david cameron

The Boston Globe reports Two Republican candidates for statewide office, including the state party’s de facto nominee for attorney general, won’t appear on the September primary ballot after the commission that oversees ballots took issue with hundreds of nomination signatures they submitted.

The result comes as a shock considering President Donald Trump and his Republican Party’s purported war on voter fraud in what critics say is actually a ploy to remove Democratic voters from rolls.

Despite the party’s crusade, however, Anne Manning Martin, a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, and Michael Walsh, the party’s endorsed candidate for attorney general, were both knocked off after the commission found problems with enough of the signatures they had collected.

“In accordance with the Ballot Law Commission’s decisions, the names of Anne Manning Martin for Lieutenant Governor and Michael C. Walsh for Attorney General will not be printed on the September 1, 2026, state primary ballots,” said Deb O’Malley, a spokesperson for Secretary of State William Galvin’s office.

The commission invalidated 1,021 signatures of the 10,677 Walsh turned in to the secretary of state’s office, leaving him hundreds of signatures short of the 10,000 required to make the ballot.

For Manning Martin, the commission invalidated 1,279 signatures her campaign submitted, leaving her with only 9,413 “valid signatures.”

“A general review of the certified signatures on the nomination papers also demonstrates they are likely fraudulent,” the commission wrote in the decision.

The Globe reports this decision is “the latest development in the signature fraud controversy that has now decimated the Republican ticket, knocking off two candidates for lieutenant governor and eliminating the party’s sole challenger to Attorney General Andrea Campbell.”

“The state Republican party, already struggling to field candidates down-ballot, is now only officially challenging for three of the six statewide constitutional offices, all of which are currently held by Democrats,” The Globe reports.

MAGA influencer and podcaster Tucker Carlson was happy to laud the hard feelings between President Donald Trump’s digital media manager Alex Bruesewitz and ultra conservative columnist and Fox News pundit Mark Levin on his Friday podcast.

In addition to discussions topics about how hard the nation appears to “discriminate” against white people and foreign influences on social media, Bruesewitz and Carlson eventually got around to the topic of Levin, who has criticized Trump’s disastrous invasion of Iran as well as a few other Trump policy disagreements.

“Mark Levin hates Trump. He's always hated Trump, has worked against Trump openly for a decade. And then Trump does something that he agrees with and he's [suddenly] the gatekeeper and Trump's best friend,” said Carlson. “Now he hates Trump again and he's attacking Trump. How long does Trump continue to be friends with this guy?”

Carlson himself has roundly criticized Trump’s invasion of Iran and warned that the invasion could escalate into a major world war if Trump followed through on his threat to annihilate Iranian civilization. But this discussion was about Levine.

Bruesewitz pointed out that Levin is “trying to get me fired, by the way,” before claiming Trump is “unique” in that he can handle when people criticize him,” in blatant contradiction to facts.

“Oh, he can? … He doesn't think they’re ‘low IQ crazy people’? Carlson demanded incredulously, referring to Trump’s insult of Carlson’s own criticism a matter of weeks ago over Iran.

“Only some,” Bruesewitz admitted, before going on to describe Levin as “part of the Republican Party that has been left in the past.”

“They are desperately trying to remain relevant and they use conflicts, whether it's in the Middle East … for example or the conflict in Ukraine. They use these issues to have a little relevance to maintain their presences on Fox News. But the people aren’t with him and you see that in polling. You see 60-something percent of Americans support [Trump’s] MOU [ending the Iran war]. You look at Mark Levin's twitter feed he acts like everybody's against it. Nobody’s against it except for Mark and his friends, who are probably coordinating in their messaging and talking points.”

“I always try to remind myself Mark Levin is not a player in any affairs, global or local,” Carlson said in agreement. “He's irrelevant and his job is, like, to make me mad and suck me into his fantasy world and I should just ignore this and you clearly already figured that out.”

“Don't take the bait,” Bruesewitz advised.

