Cosmology and Fundamental Physics
Pope John Paul II
Discourse of His Holiness Pope John Paul II given on 3rd October 1981 at the Solemn Audience granted to the Plenary Session and participants in the Study Week dedicated to "Cosmology and Fundamental Physics" with members of two Work Groups who had discussed "Perspectives of Immunization against Parasitic Diseases" and "Effects Resulting from an Atomic Bombing".
Mr. President,Members of the Academy, Ladies and Gentlemen,
1. The programme of work which your President has presented, and with which I was already acquainted before this meeting, demonstrates the great vitality of your Academy, its interest in the most acute problems of modern science and its interest in the service of humanity. On the occasion of a previous solemn session I have already had the opportunity to tell you how highly the Church esteems pure science: it is "a good, worthy of being loved, for it is knowledge and therefore perfection of man in his intelligence ... It must be honoured for its own sake, as an integral part of culture" (Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 10 November 1979).
Before speaking of the questions which you have already discussed during these days and those which you now propose to study, permit me to express my warm thanks to your illustrious President, Professor Carlos Chagas, for the congratulations which he kindly expressed in the name of your whole Assembly for my having regained my physical strength, thanks to the merciful Providence of God and the skill of the doctors who have cared for me. And I am pleased to avail myself of the occasion to express my particular gratitude to the Members of the Academy who from all parts of the world have sent me their good wishes and assured me of their prayers.
2. During this Study Week, you are dealing with the subject of "Cosmology and Fundamental Physics", with the participation of scholars from the whole world, from as far away as North and South America and Europe and China. This subject is linked to themes already dealt with by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the course of its prestigious history. Here I wish to speak of the session on microseisms, stellar clusters, cosmic radiation and galactic nuclei, sessions' which have taken place under the presidency of Father Gemelli, Monsignor Lemaitre and also Father O'Connell, to whom I address my most fervent good wishes and whom I pray the Lord to assist in his infirmity.
Cosmogony and cosmology have always aroused great interest among peoples and religions. The Bible itself speaks to us of the origin of the universe and its make-up, not in order to provide us with a scientific treatise, but in order to state the correct relationships of man with God and with the universe. Sacred Scripture wishes simply to declare that the world was created by God, and in order to teach this truth it expresses itself in the terms of the cosmology in use at the time of the writer. The Sacred Book likewise wishes to tell men that the world was not created as the seat of the gods, as was taught by other cosmogonies and cosmologies, but was rather created for the service of man and the glory of God. Any other teaching about the origin and make-up of the universe is alien to the intentions of the Bible, which does not wish to teach how heaven was made but how one goes to heaven.
Any scientific hypothesis on the origin of the world, such as the hypothesis of a primitive atom from which derived the whole of the physical universe, leaves open the problem concerning the universe's beginning. Science cannot of itself solve this question: there is needed that human knowledge that rises above physics and astrophysics and which is called metaphysics; there is needed above all the knowledge that comes from God's revelation. Thirty years ago, on 22 November 1951, my predecessor Pope Pius XII, speaking about the problem of the origin of the universe at the Study Week on the subject of microseisms organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, expressed himself as follows: "In vain would one expect a reply from the sciences of nature, which on the contrary frankly declare that they find themselves faced by an insoluble enigma. It is equally certain that the human mind versed in philosophical meditation penetrates the problem more deeply. One cannot deny that a mind which is enlightened and enriched by modern scientific knowledge and which calmly considers this problem is led to break the circle of matter which is totally independent and autonomous—as being either uncreated or having created itself—and to rise to a creating Mind. With the same clear and critical gaze with which it examines and judges the facts, it discerns and recognizes there the work of creative Omnipotence, whose strength raised up by the powerful fiat uttered billions of years ago by the creating Mind, has spread through the universe, calling into existence, in a gesture of generous love, matter teeming with energy".
3. Members of the Academy, I am very pleased with the theme that you have chosen for your Plenary Session beginning on this very day: "The Impact of Molecular Biology on Society". I realize the advantages that result—and can still result—from the study and applications of molecular biology, supplemented by other disciplines such as genetics and its technological application in agriculture and industry, and also, as is envisaged, for the treatment of various illnesses, some of a hereditary character.
I have firm confidence in the world scientific community, and in a very special way in the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and I am certain that thanks to them biological progress and research, as also all other forms of scientific research and its technological application, will be carried out in full respect for the norms of morality, safeguarding human dignity, freedom and equality It is necessary that science should always be accompanied and controlled by the wisdom that belongs to the permanent spiritual heritage of humanity and that takes its inspiration from the design of God implanted in creation before being subsequently proclaimed by his Word.
Reflection that is inspired by science and by the wisdom of the world scientific community must enlighten humanity regarding the consequences—good and bad—of scientific research, and especially of that research which concerns man, so that, on the one hand, there will be no fixation on anticultural positions that retard the progress of humanity, and that on the other hand there will be no attack on man's most precious possession: the dignity of his person, destined to true progress in the unity of his physical, intellectual and spiritual well-being.
4. There is another subject which, during these days, has occupied the thoughts of some of you, eminent scholars from different parts of the world who have been brought together by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: the question of parasitic diseases, diseases which strike the poorest countries of the world and are a serious obstacle to the development of man in the harmonious framework of his physical, economic and spiritual well-being. The efforts to eliminate, as far as possible, the serious harm caused by parasitic diseases to a considerable part of humanity are inseparable from the efforts which should be made for the socioeconomic development of those same peoples. Human beings normally need a basic minimum of health and material goods in order to be able to live in a manner worthy of their human and divine vocation. It is for this reason that Jesus turned with infinite love to the sick and infirm, and that he miraculously cured some of the diseases about which you have been concerned in these past days. May the Lord inspire and assist the work of the scientists and doctors who dedicate their research and profession to the study and treatment of human infirmities, especially those which are the most grave and humiliating
5. In addition to the question of parasitic diseases, the Academy has been studying the question of a scourge of catastrophic dimensions and gravity that could attack the health of humanity if a nuclear conflict were to break out. Over and above the death of a considerable part of the world's population, a nuclear conflict could have incalculable effects on the health of the present and future generations.
The multi-disciplinary study which you are preparing to undertake cannot fail to be for the Heads of State a reminder of their tremendous responsibilities, and arouse in all humanity an ever more intense desire which comes from the most profound depths of the human heart, and also from the message of Christ who came to bring peace to people of good will.
By virtue of my universal mission, I wish to make myself once more the spokesman of the human right to justice and peace, and of the will of God who wishes all people to be saved. And I renew the appeal that I made at Hiroshima on February 25 of this year: "Let us pledge ourselves to peace through justice; let us now take a solemn decision, that war will never be tolerated or sought as a means of resolving differences; let us promise our fellow human beings that we will work untiringly for disarmament and the banishing of all nuclear weapons; let us replace violence and hate with confidence and caring".
6. Among the efforts to be made in order to secure the peace of humanity, there is the effort to ensure for all peoples the energy needed for their peaceful development. The Academy concerned itself with this problem during its Study Week last year. I am happy to be able to award today the Pius XI Gold Medal to a scientist who has contributed in an outstanding way, by his research in the field of photo-chemistry, to the utilization of solar energy: Professor Jean-Marie Lehn of the College de France and the University of Strasbourg, and I express to him my most cordial congratulations.
To all of you, I offer my sincere compliments on the work which you are doing in scientific research. I pray that Almighty God will bless you, your families, your loved ones, your collaborators, and the whole of humanity, for whom in diverse yet converging ways you and I are carrying out the mission which has been entrusted to us by God.
From Discourses of the Popes from Pius XI to John Paul II to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences 1936-1986 (Vatican City: Pontifica Academia Scientiarum, 1986), 161-164.
Provided Courtesy of:Eternal Word Television Network5817 Old Leeds RoadIrondale, AL 35210www.ewtn.com

