The Week - All signs point to big Republican gains in November, enabling the GOP to implement its agenda. But what agenda is that?

The Atlantic Wire - A Florida church led by pastor Terry Jones has spent weeks publicizing its plan to burn Korans on September 11. But now that hundreds of people in Afghanistan and Indonesia are protesting the planned event and General David Petraeus has condemned it, saying it will endanger his troops, the U.S. is starting to pay more attention to this fringe but increasingly high-profile event. What does it mean for the U.S. struggle against terror? What are its moral and legal implications? Should the U.S. government try to intervene?

The Atlantic Wire - When Mark Hurd was fired as CEO of Hewlett-Packard following a mysterious sexual harassment complaint, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison slammed HP's board of directors saying they "just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs." Now Ellison is putting his money where his mouth is, hiring Hurd as Oracle's co-president. "Mark did a brilliant job at HP and I expect he'll do even better at Oracle," Ellison said in a statement announcing the hire. Intriguingly, Oracle is looking to compete in the same space as HP. Will Hurd exact revenge on his former bosses?

The Week - A run on Kabul Bank — the nation's largest — is triggering fears of an Afghan financial meltdown. Should the U.S. step in?

The Atlantic Wire - The options could hardly be starker for Labor Day movie-goers. On one hand, there's the blood-stained Machete, which seems to revel in the number of body-parts it dismembers for the pleasure of audiences. And, of course, there's also that European-tinged, art-house hitman movie with the relatively unassuming poster of George Clooney furrowing his brow. What's that one about, exactly? It appears that nearly half of our nation's finest critics lost their patience with the slow-burning film before trying to figure that out.

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The Week - During his Labor Day address, President Obama announced a $50 billion proposal to rebuild American roads and rails

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RealClearPolitics.com - On Friday, at a town hall in small town Oklahoma, conservative Sen. Tom Coburn said Newt Gingrich is "the last person I'd vote for, for president." Gingrich is "a super-smart man but he doesn't know anything about commitment to marriage." Gingrich lacks, in Coburn's view, "the character traits necessary to be a great president."

The Christian Science Monitor - Job-creation proposals are flying out of the White House like popcorn these days. Democrats in Congress need all the help they can get to retain power after the Nov. 2 elections. And President Obama is trying desperately to take the chill out of a frosty economy.

The Nation - The Nation -- "Transformational politics is the work we do today to ensure that the deal we can get on gun control or immigration reform in a year—or five years, or twenty years—will be better than the deal we can get today. Transformational politics requires us to challenge the way people think about issues, opening their minds to better possibilities."

The Christian Science Monitor - In mid-August in the northern Afghanistan province of Kunduz, the Taliban carried out a horrific sentence against two young Afghan lovers who had eloped against their families wishes. The punishment was death by stoning. Deemed by Islamic extremists to be justified under sharia law, the process involves partially burying the accused, after which a male crowd hurls stones at the victims exposed heads until they die.

The Christian Science Monitor - A year ago, the practice of mass rape by militias in eastern Congo made headlines in the United States as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited the region to speak out against rape as a weapon of war.

Huffington Post - Read Harry Shearer's other articles on HuffingtonPost.com

Huffington Post - Read Larry Flynt's other articles on HuffingtonPost.com

The Atlantic Wire - Earlier this week, we asked our readers to give us a peek into their daily media consumption habits. Here are some of the standout replies we received so far:Longtime Atlantic Wire reader and commenter Sper Chudy:First thing I do is scan my RSS feeds from The Atlantic Wire, memeorandum, the Slatest, and NPR. This gives me a good sense of what the talking-heads think is important. To find out what I really should be concerned about, I'll read The Independent, ProPublica, Reason, and Al-Jazeera English.Then for some lighter reading, I check out Gawker, the Awl, McSweeney's, the Slog at The Stranger, and Wonkette. For cogent analysis, I head for Democracy in America at The Economist, The New York Review of Books blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, and the Planet Money blog on NPR. Finally, I'll head to Slate, Salon, Foreign Affairs, National Affairs, the Wilson Quarterly, and longform.org (which is a great site that collects the best long form articles from across the web) to pick out some articles to read throughout the day and over the weekend. One last thing, if you use Firefox as your browser, I recommend getting the Read It Later add-on, which allows you to save articles onto a convenient queue.

The Atlantic Wire - So this is what the exploding logo was all about. Today, one of the world's fastest search engines just got a little faster. Google unveiled its newest update to Web search, Google Instant. Now, when users begin typing a keyword search, the results instantly appear below. Marissa Mayer, the company's VP of search products, says the new update is all about saving users' time. "Our testing has shown that Google Instant saves the average searcher two to five seconds per search," Mayer says. "That may not seem like a lot at first, but it adds up. With Google Instant, we estimate that well save our users 11 hours with each passing second!" Reactions from around the Web:

The Atlantic Wire - Should the government let the bottom fall out of the housing market? It sounds catastrophic, but on Sunday, The New York Times reported that the argument in favor of this move is gaining popularity. The Washington Indpendent's Annie Lowrey summed the idea up succinctly as this:

The Atlantic Wire - Slate's Timothy Noah is doing a multi-week feature on income inequality. The blogosphere, particularly the left-leaning portion, is taking note. Noah starts out at a point many liberals have been hammering for years: income inequality today is greater than in parts of the famously stratified Gilded Age. Toward the end of that era, "the richest 1 percent accounted for 18 percent of the nation's income. Today, the richest 1 percent account for 24 percent of the nation's income." Noah's multi-part series is dedicated to exploring why this is the case: "few ... experts have much idea how to reverse the trend," he explains, "because almost no one can agree about what's causing it." Noah reviews the work of experts to explain why "the Great Divergence [of income from the 1970s through the present day] can't be blamed on either race or gender" any more than it can be blamed on immigration; even economists working specifically on the subject admit immigration can only account for a tiny portion of the problem.

The Atlantic Wire - Chicago mayor Richard Daley's announcement that he would not seek reelection immediately sparked speculation: could Rahm Emanuel seek the spot? Rumors that the White House chief of staff might be Chicago-bound have only intensified, producing a belated outpouring of positive Emanuel assessments. The canny political operator was seeming very unpopular, particularly among liberals, earlier in the year. Will the White House suffer if Emanuel leaves?