The Hill News

Time Magazine picked "the protester" as the magazine's "2011 Person of the Year" in a decision that honors Middle East protestors who toppled governments as well as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. 

The magazine depicted its person of the year as a protesting silhouette on the front cover of the issue hitting newsstands Wednesday.

The story traces the recent trend of effective protests, naming the street vendor in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, who lit himself on fire in protest of unfair government practices, and going on to discuss the bailout upset in the United States that produced the "shockingly successful populist" Tea Party movement and spending a large chunk of space on the "Occupy Wall St! reet" movement that began in Manhattan's Financial District this past summer. 

"Protests have sort of fallen out of fashion as an effective political tool the last twenty years," according to Time writer Kurt Andersen, who wrote the article, in an interview posted on the magazine's website. "Not only did protests come back in this big, globally contagious way this year, but we are two regimes down and counting."

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