In today’s New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd compares the tea party debt crisis situation to one big monster party with President Obama playing the captain in Jaws and saying he is going to need a bigger boat.  What she doesn’t understand is that Captain Obama has been eaten by the shark as was the case in Jaws or even in Alien where the space ship captain is dispatched early on.

There is a scene in the Ron Howard film Backdraft where one fireman grips the hand of another who is about to fall into the flames below and says, “You go we go.”  This is the America we used to know before the rise of the tea party and the election of a president who is fearful or unable to stand his ground against extremists.

Right now you know the Clintons are huddling weighing the options.  Should Hillary run for president now and risk fragmenting the Democratic Party or wait five years in which case her moment may have gone by?

Because of the volume of direct emails I received in response to my Hillary 2012 blog I feel compelled to revisit the issue in a little more details.  I should immediately point out that it was a good idea posting such a blog calling for Hillary Clinton to run against President Obama because it was sort of like lancing the boil or getting out everything in the light of day or just getting a dialogue going on what is going on with the Obama Administration.

I can't blame liberals and Dems for being angry, and I won't even squawk if a considerable number play some kabuki and vote no, as long as they provide enough votes to pass the damn thing.

I was surprised to read in the newspaper that the June 2011 employment-population ratio, the ratio of people age 16-plus who were working to the total population that age, had fallen to the lowest level since June 1983, when I graduated from college into unemployment. Part of this is cyclical – this is the worst recession since the early 1980s debacle, and has arrived just into time for the children of the benighted 1970s generation – the first to be worse off than those who came before – to repeat that young adulthood experience. But I believe there is also something structural going on.

In the past 15 years (the business cycle adjusted for), I am aware, New York City’s employment-population ratio and its labor force participation ratio – the share of its residents age 16-plus who are either working or looking for work – have been moving up. This is significant because one of New York City’s chief economic liabilities for the past half-century has been its need to carry a large economically inactive population. Through 1960, New York City residents had been more likely than the U.S. average to be working or looking for work, mostly because its women were more likely to work outside the home. But during the mass population migrations of the 1960s and 1970s this changed, giving New York the status of the city that didn’t work. Is it changing back? I downloaded the data in the linked at the end of the post spreadsheet to find out (had trouble attaching).

The free fall of the extremist driven debt ceiling crisis and the resulting egregious agreement that followed it has after three years of weak leadership left President Obama severely wounded with doubts rising as to his ability to now win the 2012 presidential election.