Dispatch writer Nick Catoggio appears to be feeling more venom than usual. On Friday Catoggio lit into the no-explanations secrecy with which President Donald Trump and his lieutenants conduct business, particularly the quick removal of four-star Gen. Chris Donahue.

Donohue was the top Army commander in Europe who led Delta Force in battle against ISIS. As commander of the 82^nd Airborne, Catoggio said he was also famously the last man out of Afghanistan when U.S. troops withdrew in 2021.

Before his removal the Atlantic reports he was “leading the service’s effort to take lessons from Ukraine and apply them to future conflict.

“Not a man the military would lightly part with, one might think. He must have done something awfully bad for our defense secretary, who famously loves warfightin’ warriors, to send him packing,” said Catoggio. “… Or maybe it simply bugged Hegseth to have someone in the chain of command as universally admired as Donahue is. It’s not just a matter of jealousy (although it probably is that too). An officer as distinguished as Donahue having to answer to a cosplaying yutz who used to host Fox & Friends Weekend only made Hegseth’s yutziness more glaring by contrast to the brass, I’m sure.”

But there’s no official explanation coming on why exactly Donohue is out — and you’re not going to get one in this administration, said Catoggio.

“[E]lecting a figure like Trump implicitly amounts to a sort of waiver by voters of their right to accountability from their government,” Catoggio said. “You don’t hand power to a nationalist strongman expecting that he’ll dutifully explain his thinking on policy periodically like some egghead technocrat. You do it because you don’t expect that. You trust him. Your vote is a vote of confidence in him and his instincts.”

Under Trump, “the people’s role in government ends on election night. (Unless the Democrats win, of course, in which case rigorous oversight going forward is a must.) The administration couldn’t be any plainer about that,” said Catoggio. “‘TRUST IN TRUMP,’ the official White House Twitter account declared a few weeks ago amid spiking anxiety over gas prices, going on to quote the president: "Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end - It always does!"

And that’s your answer as to why Chris Donahue was fired, said Catoggio. It’s what Americans supposedly agreed to do in 2024, so that’s all the explanation they’re entitled to.

“The last 16 months are littered with examples of that ethos at work,” Catoggio added, referring to DOGE running “roughshod” over federal agencies with little explanation to Congress or voters about what was getting cut or why. It also explains the complete silence behind dozens of “outrageous” federal pardons being issued without explanation, just like Trump’s “Liberation Day” trade war, and his disastrous war on Iran.

“Even the Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, an obsession of the president’s own base, would still be hidden if not for a revolt in Congress that forced their publication. MAGA fans who turned out in 2024 may have thought they were voting for transparency on Epstein by voting for the president, but that’s not how postliberalism works. To Trump, they were voting to signal their absolute trust in him,” said Catoggio. “If he thought they shouldn’t see the Epstein material, that should have been good enough. No further explanation required.”

Former Republican and current Bulwark podcaster Tim Miller showed no mercy to MAGA podcaster Megyn Kelly after her attack on Haitians this week.

“I think you're kind of nice to Megyn Kelly there because what Megyn Kelly is doing is she's being a rancid b——,” Miller said on his Friday afternoon Bulwark podcast with guest host Jane Coaston. “That's what she's doing. I'm sorry but, like, that is all she's doing.”

The former NBC daytime talk host took to her SiriusXM “Megyn Kelly Show” and denigrated Haitian immigrants living in the U.S.

“And half of you people, more than half, you won't assimilate. We don't want you,” Kelly said. “We don't care if you're offended. Get out. Go home. Go back to f—— Haiti. Sorry. I'm just I'm thinking about our friends in Ohio who've been dealing with these … Haitians for years now. Drunk driving all over their towns and killing people.”

“This is the whole cats and dogs thing,” Kelly then added, citing a soundly debunked claim by President Donald Trump that immigrants were eating cats and dogs prior to his 2024 re-election. “They don't want to live like Americans live.”

Coaston called Kelly’s rage insincere because she was merely doing it for money.

