Remember when I told you something was big news?

You know, back before I started getting all excited about football season and so forth.  If not, here's a reminder.  It's a really short post.  Go ahead and read it.  I'll wait.

Well, today's news is just as bad, maybe worse.  They've revised Q2 GDP growth downward from a pitiful 1.7% to a jaw-droppingly bad 1.3%.  This is after the $6 trillion in new debt that our genius leaders have thrown at the problem handed out to their political allies over the last few years.  These are simply awful results.  There's no other way to put it.  It's even getting hard to accept the argument that things would have been worse if we hadn't taken on all that new debt.

On top of that, we get the news that durable goods orders fell 13.2% in August.  This is really, really, really bad news.  Have you ever seen those old videos of rockets that start to launch and then fall backward onto the launch pad?  For whatever reason, those rockets failed to achieve escape velocity - the speed necessary to escape the earth's gravitational pull.  This economy is looking like the rocket at the top of the flight, struggling to keep moving before it starts to drift backward and explodes.  It's not going backward yet, but the speed is getting dangerously close to zero.

How do you suspect they'll report this one on the television news tonight?