Benazir Bhutto killed in attack
The Pakistani opposition leader's assassination has thrown the country into turmoil.
By Sadaqat Jan and Zarar Khan Associated Press
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was killed Thursday in a suicide attack as she drove away from a campaign rally just minutes after addressing thousands of supporters, aides said.
The death of the charismatic former prime minister threw the campaign for the Jan. 8 election into chaos and created fears of mass protests and an eruption of violence across the volatile south Asian nation.
It left a void at the top of her Pakistan People's Party, the largest political group in the country. It also threw into turmoil U.S. President George W. Bush's plan to bring stability to this key U.S. ally by reconciling her and President Pervez Musharraf.
Shortly after Bhutto's death, Musharraf convened an emergency meeting with his senior staff, where they were expected to discuss whether to postpone the election, an official at the Interior Ministry said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks.
Next to Musharraf, Bhutto, 54, was the best known political figure in the country, serving two terms as prime minister between 1988 and 1996. She was respected in the West for her liberal outlook and determination to combat the spread of Islamic extremism, a theme she returned to often in her campaign speeches.
As news of her death spread, supporters at the hospital in Rawalpindi smashed glass doors and stoned cars. Many chanted slogans against Musharraf, accusing him of complicity in her killing.
Angry supporters also took to the streets in the northwestern city of Peshawar as well other areas, chanting slogans against Musharraf. In Rawalpindi, the site of the attack, Bhutto's supporters burned election posters from the ruling party and attacked police, who fled from the scene.
The attacker struck just minutes after Bhutto addressed a rally of thousands of supporters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi. There were conflicting accounts over the sequence of events.
Rehman Malik, Bhutto's security adviser, said she was shot in the neck and chest by the attacker, who then blew himself up.
But Javed Iqbal Cheema, spokesman for the Interior Ministry, told state-run Pakistan Television that Bhutto died when a suicide bomber struck her vehicle. At least 20 others were killed in the blast, an Associated Press reporter at the scene saw.
U.S. officials said they were looking into reports of Bhutto's death.
"Certainly, we condemn the attack on this rally. It demonstrates that there are still those in Pakistan who want to subvert reconciliation and efforts to advance democracy," said deputy State Department spokesman Tom Casey.
The United States has for months been encouraging Musharraf to reach some kind of political accommodation with the opposition, particular Bhutto, who is seen as having a wide base of support here.
Bhutto had returned to Pakistan from an eight-year exile on Oct. 18. Her homecoming parade in Karachi was also targeted by a suicide attacker, killing more than 140 people. On that occasion she narrowly escaped injury.
Bhutto was killed just a few miles from the scene of her father's violent death 28 years earlier. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a former prime minister and the founder of the party that his daughter would later lead, was executed by hanging in 1979 in Rawalpindi on charges of conspiracy to murder that supporters said was politically motivated by the then-military regime. His killing led to violent protests across the country.

