Is the United States� economy headed ineluctably over the edge, as the gloomier financial forecasters project? Or is it still possible for us to reverse course and draw back from the precipice on which our economy is teetering?

A just-released transcript of a meeting between Henry Kissinger and a Turkish Foreign Minister 35 years ago provides a bombshell quote that will go a long way toward solidifying the former Secretary of State's reputation as one of the most Machiavellian insiders of American politics and diplomacy in the 20th century.

The refusal of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UCI) to grant emeritus status to retired education professor Bill Ayers has caused a mini brouhaha of sorts in radical media and academic circles. Ayers, a founder of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the terrorist Weather Underground Organization (WUO), joined the university's education faculty in 1987. He retired on August 31 of this year.

One of the most outspoken advocates on behalf of a Big Government-Big Media merger is avowed socialist Robert McChesney, the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the President and co-founder of Free Press, a national organization pushing an agenda that includes media reform "solutions" that advocate Big Media bailouts and government-funded public-private partnerships. Professor McChesney also hosts the "Media Matters" weekly radio program every Sunday afternoon on WILL-AM, a "public" radio station that receives about 60 percent of its funding from the federal and state governments and liberal-left tax-exempt foundations.

United States District Judge Donald Molloy's August 5 decision to restore full endangered species protection to the Canadian gray wolf in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming virtually guarantees that more people will fall victim to the proliferating and increasingly brazen predators. In addition, elk populations as well as populations of other wild ungulates (moose, deer, goats, sheep, bison) may be driven to near extinction levels in many parts of the Rocky Mountain Northwest due to wolf predation. Ranchers also have experienced a sharp increase in wolf killings of cattle and sheep, enough so that some cattlemen and sheepmen have been driven into bankruptcy.

The creaking, decrepit mastodons of the Big Media are soliciting our sympathy — and our money. We must save them, they say, from extinction. For our own good, of course.

The Aspen Institute hosted its annual Forum On Communications And Society (FOCAS) August 15–18 in Aspen, Colorado, exploring the theme of "News Cities: The Next Generation of Healthy Informed Communities." Sponsored by the Aspen Institute and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the FOCAS gathering is the latest in a series of conferences and publishing events aimed at boosting the idea that the federal government should pump tens of billions of tax dollars into America's newspapers, broadcast news, and activist "citizen media."

Andrey Ternovskiy, one of Russia's wunderkind Internet entrepreneurs, is being courted by venture capitalists the world over. To get access to cash he needn't leave Moscow, but he doesn't want to do business with the billionaire oligarchs tied to the Russian Mafia and Putin's KGB-FSB machine in the Kremlin.

"Maybe I'm breathing the same pixie dust, but there's real momentum for this," says Esther Dyson, in a June 25 online article for Foreign Policy magazine reporting on Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's visit to California's Silicon Valley. Dyson, a globally celebrated technology guru, is a major promoter of Skolkovo, the ambitious project near Moscow that Kremlin leaders intend to make into a high-tech research and production center. (See Obama's Russia Adviser Michael McFaul and the Russian Spies.)

On July 8, Vicky Pelaez disembarked from a charter jet flight in Vienna, Austria — accompanied by U.S. Marshals. Pelaez was the only non-Russian among the ten spies deported from the United States in a spy swap with Russia. A Peruvian journalist, Pelaez has been married to confessed Russian agent Mikhail Vasenkov for some thirty year.