

The California-based company said it does not do business in B.C. and that Giustra was only relying on his B.C. roots to file the case in Canada because it would be a non-starter in the U.S., where the First Amendment protects free speech.

The company claimed he would have been mostly affected in the U.S.where he spends much of his time, owns extensive property and has substantial interests in the entertainment industry meaning B.C. is only tangentially connected to the matter.

In essence, Myers said, Twitter claimed it was only a platform for others to post comment, and couldn't be expected to face defamation cases every place people felt aggrieved.

The judge said the case presented some difficult if timely questions.

"This case illustrates the jurisdictional difficulties with internet defamation where the publication of the defamatory comments takes place in multiple countries where the plaintiff has a reputation to protect," Myers wrote.

"The presumption is that a defendant should be sued in only one jurisdiction for an alleged wrong, but that is not a simple goal to achieve fairly for internet defamation."

Myers found Giustra's connection to B.C. undeniable.

"There can be no dispute that Mr. Giustra has a significant reputation in British Columbia. He also has strong ties to the province," he wrote.

"The fact that he has a reputation in or connections to other jurisdictions does not detract from that."

The judge said Giustra had also done what he needed to do to showhis reputation in B.C. might have been affected.

"I do not agree with Twitter who argues that of all places in the world, the Plaintiff's reputation has not been harmed in B.C.," Myers wrote.

In its application, Twitter drew on a 2018 Supreme Court of Canada judgment in which a Canadian billionaire with substantial interests in Israel was denied his bid to sue an Israeli newspaper in Ontario over an article that appeared online.

In that case, the court ruled that Israel would be the more appropriate place to hold a trial because the billionaire was better known there, he hadn't limited his suit to damages suffered in Canada and most of the witnesses would also be in Israel.

But Myers found that many of the tweets referred to B.C. and went beyond the kind of business articles that were at the heart of the Supreme Court of Canada case.

"Here the tweets refer to Mr. Giustra's personal characteristics alleging, for example, pedophilia," Myers wrote.

Despite the lawsuit, Giustra maintains a Twitter account.

The court filings include a letter hewrote to Twitter chief executive officer Jack Dorsey in April 2018, asking him to make his case a priority.

"As Twitter's CEO, I ask that you now investigate the source of these past and ongoing attacks against me whether they are the result of individuals, a group, bots, or a combination of all three," Giustra wrote.

"I do not want to cancel my Twitter account that would be a victory of those who are turning this incredible communication tool into a conduit for slander and hate."

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B.C. billionaire given the green light to sue Twitter over 'Pizzagate' tweets - CBC.ca

President Trumps last days in office offer a final opportunity to declassify critical information on the Russia investigation that engulfed his lone term.

Voluminous public records including investigative reports from Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Congress and the Justice Departments inspector general have established that Trump and his associates were targeted with a baseless Russian collusion allegation. The fraudulent claim originated with the Hillary Clinton campaign, was fueled by a torrent of false or deceptive intelligence leaks, and was improperly investigated by the FBI, potentially to the point of being criminal. Despite these disclosures, key questions remain about the origins and the spread of the conspiracy theory.

Before he leaves office on Jan. 20, Trump could use his declassification authority to help clear up some critical issues of the Russiagate saga.

A version of this piece initially appeared Jan. 10 at RealClearInvestigations.com

The FBI says it opened its Trump-Russia investigation on July 31, 2016 after learning of a potential offer of Russian assistance to junior Trump campaign volunteer George Papadopoulos. It later emerged that the offer came from a Maltese academic named Joseph Mifsud, whom U.S. officials have suggested was acting as a Russian cutout.

Muellers team depicted Mifsud as having extensive contacts with Russia. Yet Mifsuds closest public ties had been to Western governments, politicians, and institutions, including the CIA, FBI, and British intelligence services. Despite Mifsuds central role in the investigation, the FBI conducted only one brief interview with him in February 2017. The Mueller team later claimed that Mifsud gave false statements to FBI agents yet, conspicuously, did not indict him for lying. The FBIs notes on the interview show that Mifsud denied having any advance knowledge of Russian hacking.

