On Friday, at a speech in Fargo, North Dakota, the president made a strange appeal to Native American voters. “Maybe they don’t know about what’s going on with respect to the world of Washington and politics, but I have to tell you, with African-American folks, I would say what do you have to lose?” he asked.

Trump has often made disrespectful comments about Native Americans. Testifying before congress in 1993, he challenged the casino licence given to some reservations. “If you look, if you look at some of the reservations that you’ve approved, that you, sir, in your great wisdom have approved, I will tell you right now—they don’t look like Indians to me,” Trump said.

“The President has a long record of attacking Native Americans,” Simon Moya-Smith, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, argued in 2017. “He pushed through the Dakota Access Pipeline, which violates the Native American land and threatens indigenous lives and water. And while that pipeline was already leaking like a garden hose with bullet holes, he resurrected the Keystone XL Pipeline, which again is in direct violation of our sovereign treaty rights.” Moya-Smith also mentioned Trump’s frequent use of the name “Pocahontas” as a slur directed against Elizabeth Warren.

Speaking to an audience largely made up of students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, former President Barack Obama spoke approvingly of the aggressively reformist agenda being put forward by Democratic candidates.

“So Democrats aren’t just running on good old ideas like a higher minimum wage, they’re running on good new ideas like Medicare for all, giving workers seats on corporate boards, reversing the most egregious corporate tax cuts to make sure college students graduate,” Obama said. He went on to praise “good new ideas like barring lobbyists from getting paid by foreign governments.”

Obama had supported universal health care before he was president, but this is the first time he’s aligned himself with the new “Medicare for all” push originally championed by Bernie Sanders. Also noteworthy is that two of the “good new ideas” Obama praises (workers sitting on corporate boards and the ban on foreign governments paying lobbyists) are signature issues of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.

On Friday morning, Johnson and his wife Marina Wheeler announced they were divorcing. The couple has been married since 1993 and have four children. This will be Johnson’s second divorce. His first marriage, to Allegra Mostyn-Owen, ended in divorce in 1993. The British tabloid press has long been filled with stories of Johnson’s notoriously louche sexual history, which seems to have involved a staggering number of extramarital affairs and out of wedlock pregnancies.

Having quit as a Foreign Secretary in July, Johnson has become the foremost critic of Prime Minister Theresa May within the Conservative Party and is expected to try and replace her. Johnson’s status as twice-divorced might be seen to hinder his chances. After all, in the modern era, the United Kingdom has only had one divorced Prime Minister (Anthony Eden, whose brief tenure ran from 1955-1957).

But political observers, including bookmakers, still see Johnson as the person most likely to be the next leader of the Conservative Party. “He’s still the favorite,” one bookmaker told Reuters. “Over the years Boris has been very Teflon ... we think he’s got more than a couple of lives left yet.”

With his lurid private life, clownish public persona and frequent recourse to nationalist demagoguery, Johnson has often been compared to Donald Trump. It’s likely that Johnson will prove, as Trump has, that even conservative voters are willing to set aside a politician’s private life.

As Independent columnist Sean O’Grady notes, there are plenty of other reasons to vote against Johnson:

The tragedy of it all is that Johnson is being treated as a character in a reality TV show or soap opera, which denigrates politics. He is much more than that. Still, a potential leader of the country in some diabolical takeover of the Conservative Party by Leave fundamentalists.

What Johnson proposes to do next with his genitalia is nobody’s business than his own. What he proposes to do to the country concerns all of us, whether he is happily married or not.

The president’s personal lawyer this week sketched out a new approach to negotiating Trump’s interview with the special counsel as part of the Russia investigation. It’s unknown, however, whether Mueller will accept Giuliani’s parameters.

In an interview with BuzzFeed on Thursday, Giuliani said that the president’s legal team could negotiate on two separate tracks for interviews between Mueller and Trump. One track is “collusion,” referring to questions about whether the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government. The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Mueller told Trump’s lawyers that he would accept written answers from the president to questions about Russian electoral interference and whether his campaign colluded with Moscow to facilitate it. Giuliani acknowledged to BuzzFeed that Mueller has “a better argument for that [interview], legally and factually.”

On the second track of “obstruction,” which relates to Trump’s post-inauguration efforts to stymie the Russia investigation, Giuliani indicated he would put up a much harder legal fight. “That’s a no-go,” he told the Associated Press on Thursday. “That is not going to happen. There will be no questions at all on obstruction.” Giuliani later clarified to BuzzFeed that he was referring only to Mueller’s first set of questions on the matter, not the subject entirely. Nonetheless, he also said he believes he has a stronger legal position to challenge questions about Trump’s presidential acts.

Trump’s legal team has spent most of the year resisting Mueller’s efforts to secure an interview with the president. While Trump often says publicly that he would be willing to sit down with the special counsel, many members of his inner circle view it as a potentially calamitous legal risk because of the president’s penchant to lie about matters large and small. Giuliani’s new approach could mitigate some of that peril—but not eliminate it entirely.

The August jobs numbers released on Friday exceeded expectations and are, in one key area, the best of the economic recovery. The unemployment rate remained a smidge below 4 percent, with the economy adding 200,000 jobs. But the highlight of the report is year-over-year earnings wage growth, which was at 3.9 percent—the highest it has been since 2009.

