Good morning! I didn’t come up with that headline, but damn if it doesn’t fit. Let’s dig in:

1. Behold the evisceration.

In Reno yesterday, Clinton laid into the Trump’s campaign’s alliance with what’s known as the alt-right, which is a polite term for white supremacists, including the hiring of Breitbart CEO/alleged wife beater Stephen Bannon.

Watch it below; the good stuff starts around the eight-minute mark. Or read a transcript here.


State regulators fined one of Trump’s casinos for repeatedly removing black dealers from the floor. No wonder the turn-over rate for his minority employees was way above average.

And let’s not forget Trump first gained political prominence leading the charge for the so-called “Birthers.”

He promoted the racist lie that President Obama is not really an American citizen – part of a sustained effort to delegitimize America’s first black president.

In 2015, Trump launched his own campaign for president with another racist lie. He described Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals.

And he accused the Mexican government of actively sending them across the border. None of that is true.

From The New York Times:

By the end, Mrs. Clinton was quoting headlines from the Breitbart News website, which is overseen by Mr. Trump’s new campaign chief, Stephen K. Bannon.

“I’m not making this up,” she warned, before digging into the site’s archives: “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy”; “‘Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?’”; “Hoist It High and Proud: The Confederate Flag Proclaims a Glorious Heritage.”

The address came a week after Mr. Trump hired Mr. Bannon, who has eagerly described the site as “the platform for the alt-right” — a loosely defined and contested term often associated with white nationalist and anti-immigrant sentiment.

“The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump campaign represents a landmark achievement for the alt-right,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Were this a close race, such a line of attack might seem desperate, no matter how true it is. But with Clinton up about seven or eight points, she’s just twisting the knife. This is exactly the mocking the Republican standard-bearer so richly deserves. More important, it’s the ridicule this ideology so deserves.


2. Did football coach Tim Beckman deserve a second chance at UNC?

Tim Beckman is gone from the North Carolina football program, which is only right. He never should have been there in the first place.

Even though the entirely avoidable situation was resolved Thursday night when Beckman resigned from his volunteer assistant position, apparently at chancellor Carol Folt’s instigation, the misstep raises serious questions about Larry Fedora’s judgment and how closely anyone at North Carolina is paying attention to what’s going on in athletics.

It was a bad decision by Fedora to offer a volunteer assistant job to his old friend Beckman, who permanently disqualified himself from the profession when he mistreated injured players at Illinois. It was a worse decision by athletic director Bubba Cunningham to approve it. Fedora then magnified the damage when he defended the decision Wednesday in a tour de force of misdirection and arrogance.

The issue with Beckman was not that he “didn’t win enough games,” as Fedora blithely put it, implying that you can do just about anything if you win enough games. (Does Fedora think he has?) Beckman went from two to four to six wins with a moribund program, which would be a precipitous firing on that basis alone. The issue with Beckman was that he couldn’t be trusted to act in the best interest of his players, the worst sin there is in college sports.

3. Caroline Sullivan is a woman without a district.

A judge declined to reopen the filing period for this fall’s Wake County commission races, thus ensuring that sitting commissioner Carolina Sullivan will be unable to run for the board—thanks to the legislature’s meddling, of course.

A federal judge on Thursday denied a request by Wake County Commissioner Caroline Sullivan to reopen the candidate filing period so she could run for the seat she currently holds.

U.S. District Court Judge James C. Dever III said the Wake elections board wouldn’t have enough time to reopen the filing period for three commissioners districts, as Sullivan had wanted.

When Dever issued an order Aug. 9 to reopen the filing period for all nine Wake school board seats, “the court was extremely concerned about the ability of the Wake County Board of Elections to meet all of the necessary deadlines for timely and orderly elections in Wake County in November 2016,” the judge wrote.

Sullivan wanted Dever to allow Board of Commissioners candidates to refile for Districts 4, 5 and 6. She represents District 4, which includes south Raleigh, parts of Cary and Apex and unincorporated areas of southern Wake.

But she filed to run in a “super district” the General Assembly drew for the commissioners and school board to use this year. State lawmakers’ maps included two super districts that each would have covered half the county, both for commissioners and the school board.

Recent court rulings deemed the new district maps unconstitutional, leaving Sullivan without a race to run in for the Nov. 8 election. She argued that the filing period should be reopened because the initial filing occurred under the unconstitutional maps.

4. The Police Benevolent Association backs Governor McCrory.

With Thursday’s backing from the state chapter of the Police Benevolent Association, Gov. Pat McCrory has sewn up endorsements from the three main law enforcement organizations in North Carolina.

The Police Benevolent Association announced its endorsement at a Raleigh hotel, where the Republican governor used the opportunity to needle his Democratic opponent, Attorney General Roy Cooper, for failing to win that support despite being the state’s top law enforcement officer.

Previously, the Fraternal Order of Police and the N.C. Troopers Association announced their endorsements of the governor. The Fraternal Order of Police and the larger Police Benevolent Association are similar membership organizations that provide benefits and legal assistance.

At this point, McCrory needs all the help he can get.

That’s all for today. Have a wonderful weekend!