From Andrew Sullivan

Ron Paul; An Adult to recover the GOP

By now, readers will know who I favor in the Democratic race. Here's my most considered case. But what of the GOP? For me, it comes down to two men, Ron Paul and John McCain. That may sound strange, because in many ways they are polar opposites: the champion of the surge and the non-interventionist against the Iraq war; the occasional meddling boss of Washington and the live-and-let-live libertarian from Texas. But picking a candidate is always a mix of policy and character, of pragmatism and principle. And what these two mavericks share, to my mind, is a modicum of integrity. At one end of the character scale, you have the sickening sight of Mitt Romney, a hollow shell of cynicism and salesmanship, recrafted to appeal to a base he studied the way Bain consultants assess a company. Paul and McCain are at the other end. They have both said things to GOP audiences that they knew would offend. They have stuck with their positions despite unpopularity. They're not saints, but they believe what they say. Both have also taken a stand against the cancerous and deeply un-American torture and detention regime constructed by Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. In my book, that counts.
I admire McCain in so many ways. He is the adult in the field, he is attuned to the issue of climate change in a way no other Republican is, he is a genuine war hero and a patriot, and he bravely and rightly opposed the disastrous occupation policies of the Bush administration in Iraq. The surge is no panacea for Iraq; but it has enabled the United States to lose the war without losing face. And that, in the end, is why I admire McCain but nonetheless have to favor Paul over McCain. Because on the critical issue of our time - the great question of the last six years - Paul has been proven right and McCain wrong. And I say that as someone who once passionately supported McCain's position on the war but who cannot pretend any longer that it makes sense.
Let's be clear: we have lost this war. We have lost because the initial, central goals of the invasion have all failed: we have not secured WMDS from terrorists because those WMDs did not exist. We have not stymied Islamist terror - at best we have finally stymied some of the terror we helped create. We have not constructed a democratic model for the Middle East - we have instead destroyed a totalitarian government and a phony country, only to create a permanently unstable, fractious, chaotic failed state, where the mere avoidance of genocide is a cause for celebration. We have, moreover, helped solder a new truth in the Arab mind: that democracy means chaos, anarchy, mass-murder, national disintegration and sectarian warfare. And we have also empowered the Iranian regime and made a wider Sunni-Shiite regional war more likely than it was in 2003. Apart from that, Mr Bush, how did you enjoy your presidency?
McCain, for all his many virtues, still doesn't get this. Paul does.
Paul, moreover, supports the only rational response: a withdrawal, as speedily and prudently as possible. McCain, along with Lieberman, still seems to believe that expending even more billions of dollars to prop up and enable a fast-devolving, ethnically toxic, religiously nutty region is somehow in American interests. Given the enormous challenges of the terror war, the huge debt we are piling up, the exhaustion of the military, the moral and financial corruption that has its white-hot center in Mesopotamia, I do not believe that an endless military, economic and political commitment to Iraq makes sense. It only makes sense if we are determined to occupy the Middle East indefinitely to secure oil supplies. But the rational response to oil dependence is not to entrench it, but to try and move away from it. Institutionalizing a bank-breaking, morale-busting Middle East empire isn't the way to go.
But the deeper reason to support Ron Paul is a simple one. The great forgotten principles of the current Republican party are freedom and toleration. Paul's federalism, his deep suspicion of Washington power, his resistance to government spending, debt and inflation, his ability to grasp that not all human problems are soluble, least of all by government: these are principles that made me a conservative in the first place. No one in the current field articulates them as clearly and understands them as deeply as Paul. He is a man of faith who nonetheless sees a clear line between religion and politics. More than all this, he has somehow ignited a new movement of those who love freedom and want to rescue it from the do-gooding bromides of the left and the Christianist meddling of the right. The Paulites' enthusiasm for liberty, their unapologetic defense of core conservative principles, their awareness that in the new millennium, these principles of small government, self-reliance, cultural pluralism, and a humble foreign policy are more necessary than ever - no lover of liberty can stand by and not join them.
He's the real thing in a world of fakes and frauds. And in a primary campaign where the very future of conservatism is at stake, that cannot be ignored. In fact, it demands support.
Go Ron Paul!

