Time's Person of the Year is...

...Vladimir Putin.

Yep, the magazine that freaked out in 2001 and gave the award to feel-good candidate Rudy Giuliani rather than obvious newsmaker Osama bin Laden, and who last year stopped trying and made everyone the winner, has chosen Russia's polonium-wielding dictator as the man who embodies 2007. [*insert looked-into-his-soul joke here*]

Time explains their decision, noting that they looked beyond the obvious choices-

"TIME's Person of the Year is not and never has been an honor. It is not an endorsement. It is not a popularity contest. At its best, it is a clear-eyed recognition of the world as it is and of the most powerful individuals and forces shaping that world—for better or for worse. It is ultimately about leadership—bold, earth-changing leadership. Putin is not a boy scout. He is not a democrat in any way that the West would define it. He is not a paragon of free speech. He stands, above all, for stability—stability before freedom, stability before choice, stability in a country that has hardly seen it for a hundred years. Whether he becomes more like the man for whom his grandfather prepared blinis—who himself was twice TIME's Person of the Year—or like Peter the Great, the historical figure he most admires; whether he proves to be a reformer or an autocrat who takes Russia back to an era of repression—this we will know only over the next decade. At significant cost to the principles and ideas that free nations prize, he has performed an extraordinary feat of leadership in imposing stability on a nation that has rarely known it and brought Russia back to the table of world power. For that reason, Vladimir Putin is TIME's 2007 Person of the Year."

Runners-up: Al Gore, J.K. Rowling, Chinese President Hu Jintao, and Gen. David Petraeus.

I think that any of those (well less so with Rowling, of course) would've been better representations of 2007, but they wanted to think globally here, and I guess I can see that.

The section on their website has some good reads, including a piece on Russia and China, a look back at the "you" choice from last year, and a good feature on other people who mattered (ie. the Burmese monks, Nicolas Sarkozy, Alberto Gonzales, Obama and Hillary, Ron Paul, Blackwater's Erik Prince, Rupert Murdoch, the Jena 6, and... Billiam the YouTube Snowman). That about sums up what an odd year this was. Bring on 2008, I'm tired.