Wage growth has been a concern in the wake of recession. Even as the economy has improved, wages have stayed flat—as they largely have since the late-1970s. Despite the windfall that many corporations received in the wake of the passage of the $1.5 trillion Tax Cuts and Jobs Act last-December, they have largely refrained from providing their workers with raises. Even in other relatively strong jobs reports, like last month’s, wage growth has been a glaring sore spot. August’s spurt in wage growth is a welcome and long overdue development for workers, millions of whom are struggling despite the fact that this economy is technically performing well.

But there are warning sings. Labor participation is down and has not yet returned to pre-recession levels. As The New York Times’s Neil Irwin noted, there are signs that the economy is straining at capacity and could begin to slow down, particularly if the Federal Reserve continues to hike interest rates which could depress both growth and wages. There are increasing complaints of a labor shortage and the spike in wage growth may be, as Irwin argues, a sign that employers have simply run out of other options.

At a rally in Billings, Montana, the president reflected on the history of one of the most famous speeches in American history.

“You know when Abraham Lincoln made the Gettysburg Address speech, the great speech” Trump asked. “Do you know he was ridiculed? He was ridiculed. ... And he was excoriated by the fake news. They had fake news. He was excoriated. They said it was a terrible, terrible speech.” But the president added, the greatness of the speech was eventually recognized: “Fifty years after his death they said it may have been the greatest speech ever made in America. Pretty good. Pretty good. I have a feeling that’s going to happen with us.”

Not surprisingly, Trump’s recounting of history is sketchy. Aside from a few Democratic newspapers that opposed Lincoln for political reasons, the Gettysburg received a warm welcome.

In addition to comparing his own oratory with Lincoln’s, the president struggled to pronounce the word “anonymous.”

Other highlights of the speech, as reported by Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale, include:

* saying the opposition to Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination is “sick.”

* taking delight in the fact North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un said “terrific things about me.”

* warning that if he’s impeached the United States will become “a third world country.”

* trying to guilt trip his supporters by saying that “If [impeachment] does happen it’s your fault, because you didn’t go out to vote.”

* fretting over a “Deep State” conspiracy to subvert his administration. “At some point, this whole thing is going to be exposed,” Trump promised. “And it’s really bad and it’s really dangerous.”

* claiming that the books coming out critical of his administration are a response to White House physician Ronny Jackson giving him a good report. “But Ronny Jackson is a doctor, he is actually the doctor that gave me my physical,” Trump claimed. “And he said that I am in great shape. And the Democrats, liberals, deep state, they were very upset to hear that. So they got tougher and tougher and they write more books now.”

Twitter is permanently shuttering the accounts of Alex Jones and his conspiracy minded site InfoWars. The timing of the move is curious. Twitter has been much slower to go after Jones than other social media. The trigger for the ban seems to have been Jones’s mockery of CNN reporter Oliver Darcy.

As BuzzFeed reports, “The incident that inspired Twitter to action appears to have been a series of tweets containing a 9-minute Periscope video of Jones confronting CNN reporter Oliver Darcy. In the video, Jones and his camera men confront Darcy while Jones lambastes him as ‘the equivalent of like the Hitler Youth’ and accuses him of ‘smiling like a possum that crawled out of the rear end of a dead cow.’”

While Jones’s treatment of Darcy is undeniably obnoxious, it is also fairly mild by Jones’s standards. After all, InfoWars is infamous for spreading the falsehood that the Sandy Hook massacre was a false flag operation, a lie that caused Jones’s fans to harass families of the mass shooting.

As CNN noted in early August:

Content that appears to violate Twitter’s rules appears over and over again in the hundreds of hours of video available on the accounts that Jones and InfoWars maintain on Twitter and Periscope, a livestreaming video service that Twitter owns. Jones has repeatedly degraded individuals of the Muslim faith. He has attacked people on the basis of gender identity. And he has engaged in the harassment of individuals.

In banning Jones and InfoWars after they insulted of Oliver Darcy, Twitter is suggesting a curious double standard. You can apparently harass ordinary people all you want, but shouldn’t go after high-profile reporters.

From television origins (Gunsmoke), Reynolds became one of the most recognizable faces of 1970s American film. After negligible early roles in movies like Shark! (1969), he broke out (sans mustache) as archery ace Lewis Medlock in Deliverance (1972). That same year he also played “Sperm Switchboard Operator” in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask).

Those two roles express something at the heart of the Reynolds mystique: He was macho, lusty, and funny.

Aside from Deliverance, Reynolds’s most iconic roles were in movies that eventually took on cult status. In Smokey and the Bandit (1971), The Longest Yard (1974), and 1981’s Sharky’s Machine (which he also directed), he played charming funsters with hearts of gold and biceps of steel. These roles turned Burt Reynolds into a symbol for a butch American sexuality.

The 1990s saw a Reynolds reprise, with turns in Striptease (1996) and Boogie Nights (1997). From the 2000s onward he seemed to enjoy playing up to the typecasting that arguably limited his career, cropping up in a heroic total of 37 movies this century, mostly in comic works like the Dukes of Hazzard remake. In 2019 he will appear posthumously in the Manson family dramatization, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

His long career included a 1973 album, featuring songs like “The First One That I Lay With” and “She’s Taken A Gentle Lover.” He winkingly embodied an American masculinity that women laughed over and men sought to emulate. With Reynolds’s death, America has lost its least subtle and most charismatic old-school Adonis. With a wink and a grin, he has disappeared into the sunset.