New Jersey Moves to End Its Death Penalty
By JEREMY W. PETERS NY TIMES
TRENTON — The New Jersey General Assembly approved a bill eliminating capital punishment on Thursday, clearing the way for Gov. Jon S. Corzine to sign the measure as early as Monday.
Mr. Corzine said he would act quickly. “It will be very, very prompt,” he said at a news conference on Thursday. “I’m sure it will be within the next week.”
Once he signs the bill, New Jersey will become the first state in the modern era of capital punishment to repeal the death penalty.
The measure has moved at an unusually fast pace through the Legislature. In the last week, it passed a Senate committee, an Assembly committee and both houses, leading many Republicans to accuse the Democratic leadership of trying to rush the bill through a lame-duck session.
“I am ashamed the Assembly would consider this bill today,” said Assemblyman Richard A. Merkt, a conservative Republican from Randolph.
The voting did not break down exclusively along party lines, however. Three Republicans joined 41 Democrats in the Assembly to pass the bill, 44 to 36. Surprisingly, nine Democrats voted against the measure. On Monday in the Senate, 4 Republicans joined 17 Democrats to muster just enough support to get the 21 votes needed to pass a bill.
“We need to put politics aside,” said Christopher Bateman, a Republican from Somerville. “I think we have an opportunity today to change the course on this very important issue.”
Several state legislatures have tried to overturn their death penalties since 1976, when the United States Supreme Court set the framework for the current system of capital punishment. And while executions have come to a halt by other means — through a moratorium, for example, issued by the governor of Illinois, and a court ruling declaring New York’s penalty unconstitutional — no state legislature has ever flatly outlawed the death penalty.
Once the governor signs the bill, the New Jersey Department of Corrections will begin deciding what to do with the eight men on death row in the New Jersey State Prison here. Under the bill, inmates sentenced to death have 60 days to petition their sentencing courts to commute their sentences to life in prison with no possibility of parole. They also must agree to forego their rights to any further appeals.
If they do not petition the court, their death sentences remain in place. But since the state’s capital punishment statute will be repealed, their sentences will be effectively equivalent to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Some of the most violent death-row inmates — those who are allowed no contact with other inmates — will probably be placed in a unit of the prison that is nearly identical to death row, confined for almost the entire day in a cell measuring 7 feet by 11 feet, correction officials said. The less violent death-row inmates may be moved to the prison’s general population.
The Department of Corrections has said it will take up the matter once Mr. Corzine signs the bill.

