Opening Salvo…Year in Review

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

Over the next few days, we are sure to be bombarded with lists and summaries that try to capture our experience of the year that is known as 2008. To get ahead of the game a bit, I thought I’d post a couple I’ve seen for fun and consideration.

First of all, there is the JibJab version.

MSNBC has an interesting Year in Pictures.

And from a total political geek perspective, Al Giodano nominates Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight as The Genius of the Year.

Receiving almost a million visits a day toward the electoral climax, 538 (named for the number of votes in the Electoral College) armed and inspired a critical mass of the citizenry to think for itself rather than buying the (often errant or partisan) claims of individual big-media sponsored polling companies. From here on out, every pollster must look over his shoulder and worry more, in advance, about his and her methodologies and accuracy, and be less eager to tell the paying client what it wants to hear from the results. That has an immensely cleansing impact on the political process.

But I love how Giodano ended the piece. He quotes from Silver’s post on Christmas Day.

We’re going to be taking it easy today. There are presents to unwrap — hopefully, more exciting ones than in 2006, when my entire family dutifully bought one another copies of the Iraq Study Group Report

And Giordano adds this.

That passage resonated with my long standing policy of never speaking to children, even infants, in “baby talk” (a phenomenon that strangely bleeds into human relations even after the kids have become legal adults). The infantilization of the citizenry begins very early on…And in effect, that’s also part of what Silver accomplished this year: treating the citizenry as grown-ups…