Elected officials in California are carrying on with business as usual, even after their constituents voted overwhelmingly to send them packing.An election was held on April 28 in the California city of Avenal in Kings County, where the mayor, Alvaro Preciado, and three city council members — Leticia Gamez, David Reynosa, and Pablo Hernandez — were recalled with at least 76% of voters backing the ouster in each case. The Kings County Registrar of Voters certified the recall election.'I’ve never seen a city so deflated.'The driving force behind this electoral housecleaning — which the council members unsuccessfully attempted to stop with a lawsuit in April — was principally voter concerns about transparency and the council's previous decision to cease contracting with the county fire department.Preciado, Gamez, and Hernandez voted on June 11 to reject the will of the electorate and remain in office. They even approved a new city budget despite recall advocates producing a restraining order, reported the SF Chronicle.Those officials clinging to power, including Reynosa, maintain that the recall election was conducted unlawfully by Kings County and without the council's authorization.Preciado told the SF Chronicle last month that he was staying in office until a judge decides on the recall's legality.California Democrat Attorney General Robert Bonta cleared the way for legal action against the recalled officials on June 11.RELATED: Gov. Pritzker says he's one of the good billionaires, not the ones vilified by socialists In his opinion, Bonta noted that "if the Relators are correct on the merits, then the Defendants are not lawfully occupying office. It would not be in the public interest to permit elected officials to disregard election results."Days after Bonta granted the recall campaigners' application for leave to sue in quo warranto, residents served Preciado and the other recalled officials a lawsuit and an earful at an Avenal city council meeting.Dalila Barajas, a resident of Avenal who is one of the recall proponents, told KGPE-TV, "It just seems that the more meetings they have, the more money that they're spending illegally, the more our citizens are getting frustrated and the more we're asking for them to step down."While Bonta cleared lawsuits against the recall officials, King County District 2 Supervisor Richard Valle criticized the state attorney general for his apparent disinterest in the scandal, telling KMPH-TV on Wednesday, "I believe that if these were MAGA republicans who were refusing to leave office, someone in California would have done something about that.""We were hoping he would take some action," added Valle."I’ve never seen a city so deflated in my time of being around in public service. The people feel like nobody’s coming to help," added the King County supervisor. "Why is it being allowed to take place here in the state of California, in the county of Kings, in the city of Avenal? It’s embarrassing."Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
An author who has written four books about President Donald Trump claimed on Thursday that first lady Melania Trump has concocted a "preposterous" new way to try and silence him. Michael Wolff, co-host of the "Inside Trump's Head" podcast with Joanna Coles of The Daily Beast, said during a new episode that Melania Trump's legal team has moved to sanction the lawyers representing Wolff for bringing a frivolous lawsuit against her. A federal judge threw out Wolff's anti-SLAPP lawsuit against Melania Trump in May, which he filed after she threatened to bring a $1 billion lawsuit against Wolff for his claims about the Trump family's ties to disgraced financier and convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. “Essentially, they are moving to sanction my lawyers for doing nothing more than bringing the lawsuit against Melania Trump,” Wolff said on the podcast. “So this is preposterous on its face.”Wolff also claimed that he found out about the move from Boris Epshteyn, a lawyer close to the Trumps, whom Donald Trump has described as someone who will "say anything" to make him happy. He claimed that hearing about the move from Epshteyn revealed that the strategy behind the lawsuit “was being coordinated at the highest levels of Trump law.”
Bronx Councilwoman Althea Stevens blasted the democratic socialist mayor over what she called a lack of "equity" in his first budget -- accusing him of not allotting enough cash for her district, which faces high rates of poverty and gun violence.
The White House is trying to break a fireworks record on Saturday—but doing so will likely cost taxpayers a pretty penny.The Trump administration has not communicated how much the July 4 celebration will cost, or who is expected to foot the bill for the pyrotechnics display. There has been no public record of the company behind the show, Pyrotecnico, receiving a standard government contract for the job, as has been the case with Washington’s previous July 4 celebrations.In lieu of concrete digits, NOTUS’s Anna Kramer reached out to several fireworks companies for a rough estimate on the show’s price tag. They projected the cost in the millions.“You’re talking a many multimillion-dollar production, without a doubt,” James Woods, the director of sales at Pyro Shows in Tennessee, told NOTUS. Pyro Shows assisted in one of the previous world record-setting fireworks displays in Dubai in 2014.Woods told NOTUS that some of the individual shells used in the upcoming celebration could cost anywhere between $50 to $1,000. NOTUS estimated that if even “3 percent of the devices used in this show cost $50, that would total $1.3 million for those devices alone.”This year, the Freedom 250 celebration has promised a record-shattering 40-minute display beginning at 10:30 p.m. that will use more than 860,000 explosives. They’ll be set off along the Reflecting Pool, as well as in West Potomac Park and off of eight barges on the Potomac River.The current record is held by the Iglesia Ni Cristo, a church in the Philippines that earned the Guinness World Record title in 2016 for lighting 809,000 fireworks during a New Year’s Eve event.Another fireworks professional, Kellner’s Fireworks owner Bob Kellner, hypothesized that even if the entire record-setting show were composed of “filler” shells (the cheapest explosives possible, sold for around $2 a pop), the display would still cost a minimum of $1.7 million. But only hitting that bare minimum is highly unlikely, as more sophisticated fireworks cost significantly more.There is just one federal record offering details about the upcoming semiquincentennial. A document from the Interior Department, dated December 2025, dedicated $1.5 million to Garden State Fireworks to run the display. But that was months before Donald Trump promised to launch “the LARGEST FIREWORKS SHOW IN HISTORY” on Independence Day 2026.NOTUS reported that Garden State Fireworks has been responsible for the capital’s July Fourth show for the last decade, and typically receives a contract between $250,000 and $300,000 for the display.