Study Detects Recent Instance of Human Evolution
By NICHOLAS WADE NY TIMES
A surprisingly recent instance of human evolution has been detected among the peoples of East Africa. It is the ability to digest milk in adulthood, conferred by genetic changes that occurred as recently as 3,000 years ago, a team of geneticists has found.
The finding is a striking example of a cultural practice — the raising of dairy cattle — feeding back into the human genome. It also seems to be one of the first instances of convergent human evolution to be documented at the genetic level. Convergent evolution refers to two or more populations acquiring the same trait independently.
Throughout most of human history, the ability to digest lactose, the principal sugar of milk, has been switched off after weaning because there is no further need for the lactase enzyme that breaks the sugar apart. But when cattle were first domesticated 9,000 years ago and people later started to consume their milk as well as their meat, natural selection would have favored anyone with a mutation that kept the lactase gene switched on.
Such a mutation is known to have arisen among an early cattle-raising people, the Funnel Beaker culture, which flourished some 5,000 to 6,000 years ago in north-central Europe. People with a persistently active lactase gene have no problem digesting milk and are said to be lactose tolerant.
Almost all Dutch people and 99 percent of Swedes are lactose-tolerant, but the mutation becomes progressively less common in Europeans who live at increasing distance from the ancient Funnel Beaker region.
Geneticists wondered if the lactose tolerance mutation in Europeans, first identified in 2002, had arisen among pastoral peoples elsewhere. But it seemed to be largely absent from Africa, even though pastoral peoples there generally have some degree of tolerance.
A research team led by Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Maryland has now resolved much of the puzzle. After testing for lactose tolerance and genetic makeup among 43 ethnic groups of East Africa, she and her colleagues have found three new mutations, all independent of each other and of the European mutation, which keep the lactase gene permanently switched on.
The principal mutation, found among Nilo-Saharan-speaking ethnic groups of Kenya and Tanzania, arose 2,700 to 6,800 years ago, according to genetic estimates, Dr. Tishkoff’s group is to report in the journal Nature Genetics on Monday. This fits well with archaeological evidence suggesting that pastoral peoples from the north reached northern Kenya about 4,500 years ago and southern Kenya and Tanzania 3,300 years ago.
Two other mutations were found, among the Beja people of northeastern Sudan and tribes of the same language family, Afro-Asiatic, in northern Kenya.
Genetic evidence shows that the mutations conferred an enormous selective advantage on their owners, enabling them to leave almost 10 times as many descendants as people without them. The mutations have created “one of the strongest genetic signatures of natural selection yet reported in humans,” the researchers write.
The survival advantage was so powerful perhaps because those with the mutations not only gained extra energy from lactose but also, in drought conditions, would have benefited from the water in milk. People who were lactose-intolerant could have risked losing water from diarrhea, Dr. Tishkoff said.
Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, an archaeologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said the new findings were “very exciting” because they “showed the speed with which a genetic mutation can be favored under conditions of strong natural selection, demonstrating the possible rate of evolutionary change in humans.”
The genetic data fitted in well, she said, with archaeological and linguistic evidence about the spread of pastoralism in Africa. The first clear evidence of cattle in Africa is from a site 8,000 years old in northwestern Sudan. Cattle there were domesticated independently from two other domestications, in the Near East and the Indus valley of India.
Both Nilo-Saharan speakers in Sudan and their Cushitic-speaking neighbors in the Red Sea hills probably domesticated cattle at the same time, since each has an independent vocabulary for cattle items, said Dr. Christopher Ehret, an expert on African languages and history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Descendants of each group moved southward and would have met again in Kenya, Dr. Ehret said.
Dr. Tishkoff detected lactose tolerance among both Cushitic speakers and Nilo-Saharan groups in Kenya. Cushitic is a branch of Afro-Asiatic, the language family that includes Arabic, Hebrew and ancient Egyptian.
Dr. Jonathan Pritchard, a statistical geneticist at the University of Chicago and the co-author of the new article, said that there were many signals of natural selection in the human genome, but that it was usually hard to know what was being selected for. In this case Dr. Tishkoff had clearly defined the driving force, he said.
The mutations Dr. Tishkoff detected are not in the lactase gene itself but a nearby region of the DNA that controls the activation of the gene. The finding that different ethnic groups in East Africa have different mutations is one instance of their varied evolutionary history and their exposure to many different selective pressures, Dr. Tishkoff said.
“There is a lot of genetic variation between groups in Africa, reflecting the different environments in which they live, from deserts to tropics, and their exposure to very different selective forces,” she said.
People in different regions of the world have evolved independently since dispersing from the ancestral human population in northeast Africa 50,000 years ago, a process that has led to the emergence of different races. But much of this differentiation at the level of DNA may have led to the same physical result.
As Dr. Tishkoff has found in the case of lactose tolerance, evolution may use the different mutations available to it in each population to reach the same goal when each is subjected to the same selective pressure. “I think it’s reasonable to assume this will be a more general paradigm,” Dr. Pritchard said.

Revolutionary Light Transfer Switch
By Antone Gonsalves
InformationWeek
IBM on Thursday unveiled a technical advancement related to the use of light to carry large amounts of data quickly among cores within a microprocessor, taking the company closer to developing a chip that may one day run notebooks with the horsepower of today's supercomputers.
The breakthrough revolves around a device used to transform electrical impulses into beams of light. The device, called a modulator, is similar to what's used today in optical networks built by telecommunication companies. IBM scientists say they have found a way to shrink the modulator to a size where it can fit within a multi-core CPU.

The achievement, published in the journal Optics Express, is not all that's needed to one day bring data-carrying light beams to processors. However, it is an important first step toward production, which is about 10 to 15 years away, William Green, lead scientist on the project, told InformationWeek. "We've been working on this for sometime at IBM, and there's still a lot of work to do," he said. "It's one of the pieces within this larger network that we're designing and building."

The potential benefits of IBM's work to businesses and consumers are huge. For companies, it would mean having smaller computers that are far more powerful than today's machines, yet produce far less heat. Among the problems facing businesses today are the size and number of servers needed to process an ever-growing amount of data, which means larger expensive data centers. In addition, today's computers generate a lot of heat, requiring companies to spend more on power to cool them.

On the consumer side, a supercomputer in a box in the home could handle far more chores. Those tasks could range from operating lights and heating systems to processing and distributing video and more realistic computer games, which could include 3D environments in which characters move about seamlessly.

In the latest advancement, IBM has managed to shrink the modulator to a size in which one can be assigned to each core in a chip, a requirement in using light. Green expects to one-day see hundreds to thousands of cores on a single piece of silicon, so the size of the modulator is important. The latest device is 100 to 1,000 times smaller than previous versions in the lab.

