With the last hours of 2012 slipping away, it's time to wrap up the Book Log (expect another 4 or 5 posts for that before the day is out) and, for the first time ever, name a Blogalicious Person of the Year. And for 2012, that person is Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com.

This honor isn't as much for his election forecasts - which were accurate and well-reasoned, to be sure - but for how his work underscored what should be obvious: political punditry is a nearly useless practice. You didn't have to look far to find examples, from the online pipe dreams of Dick Morris and the ironically named Unskewed Polls to Karl Rove's adventures in math on election night. It was a sight to behold, as a entire class of otherwise educated people demonstrated that they had no working understanding of math.

(Note that I don't mean to exclude left-leaning pundits here. They bloviate just as much as their conservative counterparts, but had the numbers on their side this time around and thus weren't as obviously trapped in their ideological bubble.)

My hope is that Nate's ability to show how a rational approach to poll data can inform the average person will get everyone to take two steps away from their partisan watering hole of choice and actually try to understand how the candidates, their positions and the polls all interact. That looks unlikely, but it's my hope for 2013.