You need to give it a minute:

via The Dai­ly Dish

The cel­e­bra­tion of Mar­tin Luther King’s birth­day was a lit­tle dif­fer­ent this year. It had a polit­i­cal edge to it, and unavoid­ably so. Dr. King’s work made pos­si­ble what we’re final­ly see­ing today — a black can­di­date mak­ing a seri­ous run at the Amer­i­can pres­i­den­cy. So it seemed entire­ly appro­pri­ate that Barack Oba­ma spoke Sun­day before the con­gre­ga­tion at Ebenez­er Bap­tist Church in Atlanta, where MLK preached long ago. In this 34-minute speech, you get a per­fect reminder of King’s lega­cy and also a stump speech deliv­ered in an ora­tor­i­cal style that King would appre­ci­ate. The video clip below has been viewed close to 450,000 times on YouTube. It’s also been added to our YouTube playlist.

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Al Gore accept­ed his Nobel Prize ear­li­er today in Oslo and deliv­ered an accom­pa­ny­ing speech that issued a stark warn­ing (read text here, watch video here):

[W]ithout real­iz­ing it, we have begun to wage war on the earth itself. Now, we and the earth­’s cli­mate are locked in a rela­tion­ship famil­iar to war plan­ners: “Mutu­al­ly assured destruc­tion.”

More than two decades ago,scientists cal­cu­lat­ed that nuclear war could throw so much debris and smoke into the air that it would block life-giv­ing sun­light from our atmos­phere, caus­ing a “nuclear win­ter.” Their elo­quent warn­ings here in Oslo helped gal­va­nize the world’s resolve to halt the nuclear arms race.

Now sci­ence is warn­ing us that if we do not quick­ly reduce the glob­al warm­ing pol­lu­tion that is trap­ping so much of the heat our plan­et nor­mal­ly radi­ates back out of the atmos­phere, we are in dan­ger of cre­at­ing a per­ma­nent “car­bon sum­mer.”

As the Amer­i­can poet Robert Frost wrote, ” Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice.” Either, he notes, “would suf­fice.”

But nei­ther need be our fate. It is time to make peace with the plan­et.

The Econ­o­mist has issued its pre­dic­tions for the world in 2008, and here’s what they’re bank­ing on: The Democ­rats, and par­tic­u­lar­ly Hillary Clin­ton, nar­row­ly win the upcom­ing pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. Mean­while the Unit­ed States, which has nev­er met a bub­ble it does­n’t like, will get mired down with hous­ing and cred­it prob­lems. And look­ing for a new eco­nom­ic engine, the world will turn to Chi­na and India. Even bet­ter for Chi­na, it will host the Olympics in Bei­jing, win many medals, and feel like it has arrived (or rather re-arrived) as a nation. But per­haps feel­ing a bit too proud, it might ratch­et up ten­sions with Tai­wan, while the U.S. sur­pris­es every­one, even itself, by pos­si­bly strik­ing a “grand bar­gain” with Iran. Oth­er than that, George Bush will accom­plish lit­tle dur­ing the last year of his admin­is­tra­tion, and politi­cians will talk lots about cli­mate change. But whether they actu­al­ly do any­thing is any­one’s guess.

For more pre­dic­tions, check out The Econ­o­mist’s full write-up, and keep an eye on The Econ­o­mist pod­cast (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) where I’m sure these issues will get fuller cov­er­age in the com­ing days.

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Below, you’ll find excerpts from TIME Mag­a­zine’s con­ver­sa­tion with Stephen King. You can access the full inter­view here. King turns up the heat after the jump.

STEPHEN KING: So who’s going to be TIME Per­son of the Year?

TIME: I real­ly don’t know, there’s a very small group of peo­ple who make that deci­sion.

STEPHEN KING: I was think­ing, I think it should be Brit­ney Spears and Lind­say Lohan.

TIME: Real­ly?

STEPHEN KING: Yeah. You know, I just filmed a seg­ment for Night­line, about [the movie ver­sion of his novel­la] The Mist, and one of the things I said to them was, you know, “You guys are just cov­er­ing — what do they call it — the scream of the pea­cock, and you’re miss­ing the whole fox hunt.” Like water­board­ing [or] where all the mon­ey went that we poured into Iraq. It just seems to dis­ap­pear. And yet you get this cov­er­age of who’s gonna get cus­tody of Brit­ney’s kids? Whether or not Lind­say drank at her twen­ty-first birth­day par­ty, and all this oth­er shit. You know, this morn­ing, the two big sto­ries on CNN are Kanye West­’s moth­er, who died, appar­ent­ly, after hav­ing some plas­tic surgery. The oth­er big thing that’s going on is whether or not this cop [Drew Peter­son] killed his… wife. And mean­while, you’ve got Pak­istan in the midst of a real cri­sis, where these peo­ple have nuclear weapons that we helped them devel­op. You’ve got a guy in charge, who’s basi­cal­ly declared him­self the mil­i­tary strong­man and is being sup­port­ed by the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, whose rai­son d’e­tre for going into Iraq was to spread democ­ra­cy in the world.
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