Communications between processor cores today, which include quad-core chips from Intel and AMD and IBM's nine-core Cell processor, is handled through copper wire that moves electrical impulses. IBM hopes to eventually replace that wire with a light beam that follows a tiny silicon strip, called a silicon nanophotonic wave guide, to its destination. Light carries more data in the same amount of time as copper by being 100 times faster.

In terms of power consumption, IBM has managed to reduce the usage of its tiny modulators in the lab from several hundred millowatts to 50 millowatts, Green said. IBM is working to bring power consumption down even further.

But the bigger problem in eventually taking light-driven chips to market will be in manufacturing, Green said. Equipment and processes used today have evolved over decades around the use of copper. Introducing light technology means new equipment and a whole new way of production. Such a major transformation will take time. "That could be one of the primary challenges," Green said.

Lawn work at Romney's home still done by illegal immigrants
Boston.com
By Maria Cramer and Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff; and Connie Paige, Globe Correspondent
Standing on stage at a Republican debate on the Gulf Coast of Florida last week, Mitt Romney repeatedly lashed out at rival Rudy Giuliani for providing sanctuary to illegal immigrants in New York City.
Yet, the very next morning, on Thursday, at least two illegal immigrants stepped out of a hulking maroon pickup truck in the driveway of Romney's Belmont house, then proceeded to spend several hours raking leaves, clearing debris from Romney's tennis court, and loading the refuse back on to the truck.
In fact, their work was part of a regular pattern. Despite a Globe story in Dec. 2006 that highlighted Romney's use of illegal immigrants to tend to his lawn, Romney continued to employ the same landscaping company -- until today. The landscaping company, in turn, continued to employ illegal immigrants.Two of the workers confirmed in separate interviews with Globe reporters last week that they were in the country without documents. One said he had paid $7,000 to a smuggler to escort him across the desert into Arizona; the other said he had come to the country with a student visa that was now expired. Both were seen on the lawn by either Globe reporters or photographers over the last two months.Questioned this afternoon during two campaign stops in New Hampshire about the use of illegal immigrants on his property, Romney declined to answer. An aide said he would issue a statement, and Romney, emerging from a Concord restaurant, said, "Did you hear him? We'll give you a statement."Later, the campaign issued a statement saying Romney had just learned -- apparently from Globe reporters -- of the company's continued practice of employing illegal immigrants, and immediately fired it.
"After this same issue arose last year, I gave the company a second chance with very specific conditions," Romney said in the statement. "They were instructed to make sure people working for the company were of legal status. We personally met with the company in order to inform them about the importance of this matter. The owner of the company guaranteed us, in very certain terms, that the company would be in total compliance with the law going forward."The company's failure to comply with the law is disappointing and inexcusable, and I believe it is important I take this action," Romney said.For Romney, who has made curtailing illegal immigration a cornerstone of his presidential campaign, the revelation that he continued to employ the same landscaping company was likely to fuel criticism from his rivals, at least one of whom -- Giuliani -- has already mocked Romney's commitment to the issue on the trail.

December 3, 2007
A Chastened Imus Returns to Radio
By JACQUES STEINBERG
Nearly eight months after he was fired for making a racially and sexually disparaging remark about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, Don Imus went back on the radio at 6 a.m. today and vowed he would not say anything like that again.
He also introduced two new cast members — a black woman, Karith Foster, and a black man, Tony Powell, both of them comedians — and said they would join him in conducting “an ongoing discussion about race relations in this country.”
“I will never say anything in my lifetime that will make any of these young women at Rutgers regret or feel foolish that they accepted my apology and forgave me,” Mr. Imus told an audience that was listening in person at Town Hall in midtown Manhattan, and at home and in their cars on WABC-AM, his new radio home. “And no one else will say anything on my program that will make anyone think I did not deserve a second chance.”
Still, in many ways, it felt as if the clock had been turned back before last April, when Mr. Imus said what he said and was fired by CBS Radio and MSNBC, which had simulcast his program on cable television.
“Dick Cheney is still a war criminal,” Mr. Imus, 67, told the audience, in an effort to reassure them that he did not intend to completely alter his style, or curb his tongue. “Hillary Clinton is still Satan. And I’m going on the radio.”
On stage at Town Hall this morning, he was flanked on his right by his longtime news reader and sidekick, Charles McCord. Seated to his left, with a microphone conspicuously in front of him, was Bernard McGuirk, the producer whose initial reference on April 4 to the Rutgers team as “some hard-core hos” had prompted Mr. Imus to pile on by calling them “nappy-headed hos.”
The roster of announced guests was familiar to any regular Imus listener. They included Senator John McCain of Arizona, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, and Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, who is seeking the Democratic nomination; the author Doris Kearns Goodwin, and the political strategists James Carville and Mary Matalin.
And some long-time advertisers, too, came back, including the Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey; NetJets, the corporate aircraft leasing company; the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut, and Bigelow teas. The house band was led by Levon Helm, who had played for Mr. Imus on April 12, which had wound up being his last day.
Mr. Imus wore a tan cowboy hat, a gold-colored vest under a tan barn jacket and worn boots. In his initial remarks, Mr. Imus spoke to the audience from a lone microphone positioned at center stage. At some points, he was defiant, acknowledging that the Rutgers team, which met with him the night of his firing, had found it easier to forgive him than had some of his detractors.
“We signed for five years,” he said of his contracts with Citadel Radio, the parent of WABC, as well as with RFD-TV, which will simulcast his program. “That’s how long it’s going to take to get even with everybody.”
And yet, for all his bravado, Mr. Imus acknowledged that he had been chastened and, at times, humiliated these last few months, and that he ultimately deserved his punishment.
“I think things worked out the way they should have worked out,” he said. “We now have the opportunity to have a better program, to obviously diversify the cast.”
He added, though: “The program is not going to change.”
NY TIMES

