Noah Millman has an extraordinarily detailed set of 2008 predictions up at The American Scene, marred only by its single Diablo Cody reference. If you want nuance and granularity, go read those. If you want jaded, fatalistic vagueness, read on.
1. 2008 will be the most boring year since 2000. A lot will happen but none of it particularly surprising.
2. No one will know who is going to be President until election night, but when it becomes obvious who's won, everyone will proclaim their victory to have been inevitable.
3. Ron Paul will not run for President off the Republican Party ticket.
4. The veep picks will not be Presidential candidates and the press will roundly praise, and then unceremoniously drop, them.
5. There will not be a violent revolution in Pakistan, Iran, or Saudi Arabia.
6. Chinese economic performance will notch downward. Russia's will rise. Putin will do fine.
7. Hugo Chavez will continue to fail to strengthen his grip on power.
8. Britney Spears will die. Coming to terms will be such an incoherent prospect that the media will give up after a week of alternatively lavish and mournful contradiction.
9. A Palestinian state will be established, suicide attacks on Israel will remain low, and Syria will recover the Golan Heights. Wonks will swoon but public opinion will shrug. Israel will seem increasingly irrelevant.
10. Three popular young bloggers without paying gigs will get them.
11. The price of gold will rise steadily and evenly.
12. George Bush will not make it through his (heartwrenching) farewell address without making a painfully hilarious verbal error.
13. For the first time, one of the top ten American baby names will be a pharmaceutical product.
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