Will Hillary switch places in 2012 with Joe Biden and become Obama's running mate? Robert Reich thinks so.

This was a poignant moment in 2008. Just before the Februrary Wisconsin primary, Hillary Clinton was making an election eve appearance. The nomination was already getting away from her and T and I were starting to switch to Barack Obama in our minds, though we would vote for her the next day out of lingering loyalty, knowing it wouldn't make much of a difference. On a cold, nasty night we turned out with thousands of other people at the Monona Terrace to hear her speak. She was electrifying.

Hillary has now been the most admired American woman for a total of 16 years, more than Eleanor Roosevelt, who led the list for 13. Will she add her unique excitement to the Democratic ticket in 2012 as a vice presidential candidate? Robert Reich thinks she will, writing on his website My Political Prediction for 2012: It’s Obama-Clinton.

My political prediction for 2012 (based on absolutely no inside information): Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden swap places. Biden becomes Secretary of State — a position he’s apparently coveted for years. And Hillary Clinton, Vice President.

So the Democratic ticket for 2012 is Obama-Clinton.

Why do I say this? Because Obama needs to stir the passions and enthusiasms of a Democratic base that’s been disillusioned with his cave-ins to regressive Republicans. Hillary Clinton on the ticket can do that.

I think it's potentially a great idea, although it doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense today, but I could see it happening before or at the convention.

Today Obama looks pretty secure and the Republican field looks like a collection of fools. But if there's anything recent events have shown, today's reality is not likely to be tomorrow's. There's still a good chance that economy will tank dramatically, the Iran situation could blow up, oil prices could spike, China's economic woes could have major impact on the world economy -- in short, there could be a lot of bad stuff out there completely out of President Obama's control that could affect his electability. At the same time, whatever Biden brought to the ticket in the past wouldn't help much in this scenario.

In a choice between what might then be an unpopular incumbent through little fault of his own and a lousy Republican alternative, the opportunity to elect the first woman VP might tip the balance. If so, this would show up in polling at the time, and that might encourage Obama to take this step. It's not as if changing the VP is unheard of for Democrats. FDR did it twice.

Hillary may well want to retire from politics after the 2012 election, as she's said. That doesn't mean she wouldn't accept if asked for the good of the ticket. And, yes, it would give her a good shot at 2016. And 12 years of Democratic incumbency would give us a chance to fix SCOTUS and a lot of other things.

On the other hand, if the economy and world situation improve, rather than getting worse, there's little need for this to happen and it probably won't.

Kurled up with Stephen King and my Kindle and my Kat

The Kindle and the book I was reading were Christmas presents, but I expect that many in the future will be from the Madison Public Library—not every book I read is worth $10-15 for permanent ownership of what is, after all, an electronic file.

I spent several days glued to my chair reading 11/22/63, Stephen King's spellbinding page-turner about traveling in time and trying to prevent the Kennedy assassination (we know how the main plot point is eventually going to turn out, but there's no telling how King is going to get there). Templeton was my companion during much of this time. Stephen King is no Marcel Proust, but this book is a poignant and sometimes lyrical meditation on time, memory and loss. It's not a typical Stephen King book but it's his best book of the last decade, and one of his best ever.

The Kindle, btw, is a wonderful device for reading really big books (11/22/63 weighs in at 850 pages). First of all, the Kindle is much lighter. With its database and search capabilities and the ability to highlight and bookmark things, it's easier to find passages you want to go back to than flipping through a lot of pages. And if you read for hours straight and your eyes get tired, you can just make the type a little bigger and keep on going.

The Madison Public Library has a growing number of Kindle titles. Many have waiting lists, but reserve a few and soon you'll have a steady stream of library books waiting for you to download to your Kindle. You can bookmark, highlight passages and take notes the same as with your own books. They're saved in the cloud on Amazon's server, so the next time you check out the book—or happen to buy it—they'll be there.

High ISO holiday goodies

I grew up in the heyday of film, when fast emulsions were just starting to come in. I'd shoot Tri-X and push it from its normal ISO 400 to 800 and, very occasionally, all the way to 1600. The results may have been sort of grainy, but they were thrilling -- WOW! SHOOTING IN LOW LIGHT WITH NO FLASH! It just doesn't get any better than that, I thought. Little did I know.

Of course, now even some of the better compacts can shoot clean images at ISO1600 -- and that's in color. In the old days, pushing film was mostly the province of black and white photographers. Above ISO 400 or so, images got terribly grainy -- nice for special effects, not if not.

Today, with DSLRs, especially the full-frame versions, the sky is the limit -- go ahead, shoot available light in that coal mine. My D90 is no longer the state of the art when it comes to high ISO photography, but it still has not lost the capacity to amaze me: This was shot in VERY low light at ISO 3200 with High ISO Noise Reduction turned on and cranked up high. Back in the old days, someone who claimed to have shot this at ISO 3200 would clearly have been lying. Today, it's a digital file that includes the ISO.

Highly sophisticated phishing attack? No, just the New York Times screwing up again.

We started saving trees some time ago by canceling our daily New York Times subscription. But we've kept the Sunday NYT, partly because it's a Sunday morning ritual of long standing, and partly because it allows us full access to the NYT on all our devices. It seems a good compromise between going exclusively print or exclusively online. We have no intention of canceling it.

That's why this email today really freaked us out. We knew we hadn't canceled. Was it a sophisticated phishing attack? Had somebody hacked into the NYT's subscriber list emails? The last thing I was going to do was call that phone number. I did go to the home delivery tab at NYT.com to check my subscription. I couldn't get through -- the connection timed out. The next time I tried it said the page was down for maintenance. Yeah, right. That's when I figured it was a Times screwup.

And how, as it turned out later in the day. This Poynter.org headline says it all: New York Times sends subscriber email to 8.6 million readers instead of 300. Apparently somebody pushed the wrong button, sort of like accidentally hitting "reply all" on your email when that's the last thing you want to do.

Everybody makes mistakes, but you'd think the Times could design their system so that it takes a little more than an accidental keystroke (like a high-level admin code) to send an email to all of its readers. Or at least wait until April Fool's Day to pull a prank like this.