YOU! Should recycle, but you probably already do — because lovin' Mother Earth has never been more front-and-center in the national — nay, global — consciousness...and you heard it from Time's annual "Person of the Year" panel first.

Today's panel consisted of MySpace co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe, "NBC Nightly News" anchor and POY-panel stalwart Brian Williams, utterly winning author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, "View" moderator and former cinematic singing nun Whoopi Goldberg and — wild card! — former Virginia Senator George Allen. Yes, that George Allen. Let the games begin!

Time managing editor Rick Stengel kicked things off by assuring the crowd of assorted media types — like "Morning" Joe Scarborough, Time Inc. big boss Jeff Bewkes, NBC News Pres Steve Capus, Liz Smith, NYT newser Brian Stelter, Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici, Gawker's Maggie Shnayerson, our own Arianna Huffington, and Time's Lev Grossman, who wrote last year's "YOU" cover story, and Ana Marie Cox, in jeans, just 'cause she can — that this year's choice "will not be a pronoun."

Ah, but will it be a person? Here's how the panel voted: After praising his boss Rupert Murdoch to the skies for "reinventing" social networking and offline media, DeWolfe voted for Al Gore — always a safe choice to vote with the Norwegians! — because he's "the guy who's had the biggest effect on the world in the past few years." Williams said he'd gone "round and round" on the topic, except no one heard him because his mic didn't work, so he was given a handheld (BriWi hi-fi!)("I'll be at Chuckles on Route 3," he deadpanned). Williams' final choice: a woman who had been "abused" at the hands of us all, and yet a woman who sustains us: Mother Earth. "It is the compelling issue of our time," intoned Williams, who said putting Mama Earth's face on it would "depoliticize" the issue and that "that choice would lift this fine masthead" up above partisan squabbling. Very moving — Whoopi said so herself — but also familiar: Williams seemed to be borrowing from himself two years ago, when he nominated Mother Nature, like so: "My nomination is a woman, a mom, who has been assaulted on a near-constant basis going back many years and yet she routinely finds ways to prove how strong and resilient she is. Mother Nature." (It's okay, BriWi, we forgive you. Hell, you were on The Leap!).

Whoopi Goldberg picked up the ball next, choosing as her nominee the least-person-like pick ever: "Green," citing its ubiquity as a concept and, now, a lifestyle choice. "The word 'Green' is now on the lips of little bitty babies just coming from their mother's wombs," said Whoopi, noting that her 9 year old grandson was "into absolute basketball — and recycling." Three for three! Next up was
George Allen who segued from "green is also saving money" to the importance of having affordable, reliable, energy....to his nominee: General David Petraeus. Oooh, he went there! Said Allen: "Every year could be Mother Earth" (yes, tell that to the polar bears) but for Allen, it was all about Petraeus and the troops. Which I'm not sure he realized, but was basically him saying that the Iraq war was all about oil.

Finally was Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who came to her decision via her core concern of women's issues, saying that there could be no preserving and protecting Mother Earth without preserving and protecting women: "As long as women across the world have no access to eduction, as long as they're not financially independent, and as long as you see large parts of the world who do not own their own sexuality, the wolrd will not be greener, will not be more peaceful and will not have any of the things that we aspire to." To that end, her pick was...Nicholas Sarkozy. Ali's choice was based specifically on Sarkozy's support of women: "Just after he was elected, the first thing he said was, 'Every oppressed woman is a French woman,'" she said. "I think we should hold him to that." Then Rick Stengel made a joke about Sarkozy's wife.

Okay! At this point, it seemed pretty clear that some incarnation of the environment would have to grace Time's cover. Now was the time for the panelists to kick the tires on each other's suggestions a bit. Here's a sampling of our favorite moments from this part:

• Chris de Wolfe had a problem with David Petraeus: He wasn't reaaaally sure who he was. "I'm not super-familiar with what he's done," said deWolfe (which maybe says something about the level of
  discourse during the planned MySpace primary for January 2008). DeWolfe blamed that on the media, whose left-right partisan spinning left him confused about just what Petraeus was all about. Here's where BriWi's head almost exploded: "Is it like there's a spigot being held back and the Petraues information is in a vault?" he asked indignantly. "It's confusing to the average person," insisted DeWolfe who said that maybe "a very mainstream journalist" like Williams didn't obfuscate but everything else was, well, confusing. Williams then launched into a primer on Petraeus' life (Princeton PhD, body reconstructed after grievous injury, 4 stars and, yes, "op-ed words that came off his keyboard") and also somewhere in there reiterated last year's lament that the focus on "You" was distracting from More Important Things. (In other news, the YouTube video of BriWi as Bond has been viewed 61,221 times.)