Why didnt the FBI grill Mifsud about his sources, methods and contacts? What other efforts, if any, were made to surveil him?

A highly placed Kremlin mole was the main source of the core claim in CIA Director John Brennans hastily produced 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that Russian President Vladimir Putin intervened in the 2016 election to help defeat Clinton and support Trump.

The ICAs claim was widely portrayed as the consensus view of U.S. spy agencies, but in reality it was the conclusion drawn by a small group of CIA analysts, closely managed by then-Director Brennan. Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations revealed that Brennan overruled two senior analysts who disagreed with it.

Multiple outlets have already outed the mole, Oleg Smolenkov, and the circumstances of his exit from Russia in June 2017. This supposed betrayer of the Kremlins secrets was found to be living under his own name in a Virginia suburb.

After the FBIs collusion probe got underway in July 2016, it purportedly did not rely on the Steele dossier, a series of opposition-research memos prepared by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. In his testimony to Congress in July 2019, Mueller claimed that the dossier was outside my purview.

Yet the FBI did extensively rely on the Steele dossier, most egregiously to obtain a surveillance warrant on Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page.

There may be more evidence, as suggested in recently declassified documents, that the Steele material played a bigger role in the Mueller investigation than previously known. Further declassification could shed additional light on whether Muellers disavowal of Steele aligns with the conduct of his investigators.

In June 2016, CrowdStrike, a private company, accused Russian government hackers of infiltrating the Democratic National Committees servers. This assessment was presented as direct evidence of Russian interference in the presidential election and was later endorsed by the FBI and Muellers team.

CrowdStrikes highly consequential allegation has been contradicted by subsequent disclosures. Like Steele, CrowdStrike was a Democratic Party contractor whose version of events dovetailed with the Clintons campaigns apparent desire to muddy Trump with Russia connections. In a stunning admission, U.S. prosecutors told a court in June 2019 that CrowdStrike had submitted reports of a forensic analysis of its servers to the government in draft, redacted form.

The Crowdstrike reports would indicate whether the FBI and Muellers team were on solid ground in asserting Russia hacked the DNC and stole its emails.

Given the importance of the hacking allegation, and if its evidence is non-classified, why shouldnt Trump direct the U.S. intelligence community to release all of it?

The January 2017 ICA assessed with high confidence that a Russian intelligence agency, the GRU, used the Guccifer 2.0 persona to release the stolen DNC files. In its July 2018 indictment of GRU officers, the Mueller team also strongly suggested that Guccifer transferred the stolen DNC emails to WikiLeaks.

The special counsels final report, issued in March 2019, quietly acknowledged that it cannot rule out that stolen documents were transferred to WikiLeaks through intermediaries an admission that it has no hard evidence that Guccifer 2.0 was WikiLeaks source. It does not identify who those intermediaries might have been. Also missing from Muellers account is the evidence used to identify Guccifer 2.0 as a Russian intelligence front.

The Russia investigation remains a bitterly partisan issue, but its worth remembering that in November 2016, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta called on the U.S. government to declassify information around Russias roles in the election and to make this data available to the public. His purposes were different, of course. Nonetheless, disclosing such information now would give Americans a fair understanding of an unprecedented investigation into a sitting president as well as the conduct of the intelligence officials who it carried out.

This article was adapted from RealClearInvestigations.

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Op-Ed: Its Trumps last chance to declassify these secrets of the Russia collusion dud - The Center Square

Not that this was a shock. As an accusation, voter fraud has been used historically to disparage the participation of Black voters and immigrants to cast their votes as illegitimate. And Obama came to office on the strength of historic turnout among Black Americans and other nonwhite groups. To the conservative grass roots, Obamas very presence in the White House was, on its face, evidence that fraud had overtaken American elections.

