Women of the year.

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: Unplugged

In my recent travels I saw an article in a local paper about a women's auxiliary luncheon to honor its volunteers. The headline was supposed to read "Women of the Year," but because of a typo, it read instead, "Omen of the Year."

The headline reminded me that it's been thirteen years since the much-ballyhooed Year of the Woman. Since it was just one woman and they would never tell us who it was, I never got into that hoopla.

But get on your party hats, 2005 has been the "Year of More Than Just One Woman!" And since I'm all about transparency, none of those Bob "I'm No Deep Throat" Woodward withholding tactics for me. Here are the women of the year:

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the president-elect of Liberia and the first woman elected in Africa, defeated George Weah, a soccer hero who had mobilized jobless young men and former militia in the fourteen-year civil war that destroyed the country's infrastructure and killed 200,000 people.

Angela Merkel, an East German politician, was made over into Germany's new chancellor, replacing Gerhard Schroeder. Her challenge is to revive Germany's economy, make up with the U.S. and the E.U., and ride herd on a coalition government of Christian and Social Democrats.

The nurses of California would not be terminatored in Conan the Republican's ill-advised, expensive special election. He rolled back one of their legislative victories, which had limited the ratio of patients to nurses in hospitals. And then he insulted them by saying he "kicked their butt." So the California Nurses Association hounded him in the press and at personal appearances and kicked his steroidal concaves.

Maureen Dowd revealed in her New York Times column the deep shallowness of her colleague Judith Miller when she described a contretemps of seating assignments at a press conference. But her book tour interviews for Are Men Necessary? are maddening in her coy, girlygirl affect. Just write.

Harriet Miers, or "Poor Harry" as she is known in my house, was more excruciatingly ill-suited for her appointment than Dan Quayle...