“It's a performance for an audience. It's fake. This is what [they] want,” said Coaston. “This is what [they] want to hear from you … and we want this from you and it will benefit you financially to do this. If it didn't, she wouldn't be doing it.”

“We have evidence of all of this because do you remember when she was working for NBC?” Coaston asked Miller.

“Yeah, it was a totally different character,” said Miller. “She was like a totally different character. She was loving trans children, having them on the show. There's like a soft morning mom after school drop off [kind of vibe]. She did the wine dancing.”

Kelly’s tenure on NBC was short-lived, however. In 2018, she was criticized for on-air remarks she made on Megyn Kelly Today related to the appropriateness of blackface as a Halloween costumes, saying “that was okay as long as you were dressing up like a character." She also defended Luann de Lesseps's use of blackface to wear a Diana Ross Halloween costume.

Kelly issued an email apologizing for the remarks after catching backlash. But three days later, NBC canceled Megyn Kelly Today. She had only been with the network for about a year.

Kelly is just an actor, said Miller, who contributes nothing to the nation, unlike the immigrants who actually arrive and work hard.

“She is perpetrating a lie. That is what is underscoring the tragedy that's happening to these people that are being sent back to Haiti for no reason. They're being menaced by our government for no reason. They're in the country working hard, going to church. raising their families,” said Miller. “… Megan Kelly, you didn't build s——. She has not built any lasting cultural touchstone. She's added nothing to the culture. All she's trying to do is rip the country apart, undermine what made America special.”

MS NOW analyst Steve Benen says House Speaker Mike Johnson dropped an unexpectedly corruption-friendly reason for protecting the House’s GOP majority against its near inevitable collapse in the November midterms.

“If we lose the midterms, these Democrats will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they'll go after the president's family, the cabinet, his donors, friends, half of you in this room will be targeted,” Johnson said — and then added out loud that “I run the protection program. We’ll take care of you.”

In the final two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, there was a Republican Congress and a Democratic president, said Benen, and Republicans “put aside any legislative ambitions and spent 2023 and 2024 … investigating all sorts of perceived controversies related to the Democratic administration.”

But after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, the GOP-led Congress completely switched gears and clanked the Congressional vehicle into protection mode.

“This time, lawmakers also abandoned their oversight responsibilities to an almost cartoonish degree, pretending not to notice any of the incumbent president’s many abuses and scandals,” said Benen.

In fact, Congressional Republicans have done so little oversight, The Washington Post reported last month, that the White House Counsel’s Office, expecting Democrats to reclaim a majority in at least one chamber, recently began “giving private briefings to the administration’s political appointees on how to best prepare for congressional oversight,” said Benen.

That same article added that the roughly 30-minute briefings have included “a PowerPoint presentation about how congressional oversight works and best practices for handling it.”

Regarding his statement, Benen notes the GOP leader did not appear to be reading from a prepared text. He was just shocking shooting GOP intent from the hip before a live audience.

“What was on his mind was a near future in which a possible House Republican majority spends 2027 and 2028 shielding the president, his team and their allies from the kind of scrutiny that Congress has a responsibility to do as a matter of course,” said Benen.

“This isn’t altogether surprising,” he added, “given everything we’ve seen from Capitol Hill over the past year and a half, but it was nevertheless remarkable to hear a sitting House speaker declare, out loud and in public, that he wants and expects to run a ‘protection program’ — a phrase more commonly associated with organized crime — on behalf of the White House.”

Republicans have already been using their majority to shield the president from the fallout of the Epstein files, with Kentucky Republican and House Oversight Chair James Comer being accused of using "a new strategy" to "contain" the ability of lawmakers to issue subpoenas against "high-profile figures in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation."

Before that, Republicans used their majority to stall the passage of a new law making the Trump administration’s release of the files legally mandatory. And after failing in that effort, Trump himself targeted Republicans who favored the release for ousting in GOP primaries.

The GOP’s labor to protect Trump from incrimination is well noted, but Benen said “usually, GOP leaders are a bit more subtle about their anti-oversight posturing.”