In 2011, Republicans in Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin capitalized on their legislative gains to pass new voter restrictions under the guise of election protection. Other states slashed early voting and made it more difficult to run registration drives. One 2013 study found that in states with unencumbered Republican majorities and large Black populations, lawmakers were especially likely to pass new voter identification laws and other restrictions on the franchise.

The 2012 election saw more of the same accusations of voter fraud. Donald Trump, who had flirted with running for president that year, called the election a total sham and a travesty and claimed that Obama had lost the popular vote by a lot. According to one survey taken after the election, 49 percent of Republican voters said they thought ACORN had stolen the election for the president.

ACORN, however, no longer existed. It closed its doors in 2010 after Congress stripped it of federal funding in the aftermath of a scandal stoked by right-wing provocateurs, whose accusations have since been discredited.

The absence of any evidence for voter fraud was not, for Republicans, evidence of its absence. Freed by the Supreme Courts ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, which ended federal preclearance of election laws in much of the South, Republican lawmakers passed still more voter restrictions, each justified as necessary measures in the war against fraud.

Prominent Republican voices continued to spread the myth. Ive always thought in this state, close elections, presidential elections, it means you probably have to win with at least 53 percent of the vote to account for fraud, Scott Walker, then the governor of Wisconsin, said in a 2014 interview with The Weekly Standard. One or two points, potentially.

Rank-and-file Republicans had already been marinating in 16 years of concentrated propaganda about the prevalence of voter fraud by the time Donald Trump claimed, in 2016, that Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote with millions of illegal ballots. If Republican voters today are quick to believe baroque conspiracy theories about fabricated and stolen votes, then it has quite a lot to do with the words and actions of a generation of mainstream Republican politicians who refused to accept that a Democratic majority was a legitimate majority.

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Opinion | Stop the Steal Didnt Start With Trump - The New York Times

Mary Catherine Bateson, a cultural anthropologist who was the author of quietly groundbreaking books on womens lives and who as the only child of Margaret Mead had once been one of the most famous babies in America died on Jan. 2 in Dartmouth, N.H. She was 81.

Her husband, J. Barkev Kassarjian, confirmed the death, at a hospice facility. He did not specify the cause but said she had suffered a fall earlier that week and experienced brain damage.

Dr. Batesons parents, Dr. Mead and Gregory Bateson, an Englishman, were celebrated anthropologists who fell in love in New Guinea while both were studying the cultures there. (Dr. Mead was married to someone else at the time.) They treated their daughters arrival almost as more field work, documenting her birth on film not a typical practice in 1939 and continuing to record her early childhood with the intention of using the footage not just as home movies but also as educational material. (Dr. Batesons first memory of her father was with a Leica camera hanging from his neck.)

Benjamin Spock was her pediatrician she was Dr. Spocks first baby, it was often said and his celebrated books on child care drew from lessons learned by Dr. Mead.

Still, it wasnt her babyhood, her lineage or her scholarship an expert on classical Arabic poetry, she was as polymathic as her mother that brought Dr. Bateson renown; it was her 1989 book Composing a Life, an examination of the stop-and-start nature of womens lives and their adaptive responses life as an improvisatory art, as she wrote.

In the book, Dr. Bateson used her own history and those of four friends as examples of ambitious women at midlife. (She was 50 at the time of its publication.) All five had lived long enough to have experienced loss, the strains of motherhood, sexism, racism, career setbacks and betrayals. In Dr. Batesons case, she had been ousted as dean of faculty at Amherst College in Massachusetts in an apparent back-room deal orchestrated by male colleagues. It left her hurt at first; her anger would take years to blossom.

Written with wry compassion and a behavorial scientists sharp eye, the book became in its way an unassumimg blockbuster and a touchstone for feminists. Jane Fonda hailed it as an inspiration, as did Hillary Clinton, who as first lady invited Dr. Bateson to advise her.

Reading Composing a Life made me gnash my teeth and weep, the author and Ms. magazine co-founder Jane OReilly wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1989. I scribbled all over the margins, turned down every other page corner and underlined passages with such ferocity that my desk was flecked with broken-off pencil points.

