A year ago this week, on January 25, 2011, the ground began to crumble under then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak's feet. One year later, Mubarak and his sons are in prison, and standing trial.
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Near The Kirti Monastary in a Tibetan area of China's Sichuan province, 21-year-old Lobsang Jamyang publicly set himself on fire last Saturday. It was the fourth time this month that a Tibetan protesting Chinese repression had resorted to self-immolation.
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You'll recall that 2011 began with the oafish actor celebrating his own narcotic and sexual crapulence like a victorious gladiator working the crowds. He was egged on by a media with as much decency as the cons on the top tiers of the prison who chant "fresh fish" as the new inmates walk into general pop, their eyes stinging from delousing powder.
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A year ago, this column questioned whether the 112th Congress -- with its new speaker of the House, John Boehner -- could "overcome the inane policies of its predecessors" and "mend Washington's free-spending ways." We all know how that turned out.
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In the time since the end of the Cold War, there have been many years in which advocates of freedom and democracy found endless reasons for gloom and few for hope. This was not one of those years.
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As a former Time magazine “Person of the Year” myself (2006—look it up), I was intrigued by the editors’ choice of my latest successor: As you may have heard by now, POY for 2011 is “The Protestor,” an amalgam of Occupy Wall Street and people being gunned down in the Middle East.
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