Johnson’s protective oath sounds odd considering how hard Trump appears to be working to get the Republican majority removed from Congress, however. Trump’s polling is at historic lows, and his recent effort to blowup a hugely popular housing bill in the Senate is souring voters to both the administration and his party.

It was an ad campaign designed to sink an American legend with Trump-style accusations, but the legend appears to have endured.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports American motorcycle company Harley Davidson has weathered a hateful ad campaign by competing cycle company Indian Motorcycle.

“The attacks by Indian Motorcycle on Harley-Davidson Motor Company have generated a buzz, but not on Wall Street,” reports Sentinel writer Ricardo Torres. “Harley's stock price has increased since Indian, in late May, launched a campaign criticizing the Milwaukee-based motorcycle maker's executive hires and previous policies on diversity, equity and inclusion.

Harley's stock is up roughly 10 percent in the last month to about $25.70 per share.

“Investors aren’t paying attention to the social commentary and are instead waiting to see if Harley-Davidson's strategy of more offering affordable bikes will work, said Jaime Katz, who monitors Harley-Davidson for Morningstar.

Harley plans to relaunch the Sprint model later this year, complete with a starting price of about $6,000, and it will bring back the Sportster in 2027, which is expected to sell for about $10,000. These prices are not the kind of costs Harley customers are accustomed to from a factory paying American-worker-style wages. But Harley is leaning into lower priced cycles in response to “changing economic conditions” under Trump.

“We have a higher inflation environment for internal combustion engines; you have higher gas prices for your motorcycle; you have consumer sentiment that’s still declining; you have a stalled employment picture; you have services still outperforming goods; you have lower consumer savings,” Katz told the Sentinel.

To commemorate America’s 250^th anniversary, Harley also brought back a limited edition of the red, white and blue Super Glide model from 1971. The Sentinel reports the company is planning to build only 2,500 of them, on sale for about $15,000.

President Donald Trump’s supporters began denouncing Harley Davidson as “woke,” allegedly over the company’s unconfirmed DEI policies.

“The conservative influencers have spoken: Harley-Davidson—whose motorcycles helped create the paradigm of American masculinity —I s in fact woke and gay,” wrote The Bulwark’s Will Sommer earlier this year. Observing the numerous MAGA personalities and meme accounts denouncing the company, including actor Kevin Sorbo among others.

Sommer observed that “this campaign against the motorcycle giant stands out for the fact that Harley-Davidson doesn’t appear to have done anything terribly ‘woke.’”

Matt Laidlaw, who works at the “oldest, largest” Harley dealership in LA, claimed Indian Cycle “starting practicing some dirty marketing tactics” by “hiring political, social-media influencers to label Harley-Davidson as ‘Woke’ after Indian Cycle’s parent company, Polaris “ditched” the Indian brand.

The attacks ramped up after influencers had launched similar attacks against Cracker Barrel and Deere. In the months since these campaigns, however, MAGA sites themselves have been collapsing as fewer visitors click in—due to Trump’s low popularity and faltering health.

Former Hill writer Jason Easley reports President Donald Trump exposed every bit of respect he still has for the evangelical wing of the Republican Party, which helped put him back in the White House in 2024.

“America finally got to see what Trump really thinks of his evangelical supporters at the White House on Friday,” reports Easley. “Evangelicals formed their circle around Trump, who was seated at his desk in the Oval Office, and they sang his praises in the most godly of terms.”

Trump’s “spiritual adviser,” Paula Reid, happily praised Trump’s commitment to inserting Christianity more deeply into U.S. government, and for doing his best to frame the national argument as a war on Christianity.

“The rejection, the pain, the trauma that was caused simply because of faith. And it is just inconceivable that no one has stood up like you have stood up to fight for faith, which gives us meaning and purpose and hope and an ability to continue to be our better selves,” Reid said.

There is no telling if Trump agreed with her, however, because Trump was asleep.

The president nodded off at least twice, said, Easley, even as Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick delivered his own speech.