From The Sunday Times
December 2, 2007
What a turn-up, Bush’s natural heir is Mr Nice Guy
Andrew Sullivan
I wonder what Karl Rove – the man once known as Bush’s Brain – was thinking as he watched CNN’s YouTube Republican debate last Wednesday night. On the stage, we witnessed all the loose and dead ends of the postBush right. But one man seemed to stand apart.
He has a funny name and a well-honed shtick, and only recently was regarded as a novelty candidate. But he represents in many ways the natural evolution of the party that Rove crafted onto the evangelical persona of George W Bush. And he scares traditional economic conservatives rigid.
Mike Huckabee is something both old and new in American politics. The old first: he’s a former governor of Arkansas with a weight problem and a not-so-pretty ethical past in that never-very-pretty southern state. He has developed a good line about it: like Bill Clinton, he’s from Hope, Arkansas, and he’s asking the Republicans to give the place a second chance. But he has none of Clinton’s mastery of policy detail, and little of his fundraising skill. Whether his ramshackle campaign has enough money, volunteers and basic competence to stay in the race after mid-January is a matter of some doubt.
Huckabee’s strategy is also retro. If his geographical lineage is like Clinton’s, the candidacy his most resembles is Jimmy Carter’s in 1976. The country is fed up with a White House run by Dick Cheney, just as it was when Gerald Ford was president. More than 70% of people think the country is on “the wrong track”, a harbinger of a change election. One of the most attractive candidates is clearly not from Washington; and his basic appeal is one of religious sincerity and personal charm. He hopes to leverage the quirky Iowa caucuses to victory.
If Carter was the first president to exploit politically the cultural revival of American southern evangelicalism, Huckabee arrives as the movement has matured and is showing signs of splintering. Like Carter, he is steeped in Baptist culture and theology. He’s even a minister; and he proudly holds a degree in Bible studies from Ouachita Baptist University, in Ark-adelphia, Arkansas.
Unlike Carter, of course, he is a Republican.
And that is where the newness comes from. Under Ronald Reagan’s defining presidency, the Republican party backed free trade, low taxes, small government and self-reliance. Under George W Bush, the only feature of that policy mix that remained was low taxation. Bush backed steel tariffs, spent oodles on expanding government, especially in education and entitlements, and constantly touted the capacity of government to help anyone in need. “We have a responsibility,” Bush famously pronounced in 2003, “that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.”
Huckabee has the same instincts and the same objective: to remake the Republicans into a big-spending, “compassionate” party dedicated to winning over the bulk of working-class and especially rural Americans. In his races in the early 1990s, he was advised by Clinton’s guru, Dick Morris, who explained: “What we wanted to do was run a progressive campaign that would appeal to all Arkansans.”
As Arkansas governor, Huckabee raised taxes to fund education and healthcare for children. The conservative Club for Growth has calculated that he raised state spending by a whopping 63% in his tenure, and the conservative National Review claimed he added almost $1 billion to the state’s debt. But he combined this big-spending Republicanism with an absolutist position against all abortions, strong opposition to legal protections for gay couples, and an unembarrassed embrace of creationism. In his own words: “I do not necessarily buy into the traditional Darwinian theory, personally.” You can see why he seems Bush’s natural heir.
His one sop to the economic right is his proposal to abolish income tax and replace it with a national sales tax. But the rate he favours would not raise sufficient revenue to keep the budgeting neutral; and whatever benefits the country would get from scrapping the Internal Revenue Service would be overwhelmed by the intrusive bureaucracy required to ensure the poor weren’t clobbered by a tax that would hurt them the most. I know of no serious economist who thinks Huckabee’s tax proposals aren’t nuts.
Earlier this year, he was viewed as a joke. He could barely raise any money, and was regarded as a second-string figure to more established religious-right candidates such as Sam Brownback. But the debates made him. He’s actually funny, in a Reaganesque fashion, and relates to ordinary Americans in a way none of the other Republican candidates does. He appears genuine and trustworthy in a way none of the others manages. His main claim to fame is losing more than 100lb in weight – and, in a country of ubiquitous obesity, that shouldn’t be underestimated.
More to the point: in a party that has come to seem very nasty, Huckabee seems extremely nice. He’s the one leading evangelical Republican who doesn’t scare the bejesus out of Democrats and liberals. And in a party now dominated by religious fun-damentalists, he has more credibility than the Mormon Mitt Romney, and much less baggage than the war veteran John McCain. If you’re a Christian conservative, what’s not to like?
Hence the small ripple when he wowed the annual convention of the religious right earlier this year in Washington. And in Iowa, where fun-damentalists dominate the caucus, he has taken off in the past month. The latest poll shows him in the lead. Romney’s appeal to the Christian right has always been shallow and fatally compromised by his Mormonism.
Then what? Many observers think this all benefits the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is faring poorly against Romney in the early states. But that assumes Huckabee himself won’t gain momentum. Why exactly shouldn’t he? In Iowa, Huckabee is winning voters whose biggest concern is national security – which suggests that religious voters are not convinced they have to hold their noses and back the pro-choice Giuliani because of Huckabee’s lack of experience of terrorism.
My own hunch is that it’s perfectly possible that Huckabee will build up enough steam. In the south, it’s hard to see how a Rudy beats a Huckabee. And by the time Florida and California vote, in February, Huckabee may be unstoppable.
A Huckabee-Giuliani race? It could happen. If it ends up that way, you would see a classic divide between the old Republicanism and the new. Rudy’s urban, free-market authoritari-anism would be pitched against a rural, populist nice guy.
And if another evangelical southern governor were to beat a New York mayor, Rove’s transformation of the Republican party would be complete. This unlikely Baptist minister could finish off what Nixon started and Bush accelerated. And American conservatism could fully become what it has been tending towards for more than a decade: the apotheosis of the south. With a few inches off the waistline.

