Beating out the stiff competition Al Gore, Hu Jintao, Barry Bonds and others, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been chosen as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. I’ll have more commentary on this later when I finish some meetings, but in general I think that it is a good thing for Americans to start focusing attention on Russia (however I am surprised that no mention was made of Mikhail Khodorkovsky or other similar figures). Some excerpts from the magazine are after the cut.