• Whoopi Goldberg said that, you know what, she tended to agree that "people tend to feel left out of the discussion" but felt that a focus on Petraeus was misplaced as long as 1 in 4 veterans were coming back from overseas and becoming homeless, calling for an examination of "how we as a nation treat our heroes." Said Whoopi: "It's an embarrassment as a country." Then Williams asked who in the room had a relative in uniform. Maybe one person raised their hand.

• Stengel asked Ali about her second choice, and Ali dutifully named her: "I would like an American and a woman" — Oprah! Then she got back to her Sarkozy pitch. People, she really, really, really likes Sarkozy. Of Al Gore she said, "He has scared everyone I know into turning off the taps when they are brushing their teeth, and away from buying property in New York." The floods, they're a-comin'.

• Then George Allen had a moment. Not that kind of moment, a misty moment: In what had to be the non sequitur of the day, Allen suddenly turned to Whoopi and thanked her for her movie, "Ghost." "That movie really really touched me," said Allen, as we tried not to imagine him covered in wet clay.

• An Olbermann producer had a question: How would the panel respond to right-wingers who dismiss global warming as left-wing talking points? DeWolfe said that "even if there's a small chance" of the predicted effects of global warming (you know, like the melting of the Northwest Passage n' stuff), we still had to act, and pointed out that NewsCorp is going carbon neutral by 2009. He is a BIG fan of his boss. The ever-careful Williams responded that, whatever politics one might have, there was no denying that green-awareness had trickled down to "amoeba level." George Allen clearly got a kick out of that one, and delivered his other greatest line of the day: "If you did Nightly News the way you're doing this panel, you'd have everyone watching!" Out of the mouth of babes...

• Then a plucky 11-year old took the mike and identified herself as Hannah Spicijaric, "a reporter for 'Time for Kids.'" She asked if J.K. Rowling might be considered for POY because she sure did get the kids reading! Yeah, said Stengel, but what's she doing now? (Acutally, she's just finished another book.) According to Time spokesperson Betsy Burton, Hannah was a hit: "Everyone is asking about her!" In other news, she said she'd only managed to read two of the books — which clearly makes her the Dakota Fanning of kid journalists.

  

• On the other side of the spectrum, Liz Smith then got up and identified herself as "The 2,000-year-old gossip columnist" (though Liz we were sitting about a foot from you and we'll say that you looked rather smart) and wondered if this was just a popularity contest; Stengel said, nay, Henry Luce had decreed that the POY was he (or she or it or YOU) who had had the biggest impact for good or for not so good. Ali mentioned Ahmadinejad here as someone who "has influenced the news in a very negative way...He's developing a bomb,he's denied the Holocaust." (But Sarkozy, on the other hand...)

• Williams said that other suggestions he'd received included "the triumverate" (loose cannons Musharraf, Ahmadinejad and Putin) and that a high-ranking Democrat who he did not name had exhorted him NOT to pick Al Gore because he was "still angry at Gore for allowing himself to be talked out of running on the environment in 2004." Interesting.

• Wasn't Joe Scarborough a Republican? He got to bat cleanup, asking a blistering question about George Bush: With his approval was at 30%, last November's Democratic sweep and just 18% of America in favor of the surge, he ignored it all and did it anyway. "I have never seen a president with a lower approval rating get more of what he wants." Actually, it wasn't really a question. Williams — still careful! — noted that Bush had said, hey, come find me in Crawford on the Ranch after a few years' perspective, then you'll see things differently. Well, that's a comfort! Whoopi, meanwhile, was irritated: "The idea that this guy lied and bullshitted his way through is not representative" of what Americans signed off on, she said. "If we're going to talk politics let me go." That seemed as good a note to leave on as any.

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