Time magazine lists its "Persons of the Year": Bono, Bill Gates, and his wife, Melinda.

No, really!

Regarding the last choice, in an email to Michelle Malkin, Steve Den Beste nails it:

I think the unspoken subtext of this is that before he got married, Bill Gates was a carnivorous capitalist. Melinda tamed the beast, and that's why she's lauded.

As for all of them, Betsy Newmark suggests they read Paul Theroux's column in the New York Times on why Africa has become an endless sinkhole of charitable funds. Theroux writes:

It seems to have been Africa's fate to become a theater of empty talk and public gestures. But the impression that Africa is fatally troubled and can be saved only by outside help - not to mention celebrities and charity concerts - is a destructive and misleading conceit. Those of us who committed ourselves to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago are dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has been reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are more appalled by most of the proposed solutions.

I am not speaking of humanitarian aid, disaster relief, AIDS education or affordable drugs. Nor am I speaking of small-scale, closely watched efforts like the Malawi Children's Village. I am speaking of the "more money" platform: the notion that what Africa needs is more prestige projects, volunteer labor and debt relief. We should know better by now. I would not send private money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was accounted for - and this never happens. Dumping more money in the same old way is not only wasteful, but stupid and harmful; it is also ignoring some obvious points.

If Malawi is worse educated, more plagued by illness and bad services, poorer than it was when I lived and worked there in the early 60's, it is not for lack of outside help or donor money. Malawi has been the beneficiary of many thousands of foreign teachers, doctors and nurses, and large amounts of financial aid, and yet it has declined from a country with promise to a failed state.

In the early and mid-1960's, we believed that Malawi would soon be self-sufficient in schoolteachers. And it would have been, except that rather than sending a limited wave of volunteers to train local instructors, for decades we kept on sending Peace Corps teachers. Malawians, who avoided teaching because the pay and status were low, came to depend on the American volunteers to teach in bush schools, while educated Malawians emigrated. When Malawi's university was established, more foreign teachers were welcomed, few of them replaced by Malawians, for political reasons. Medical educators also arrived from elsewhere. Malawi began graduating nurses, but the nurses were lured away to Britain and Australia and the United States, which meant more foreign nurses were needed in Malawi.

When Malawi's minister of education was accused of stealing millions of dollars from the education budget in 2000, and the Zambian president was charged with stealing from the treasury, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what happened? The simplifiers of Africa's problems kept calling for debt relief and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in Botswana, compared with the kleptomania of its neighbors. Donors enable embezzlement by turning a blind eye to bad governance, rigged elections and the deeper reasons these countries are failing.

Betsy also suggests they could learn from Thomas Sowell. But then...who couldn't?

Update: Bizzy Blog notes that, "Time’s 'People Who Mattered' Are Framed with Bias-Tinged Pictures and Captions". Of course, that's nothing new for Time.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds posts a spot-on comment from one of his readers:

Funny, the MSM has become much more pro super-rich folks since the super-rich became movers and shakers in the Democratic party. Wonder why?

As Glenn writes, not really.

Another Update: Ever the contrarian, Orrin Judd sees the upside of Time's picks:

The Left has long dreamed of transnational institutions and rules running the world, yet here are individuals, nevermind states, that matter more.

True--but I still think they're awfully silly choices.

One More: Ed Morrissey sums it up in four words: "Time Jumps The Shark". And here's why:

The true newsmakers this year, as Michelle Malkin notes in photos, were the people who went into the streets and overthrew dictators and autocracies in order to gain freedom for their nations -- in most cases, through non-violence. Ukrainians had their Orange Revolution; the Lebanese forced the Syrians to beat a hasty retreat across the Bekaa Valley after 29 years of military occupation following the murder of a pro-freedom statesman; and Iraqis faces bombs and death threats three times to in voting for a democracy and a new constitution to replace a genocidal tyrant in the heart of the Middle East, the first time that has ever occurred in an Arab nation.

Pick any of those examples, or roll them up into one pro-democracy movement that has tyranny on its heels throughout Southwest Asia and North Africa. Those were the real newsmakers this year. Instead, Time decided to go as obscure as it possibly could and picked three fine people whose impact on 2005 will have us all wondering what the hell they did to deserve the cover of Time by 2007.

Exactly.

OK, One More: Lawhawk asks, rhetorically, "Was There No One Better?", and provides some overlooked suggestions.