The insights in the book, Dr. Bateson wrote, started from a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings, as if she were rummaging frantically in the fridge to make a meal for unexpected guests.

Mary Catherine Bateson was born on Dec. 8, 1939, in New York City. Her father was in England at the time; an avowed atheist, he sent his wife a congratulatory telegram instructing, Do Not Christen.

Mary Catherine was reared according to the rituals and practices her parents had observed in their fieldwork, including being breastfed on demand; her mother would consult with Dr. Spock. So committed was Dr. Mead to record-keeping that when Mary Catherine was in college and wanted to throw out her childhood artwork, her mother declared that she had no right to do so.

Mary Catherine grew up in Manhattan, mostly in the ground floor apartments of two townhouses in Greenwich Village that Dr. Mead shared in succession with friends who lived on the upper floors. As Dr. Mead was often away from home for work or, when at home, working full-time it was a convenient living arrangement: Mary Catherine could be looked after when necessary by a full bench of unofficial siblings and their parents, as well as an English nanny and her adolescent daughter.

Dr. Meads housekeeping techniques were also novel: When home, she cooked and ate dinner with her daughter but eschewed dishwashing, so as not to waste time that could be better spent with Mary Catherine or on her work. Day after day, dishes piled up in dizzying verticals like a Chinese puzzle, awaiting a maid who would arrive on Mondays, as Dr. Bateson recalled in an earlier book, With a Daughters Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson (1984).

The memoir is an affectionate yet sober portrait of two very complicated people. One of the premises of the household in which I grew up, Dr. Bateson wrote diplomatically, was that there was no clear line between objectivity and subjectivity, that observation does not preclude involvement.

In his review of the book in The Times, Anatole Broyard noted that Dr. Bateson had brought almost as much sophistication to bear on the picture of her childhood and her parents as they did on her.

We are used to novelists and poets giving us their highly colored or hyperbolic versions of their fathers and mothers," he went on, but Miss Bateson, who was born in 1939, is a behavioral scientist as well as a writer with considerable literary skill.

Her parents were married for 14 years before divorcing. Dr. Mead died in 1978 at 76. Gregory Bateson died in 1980 at 76.

Mary Catherine attended the private Brearley School in Manhattan. At 16, after accompanying her mother on a trip to Israel for one of Dr. Meads lectures, she stayed behind and spent part of that year on a kibbutz, where she learned Hebrew. Over the years she would also learn classical Arabic, Armenian, Turkish, Tagalog, Farsi and Georgian, the latter because she thought it would be fun.

She entered Radcliffe at 17, studied Semitic languages and history, and graduated in two and a half years. She had already met Dr. Kassarjian, a Harvard graduate student at the time, but promised her mother that she would not marry until she finished college. She earned her Ph.D. in linguistics and Middle Eastern languages at Harvard in 1963; her husband earned his there in business administration.

Early in their marriage, she and Dr. Kassarjian lived in the Philippines and then Iran, following his career running Harvard-related graduate institutes in those countries. Dr. Bateson found work as an academic and an anthropologist, learning Tagalog in the Philippines and Farsi in Iran to do so. They lived in Iran for seven years, until they were forced out in the late 1970s by the revolution there, having to leave most of their possessions behind.

Dr. Bateson taught at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brandeis University and Spelman College in Atlanta, among other institutions. At her death, she was professor emerita of anthropology and English at George Mason University in Virginia and a visiting scholar at the Center on Aging & Work at Boston College.

Her husband is a professor emeritus of management at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., and professor emeritus of strategy and organization at the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Dr. Bateson published a number of books on human development, creativity and spirituality, including Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom (2010).

In addition to her husband, she is survived by their daughter, Sevanne Kassarjian; her half sister, Nora Bateson; and two grandsons.

At her death, Dr. Bateson was working on a book titled Love Across Difference, about how diversity of all stripes gender, culture and nationality can be a source of insight, collaboration and creativity.

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Mary Catherine Bateson Dies at 81; Anthropologist on Lives of Women - The New York Times