“A phrase that's not in the Constitution, and that phrase is separation of church and state,” Patrick claimed. “The left has used that one phrase that was one line out of one of hundreds of letters by Thomas Jefferson to batter and hammer people of faith for the last 70 to 80 years. And this report will speak very clearly that we want to be sure Americans understand that they cannot be attacked by that phrase any longer. So, we have 12 recommendations. I'll read the first six.”

“Patrick could have had a list of 12,000 recommendations, and Trump would have had no idea,” said Easley, because he was again off to la-la land. Easley then produced a second video of Trump snoozing for Patrick in his trademark slack-faced style.

MSNOW reporter Stephanie Ruhle reports “Evangelicals have stood with Donald Trump through thick and thin,” with more than 80 percent voting for him in all three of his presidential races. And most have even stuck with him through his fight with the Pope.

But now, “his hold on the group may be starting to slip, as indicated by a recent poll from Reuters showing his approval rating with evangelicals has fallen to 52 percent, she said. That’s still more than half — but back in March of 2025, it was 82 percent. In other words, Trump has seen a dramatic collapse among one of his most essential support groups.

But evangelicals “don’t care that Trump is an enemy of their faith,” said Easley.

“All they care about is a political agenda. Trump understood this and knew that these people would sell out their faith for political power. Now that Trump no longer needs them or their votes, he doesn’t have to pretend anymore and can humiliate them by sleeping as they speak.”

Former Republican strategist Rick Wilson said he was worried that House and Senate Republicans had tied themselves so thoroughly to President Donald Trump that the president knows he can blow up their November midterms chances without

Wilson told MS NOW anchor Katy Tur that Trump is the kind of personality that deliberately hurts those who show fealty because he sees their kindliness as weakness, and weakness must be abused.

“I think this is a real moment where the Republicans, if they were politically smart about it, would try to get some daylight between themselves and Trump, but they are so locked in this abusive marriage with him,” said Wilson. “He is the Ike Turner of their lives. He's going to torture them and hurt them, and they can't seem to escape.”

Semafor Congressional Bureau Chief Burgess Everett described Trump’s refusal to pass a popular housing bill until his GOP cohorts pass the SAVE Act — despite the bill’s inevitable doom from Democrats and a few centrist Republicans. But with the November midterms approaching fast Republicans desperately need new laws to brag about.

“They need to get together to be able to say, ‘hey, voters, you can trust us with another two years in Congress,’: Everett said. But may be unlikely if Trump refuses to sign any bills until he gets his precious SAVE Act.

Wilson said Republicans have only themselves to blame for the monster hounding them out of their Republican majority in November.

“Donald Trump started the week in very bad shape. He went in Wednesday and blew up his already tattered relationship with the Senate, threatening to veto this bill. You could see the air going out of Republicans in the House who desperately needed anything, even a symbolic lightweight, ephemeral sort of thing to take to the voters and say ‘yeah, we looked at affordability. We're working on housing costs.’ But I think there's also a great chance that Donald Trump will get bored or restless or change his mind, or somebody will get in his ear over the weekend and he'll blow it all up again,” said Wilson.

“The idea that the House is going to be somehow saved by Donald Trump, from its own worship of Donald Trump — which is what's put them in this terrible political position. I think that is a big old category error. And I don't think they see the freight train coming at them.”

Tur pointed out that the American public is “speaking pretty clearly” about their own 'fealty' to Trump, with the president suffering a 30-point popularity drop in just over a year.

“No president in modern times, with numbers that low doesn't end up splashing some radiation onto the members of his own caucus, of his own House and Senate,” said Wilson, “so these guys are really running up against a very steep hill.”

- YouTube youtu.be

Justice Department prosecutors have enraged a Utah judge over public statements that they issued to the media.

Judge Tony Graf issued a contempt of court penalty on Friday after prosecutors told the celebrity gossip site TMZ that they had “ample evidence” to win their conviction of 23-year-old Tyler Robinson.

