All of a sudden, Barack Obama is showing his populist side. On the heels of a feisty Labor Day speech in Milwaukee, the president is set on Wednesday to affirm his opposition to extending the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, according to a New York Times report Tuesday night. Obama, who is to deliver a major speech on the economy in Cleveland, will apparently call for the cuts to be extended for all households making less than $250,000 per year. Rates for the top two percent of income-earners would revert to their pre-Bush levels, which were set under Bill Clinton in 1993.

Are Democrats toast in November?

Tuesday was the official first day of the political season, with Labor Day finally behind us, and I woke up to this screaming headline in Politico's Playbook: "New wave of polls points to Nov. blowout - Stu Rothenberg moves 20 House races toward GOP." Cable TV was dominated by similar apocalyptic reports from the future, mainly based on two new polls with bad news for Democrats.

9/11 widow: The media duped us

The first time I heard about the Park51 Islamic community center was on May 6, 2010, when I received the following e-mail from a New York TV reporter:

Making wontons

My father grew up in a restaurant. His parents owned the Golden Dragon, a sprawling Chinese eatery in Portland, Ore., that offered egg rolls and grilled-cheese sandwiches on its official menu and bitter melon with black-bean sauce and birds' nest soup on its unofficial one. He tells stories of after-school hours spent peeling water chestnuts and washing dishes with his brothers and sisters while the flare of hot woks and the rhythm of cleavers filled the busy kitchen. On New Year's Eve, the kids stayed up all night, serving sweet-and-sour pork and cocktails to mobs of hungry revelers.

My dad's an alcoholic and he won't stop drinking

Dear Cary,

Wontons -- soup or fried

Mom always made ginormous batches of wontons so she could keep some in the freezer for later. To freeze uncooked wontons, lay them on a baking sheet so they don't touch and put the sheet in the freezer until the wontons are frozen solid. Once frozen, the wontons can be transferred to a freezer bag for storage. On a cold weeknight when you don't feel like cooking, take some out of the bag, allow them to thaw, and throw them into a pot of simmering broth for a comforting dinner.

"Ape House": The secret lives of bonobos

Quick. What do you know about bonobos?

Kanye West finally apologizes to Taylor Swift, writes her a song

Kanye West apologized to Taylor Swift over the weekend on Twitter. The apology was, of course, for his drunken ambushing of Swift's acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, sullying the spotlight of the industry's preeminent sweetheart. And though the act of remorse is about a year too late, West offset what he lacks in timing with persistence and a heartfelt gesture -- or, as heartfelt a gesture as possible via a social media website.

The smart Dutch take on teen sex

The Dutch could teach American parents a thing or two about the birds and the bees -- namely, the virtues of respect and acceptance of teenage sexuality. I just stumbled across a fascinating study (via Sociological Images) that compares these divergent cultural attitudes toward doing the nasty (which, by the way, is much less likely to be cast as "nasty" or "dirty" in the Netherlands). The report, "Sex, Love, and Autonomy in the Teenage Sleepover" by sociologist Amy Schalet, spills plenty of ink describing the forbidding and fearful American view of premarital teen sex that is all too familiar to most of us stateside. It's her description of parental attitudes in the Netherlands that really surprises, though.

Wall Street buys some new friends

In an unscripted moment during his Labor Day speech, President Obama declared that "powerful interests who had been dominating the agenda in Washington for a very long time" were not happy with him.

Mark Hurd joins Oracle: Lawyers, start your engines

Some of the most interesting reading about professional sports these days is about the contests that take place off the field, in courtrooms where athletes, francise owners and regulatory bodies prove again and again that the most serious competition in big-time sports is in the legal arena. We may have to start applying that standard to technology, if the post-Labor Day news is any indication.

Tuesday link dump: Chicago tribulations

• Charlie Crist uses magic letters to explain that he will get things done, with independence.
• Conservatives are only problem with the Koran-burning idea "is that its unrestrained hostility toward Muslims gives genteel Islamophobia a bad name."
• Esquire has a "California-based empath" create "Celestial Soul Portraits" of GOP politicians.
• Obama will spend 9/11 at the Pentagon. They're making Joe Biden deal with the insanity at Ground Zero.
• The story of the Lebanese Ground Zero Synagogue.
• A Ron Paul staffer has been pretending to be a liberal over at Kos, to disparage Jack Conway.
• And the DSCC's website broke today.
• Rahm Emanuel may run into some trouble from progressives, once he runs for mayor of Chicago.
• Chuck Todd and The Atlantic ask professional liar Ari Fleischer to explain journalism ethics.

"Delinkification" is bunk: Linking is good for you

Nick Carr, hypertext and delinkification

CNN introduces show with opinionated former politician and lady

Everyone laughed when CNN announced that disgraced former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and Pulitzer-winning mediocre opinion columnist Kathleen Parker would host a show together. But now this thing is actually happening, for real. (Poor Rick Sanchez is peeved. But he is the dumbest man in the world, so he will probably forget he even had an 8 p.m. hour on CNN in a week or two.)

Report: Castro blasts Ahmadinejad as anti-Semitic

Fidel Castro criticized Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for what he called his anti-Semitic attitudes and questioned his own actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 during interviews with an American journalist he summoned to Havana to discuss fears of global nuclear war.

Lady Gaga's raw meat bikini

Lady Gaga adorns the cover of September's Vogue Hommes Japan covered in raw meat -- a bikini of uncooked animal flesh, accented by crimson lipstick (her mouth agape, of course) and fair skin.

Will our generals ever shut up?

The fall issue of Foreign Policy magazine features Fred Kaplan's "The Transformer," an article-cum-interview with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. It received a flurry of attention because Gates indicated he might leave his post "sometime in 2011."  The most significant two lines in the piece, however, were so ordinary that the usual pundits thought them not worth pondering. Part of a Kaplan summary of Gates's views, they read: "He favors substantial increases in the military budget... He opposes any slacking off in America's global military presence."

More daughters, more divorce

The sex of your baby can tell you all sorts of things -- namely, which pastel hue will soon overtake your life -- but rarely do couples consider what it will mean for their marriage. Cue this curious fact: Those with a daughter are 5 percent more likely to divorce than those with a boy, and the likelihood of a split only increases with each additional daughter. What's more, unwed couples are more likely to marry if they discover they have a boy on the way.

Anti-Obama protester violently wrestled to the ground in Alaska

A LaRouchie anti-Obama protester was wrestled to the ground on Aug. 26 at the Alaska State Fair as he screamed about his free speech rights. The scene, captured on camera by a fair-goer, makes for one of the most compelling -- and disturbing -- videos of the year.

Will Rahm Emanuel run for mayor of Chicago?

Chicago Mayor-for-Life Richard M. Daley is apparently voluntarily giving up the job his father bought in 1955. Daley unexpectedly announced today that he will not run for reelection in 2011.