ThinkFast: January 15, 2007

“The handwritten personal papers of Martin Luther King Jr., including his sermons and the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, will be on display in Atlanta today.”

$72.9 million: Amount that has been raised to fund a memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr. on the National Mall. The memorial is expected to cost $100 million.

The White House has denied a Guardian report that Bush is preparing to make an “historic shift” on global warming in his State of the Union address. “[The story] is inaccurate on all fronts,” a White House official said, “and especially regarding the State of the Union.”

The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), which represents 45,000 churches, has joined with leading scientists to fight global warming. “Whether God created the Earth in a millisecond or whether it evolved over billions of years, the issue we agree on is that it needs to be cared for today,” said Rich Cizik of the NAE.

President Bush’s escalation plan is facing “some of its fiercest resistance from the very people it depends on for success: Iraqi government officials.”

Private contractors, civilian government employees, embedded journalists, and other civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan “could be subject for the first time to military courts-martial under a new federal provision.”

Frederick W. Kagan, an American Enterprise Scholar who “has the president’s ear” on Iraq and crafted the escalation plan, is actually not a “military expert,” according to a look at his resume.

And finally: After six years in office, President Bush has now spent one full year at Camp David. “Mark Knoller, CBS White House correspondent and the unofficial archivist for the White House press corps, reports on the CBS Web site that the Bushes took off Friday for their 116th visit to the beautiful presidential retreat and their 365th day there.” As of Jan. 1, Bush has spent 405 full or partial days at the Crawford ranch.