So who do you think it will be? Who would you choose? Here is the list of candidates for you to go vote on in alphabetical order and for your sake, I have left off caustic individual commentary:

Julian Assange
Glenn Beck
David Cameron
The Chilean Miners
Arne Duncan
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Jonathan Franzen
Lady Gaga
Robert Gates
Tony Hayward
Hu Jintao
LeBron James
Steve Jobs
Hamid Karzai
David and Charles Koch
Liu Xiaobo
Barack Obama
Sarah Palin
Nancy Pelosi
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert
The Unemployed American
J. Craig Venter
Elizabeth Warren, Mary Schapiro and Sheila Bair
Mark Zuckerberg

Last year they chose Fed Chair Ben Bernanke with runners up being General Stanley McChrystal, The Chinese Worker, Nancy Pelosi, and the world’s fastest man, Ursain Bolt. Frankly, Time’s choices have been rather dopey over the years. In 2006, they chose YOU, yes you; in 1979, the Ayatullah Khomeini. In ’38 and ’39, they chose Hitler and Stalin. Apparently, Time has a thing for despots, dictators, and murderous thugs. But to their credit, they have also chosen such giants as Churchill, Gandhi, Lindbergh, Truman, Eisenhower, and GI Joe. You can go here for their entire archived list of winners over the years.

My opinion? Beck.
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UPDATED, December 15, 2010: Time has chosen Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as their person of the year for 2010. That’s fine I suppose. Facebook has made an impact on many of us over the last few years — look at how even politics are dealt with on FB. But in the big scheme of things, there were so many others who would have been better.