Trump ribs Kamala for skipping Al Smith dinner

Vice President Kamala Harris was the first presidential candidate since Walter Mondale to skip the traditional Al Smith dinner, which raises money for Catholic Charities, and former president Donald Trump would not let her forget it. He called her absence “deeply disrespectful” to Catholics, earning applause from some in the audience. Trump joked, “Instead of attending tonight, she’s in Michigan receiving Communion from Gretchen Whitmer,” referring to a viral video of the Michigan governor feeding a Dorito chip to a liberal activist kneeling before her. Comedian and host Jim Gaffigan also piled on Harris, noting that 22 percent…

Vice President Kamala Harris was the first presidential candidate since Walter Mondale to skip the traditional Al Smith dinner, which raises money for Catholic Charities, and former president Donald Trump would not let her forget it. He called her absence “deeply disrespectful” to Catholics, earning applause from some in the audience. Trump joked, “Instead of attending tonight, she’s in Michigan receiving Communion from Gretchen Whitmer,” referring to a viral video of the Michigan governor feeding a Dorito chip to a liberal activist kneeling before her.

Comedian and host Jim Gaffigan also piled on Harris, noting that 22 percent of Americans identify as Catholic and that the crowd at the Al Smith dinner skews liberal, so it should have been a slam dunk for the Democratic nominee. “Catholics will be a key demographic in every battleground state. I’m sorry, why is Vice President Harris not here?” Gaffigan said. “I mean, consider this, this is a room full of Catholics and Jews in New York City. This is a lay-up for the Democratic nominee.”

Harris did submit a pre-recorded video featuring Molly Shannon as the famous Saturday Night Live character Mary Katherine Gallagher, a caricature of an awkward Catholic schoolgirl. Shannon as Gallagher warned Harris not to say anything negative about Catholics, to which Harris replied, “I would never do that no matter where I was. That would be like criticizing Detroit, in Detroit.”

Trump is currently leading with Catholic voters in battleground states by five percentage points, according to the National Catholic Register. Trump enjoys particularly large leads in Wisconsin, where he is up eighteen points among Catholic voters, and in Michigan, where he leads by twelve.

-Amber Duke

On our radar

CBS IN HOT WATER FCC commissioner Nathan Simington said a complaint against CBS News for its deceptive edit of Vice President Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview could “come before the commission for adjudication” and they would deliberate as to whether a “distortion” of content took place.

SMITH UNSEALED A federal judge ruled Friday to release an additional 1,900 pages of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment against Donald Trump for the former president’s conduct on January 6. Judge Tanya Chutkan claimed withholding the evidence from the public prior to the election would be its own form of “election interference.”

‘TRANSFER ME TO GUANTANAMO’ Former president Bill Clinton joked that he should be sent to the infamous island prison used to house accused terrorists, as Donald Trump has expressed fears of the “enemy within,” referring to radical leftists, some of whom have rioted in response to his 2016 election and the death of George Floyd in 2020.

AOC at PSU

State College, Pennsylvania

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is set to follow in Vivek Ramaswamy’s footsteps as she descends upon Happy Valley — State College, Pennsylvania — this afternoon to partake in a “Get Out the Vote Early Rally” put on by Penn State Students for Harris-Walz.

The local Centre Daily Timesreports that AOC “is aiming to ‘fire up young voters’ while underscoring the importance of this year’s election — including issues such as abortion and gun violence, according to the Harris-Walz campaign.”

Ramaswamy was on Penn State’s campus last night as part of Turning Point USA’s “You’re Being Brainwashed” tour. Pennsylvania, as usual, is one of the biggest battleground states in this year’s election, and Politicoreports that polls show Harris and Trump are “neck-and-neck,” with Harris leading Trump 46 percent to 45 percent, “well within the poll’s margin of error.”

State College is located in Centre County, a blue island in a sea of rural red. As a resident of Centre County (my little redneck town is on the very edge), I can attest that the presence of Penn State skews an otherwise conservative-minded region to the left. Penn State itself, one of the nation’s most expensive public universities, is wont to have rainbows painted on campus crosswalks in honor of the Pride movement and to have DEI flags hanging from campus lampposts. Still, students tend to be fairly politically moderate at PSU than at many other colleges, so what sort of reception AOC may expect to receive we shall have to wait and seen.

–Teresa Mull

The Bri’ish are coming

Build the wall: America is set to suffer yet another political incursion from the Old Country. A cacophony of gasps erupted nationwide at a LinkedIn post from Sofia Patel, head of operations for the UK’s Labour Party, in which she reveals she has “nearly 100 Labour Party staff… going to the US in the next few weeks heading to North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Virginia” and has ten spots free for “anyone available to head to the battleground state of North Carolina — we will sort your housing.”

“Isn’t this foreign election interference?” asked X influencer Ian Miles Cheong from his home in Malaysia. “Imagine if members of the Russian Duma did this.”

“This is illegal,” claimed South African-born X CEO Elon Musk, who has been extensively campaigning for the Republicans online and in person all year. A Community Note appended to Musk’s tweet pointing out that foreign nationals volunteering for campaigns in the US is in fact not illegal has mysteriously disappeared.

Cockburn knows conservative Americans who have gone to Britain to work for the Conservatives and the Brexit campaigns — as well as Labour activists who came to volunteer in North Carolina for Hillary Clinton in 2016 (they must have been really persuasive).

“President Trump is definitely going to win now,” tweeted Britain’s shortest serving prime minister Liz Truss in response to the controversy. Truss, lest we forget, lost her seat in Parliament to Labour in July.

Perhaps the Harris campaign could propose a work exchange: America gets Britain’s drippy milquetoast center-left leafletters, and we send Blighty Harry, Meghan and a few qualified dentists in return.

–Cockburn, from his Friday gossip column