The Furure Begins to take shape!
Iowa Poll Puts Huckabee and Obama Out Front
Mike Huckabee on the campaign trail in New Hampshire on Saturday. Can he convert his lead in Iowa to a lead in the Granite State? (AP).
A poll released by the Des Moines Register confirmed the shift in the presidential race over the last month, as Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is ahead of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). And in an even more surprising result, former Gov. Mike Huckabee has vaulted ahead of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, long the leader among the Republicans.
The leads for Obama and Huckabee remain small, particularly given the four percent margin of error. The poll placed Obama at 28 percent, Clinton at 25 percent, and former North Carolina senator John Edwards at 23 percent, meaning that depending on how effectively they turn out voters, any of them could win. The GOP race appears a two-man contest with Huckabee at 29 percent, Romney at 24 percent and former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani at 13 percent.The polls show what's happening in the campaign, as Clinton, who had long sought to rise above the fray, is attacking Obama more frequently, and Romney is slamming Huckabee for tax increases during his days as governor.
For Obama, the polls results have one potential worrisome trend. According to the Register, Obama dominates among younger caucus-goers, with support from 48 percent of those younger than 35, compared to 19 percent for Clinton and 17 percent for Edwards.The under-35 bloc represents 14 percent of Democratic caucus-goers, according to the poll. Clinton is the top choice among caucus-goers 55 and older. Older people generally show up and are considered more reliable than younger and first-time caucus-goers, another group that Obama leads. At the same time, Obama also leads among those who say they will definitely attend the caucuses.
For Clinton, the poll showed her strength among women has slipped. Obama is supported by 31 percent of women polled who are likely to attend the caucuses, compared to 26 percent for Clinton.
For the Republicans, the poll suggests Huckabee is performing strongly based on two factors: Social conservatives favor him, and he's ranked as the "most principled" of the candidates.Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, is leading Romney 38 percent to 22 percent among those who consider themselves "born-again Christians." In October, Romney edged Huckabee 23 percent to 18 percent among people in that group, which accounts for half of all likely caucus participants, according to the Register.He's leading even though Iowa Republicans rank Romney as the "most presidential" and most "fiscally conservative" and the "best able to bring about real change."
The numbers suggest that Clinton and Giuliani, the two leading candidates in national polls, have some significant challenges here. Iowa voters are not choosing the two, even though voters say Giuliani and Clinton are the "most electable" in their respective fields. Giuliani is effectively tied with Romney, with 30 percent of voters calling the former mayor the most electable, compared to 28 percent for Romney and 13 percent for Huckabee.
Thirty-four percent of Democrats say Clinton is the most electable, compared to 26 percent for Obama. At the same time, 52 percent of Democrats said Clinton is the most "ego-driven" of their candidates and 36 percent of Republicans said the same of Giuliani.-- Perry Bacon Jr. (From Washington Post)