The Hartford Courant

But it's a lousy way to guide foreign policy, says Frida Berrigan, a military expert with the New America Foundation. "Not to say the Connecticut jobs aren't important, but we can't base our foreign policy on 2000 jobs in Connecticut and 6000 jobs in ...

Much hand-wringing has resulted since Hamas, a group on the Bush administration's terrorist list, won a sizable majority of legislative seats in the recent Palestinian elections. But the planners of the elections could learn a thing or two from the recent Iraqi elections.

The problem is that the electoral system used for the Palestinian elections gave grossly unrepresentative results in which Hamas won nearly a super-majority of seats even though they did not win even a majority of votes. If the… more

This month's report of the Commission on Federal Election Reform headed by Jimmy Carter and James Baker deserves serious attention. Although dominated by aging politicians of the major parties, the commission makes recommendations that would greatly improve our elections.

The commission's boldest call is for universal voter registration, a practice used by many democracies around the world in which all eligible voters are automatically registered to vote. Universal registration would add more than 50 million unregistered Americans--nearly three in 10… more