TMZ, which has been friendly in its coverage and partnership with President Donald Trump, quoted Deputy Utah County Attorney Christopher Ballard in an April 16 report detailing details involving the case, including ballistics on the bullet fragments and the gun.

The New York Times reported that lawyers are limited in what they're allowed to say publicly when a case involves the death penalty. Robinson's lawyers said that it should mean the death penalty is off the table, but Judge Graf wouldn't go that far. Instead, he issued a fine for prosecutors, which the judge said would go to pay attorneys' fees and legal filings for Robinson.

He will also consider whether to expand the jury selection process to determine whether potential jurors were influenced by the comments prosecutors made to TMZ.

Robinson hasn't entered a plea yet, and there have been many procedural disputes between the lawyers, the Times reported.

In March, the defense submitted court filings saying that the bullet fragment recovered during Kirk’s autopsy didn't match the rifle tied to Robinson, the report said. The report actually found it to be "inconclusive." That led to a slew of social media debates about whether Robinson was the real killer, whether there was a conspiracy afoot from the Trump administration or even Kirk's wife.

When TMZ called Ballard for comment, he pushed back against the filing publicly. Ballard issued several statements speaking generally about the matter, but when he talked to TMZ, he went into significantly more detail, making the comment that got the office into trouble.

The judge tried to blame the defense, saying that their court filings set off the “media frenzy” and he did not believe Ballard spoke, “out of a malicious desire to flout this court’s authority.” The defense never spoke out publicly about the filing; it merely submitted it to the court, and such documents are public. Blaming the "media frenzy" on the defense could ultimately be something that the defense uses in the appeal process for Robinson.

The four-day hearing is set for the beginning of July.

Set for Tuesday, November 3, the United States' 2026 midterms are a little over four months away. And Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias has a warning: expect President Donald Trump to do everything he can to make the midterms as chaotic and stressful as possible.

Elias, publisher of Democracy Docket and a frequent guest on MS NOW, warned voters to expect the worst from Trump in an interview with The New Republic's Win McCormack and his wife Carol Butler.

“What we've seen from Donald Trump in the past is that he starts with lies; then, he increases the rhetoric behind the lies," Elias warned. "Then, you see the legal process. And then, when he fails in the legal process, we have violence. And I think that we are on that progression. He has lied about voting, he has now upped the rhetoric for all of the SAVE Act — which began as a proof-of-citizenship law. It's now become a voter suppression, voter purge, ban on mail-in voting, trans-targeting law, right?"

The Democratic election lawyer added, "So, when he loses in court in the cases I referenced, and he's not able to pass this law through Congress, as we've discussed, I think he's going to escalate further."

Elias said of the midterms, "It's just gonna be a knife fight from here to the end."

The attorney warned that in November, Trump might send U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to polling places in a blatant effort to intimidate voters. On his "War Room" vodcast earlier this year, MAGA Republican Steve Bannon urged Trump to do exactly that.

Elias told McCormack and Butler, "Let's assume that they're not at the polling place, but rather, they are occupying all the parking lots, and they are closing off the streets.… You're now being told you're going to have to park a mile away and walk to the polls, right? So, don't underestimate the amount of voter suppression they can impose, simply through their chaos and contrived inconvenience."

But the elections lawyer laid out a variety of ways in which Trump opponents can protect the midterms and fight back.

"There are things that lawyers can do which are unique to lawyers," Elias explained. "There are things that elected officials can do that are unique to elected officials. There are things that philanthropy can do that are unique to philanthropy. But everyone — no matter who they are, no matter what their job, no matter how much they have or don't have — they do have a town square that they can stand out in and speak out."

The Democracy Docket founder continued, "Now, some people have really big town squares. You know, they own major media publications. Other people have smaller town squares. It may be just their social media feed, it may be their dinner table, it may be their bridge club or the bowling league they belong to. But everybody's got some place where they can speak out and be heard. And what everyone needs to do is to use that town square to call out what Donald Trump is up to and what is happening to our democracy."