America 250 Soars With Amazing Flyovers and Aerial Action Over the National Mall

MAMDANI’S NYC: Con Edison Shuts Off Power to 10,000 Customers in Queens as Temps Soar Over 100 Degrees

Mamdani's New York City. The post MAMDANI’S NYC: Con Edison Shuts Off Power to 10,000 Customers in Queens as Temps Soar Over 100 Degrees appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

How did 16 hidden Ohio kids go undetected for years? Experts weigh in

Four adults face felony child endangerment charges after 16 kids were found living in squalid conditions.

WATCH: NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani Gives Divisive July 4 Address Behind George Washington’s Desk Surrounded by Foreigners – Says America Is an “Arena of Supremacy” and Its Citizens are “Small, Weak and Unoriginal”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani delivered an address, railing against ICE and Capitalism, to mark America's 250th birthday on Friday morning, hours before President Trump is set to address the nation from Mount Rushmore.  Sitting behind a desk used by George Washington in the Nation's first Capitol building, Federal Hall, now housed in New York City Hall, the Ugandan immigrant lectured Americans on our history. The post WATCH: NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani Gives Divisive July 4 Address Behind George Washington’s Desk Surrounded by Foreigners – Says America Is an “Arena of Supremacy” and Its Citizens are “Small, Weak and Unoriginal” appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

How Much Is Trump’s Insane July 4 Fireworks Show Going to Cost?

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.

Trump's 'well unified' party isn't so unified —and it's costing the GOP everything

President Donald Trump likes to boast that he has a “well unified” Republican Party, and even that he is so influential he rather than Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) is the true Speaker of the House of Representatives. Yet according to a respected political analyst, the evidence is that neither Trump nor Johnson can keep the 218 Republicans in sufficient line to get anything done against the 212 Democrats who oppose them.“GOP leaders intended to focus this week on advancing an annual must-pass defense policy bill, called the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, and a key spending bill that funds the State Department, among other things,” reported MS NOW’s Steve Benen on Wednesday. “More than a dozen House Republicans, however, decided they didn’t care for that plan, with some arguing the chamber should do nothing but focus on Trump’s voter-suppression proposal, which the White House has labeled the SAVE America Act, as others pointed to party leaders’ promise of a vote on an anti-immigration bill before the July 4 recess.”He added, “The House speaker tried to legislate anyway, hoping enough of his members would stick together and follow his lead. That didn’t go well: 13 GOP members revolted and voted with Democrats on a key procedural vote, making Johnson look weak and leaving him with little choice but to start the chamber’s holiday break early.”Johnson has gone out of his way to support Trump whenever possible, from vowing to keep Republicans in control of the House so Trump will not face investigations from Democrats to soothing his rage at losing in the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship case by suggesting a Constitutional amendment to get around that problem. Yet he was unable to actually accomplish anything in the lead-up to the July 4th holiday season.“For his part, Trump has made at least tacit efforts to curb these GOP rebellions, declaring by way of his social media platform last week, ‘House Republicans should unify, and stop voting down ‘Rules’ or, threatening to do so. … No more grandstanding, please!’” Benen reported. “The trouble is, the far-right members ignoring the speaker’s wishes (and the president’s rhetorical sops) are doing so in order to do the president’s bidding and champion his legislative priority.”He concluded, “But the underlying problem is the unavoidable fact that Johnson is simply too weak to legislate with such a small majority. Bipartisan majorities have already gone around him with more successful discharge petitions than anyone has seen in generations, and the Louisiana Republican’s latest failures this week reinforce perceptions that he just isn’t in control of the House floor he ostensibly leads.”

Small Towns Struggling to Celebrate July 4 After DOGE Axed Their Funds

Small towns hoping to put on celebrations for America’s 250th anniversary have had to cancel or scale back their plans after the Trump administration cut their funding.NOTUS reports that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency slashed funding for humanities nonprofit councils in states and territories across the country, many of which planned to use those federal funds on history projects for the upcoming semiquincentennial. These official nonprofits were created by Congress to help make history and literature accessible to the American public.Humanities councils in Ohio, West Virginia, Alabama, and Washington state all had to axe or scale back their anniversary plans, their leaders told NOTUS, and it had a ripple effect down to local historical organizations.Musk’s DOGE initiative left these state organizations with just enough money to stay afloat last year. President Trump shifted millions from DOGE cuts toward his “triumphal arch” and “Garden of American Heroes,” preventing further funds from going toward local 250th anniversary projects.Congress tried to remedy the shortfall by restoring funding for the state humanities councils to their normal levels for the 2026 fiscal year. But the Trump administration has refused to disburse that money, giving the councils less than half of what was appropriated, and told them not to expect any more.That’s having a real impact in towns across America.“It means that we are not able to do things that are extra, things that are bigger projects. A lot of humanities organizations would have had some incredible projects that none of us have been able to complete,” said Jessica Cyders, the executive director of the Southeast Ohio History Center. Her organization could have been a candidate for a 250th anniversary grant from Ohio Humanities, which distributes federal grants to the state’s local historical societies and community groups.“There’s not really a lot of cultural infrastructure in West Virginia. Where most of the cultural work is done is in regional centers, community centers, small museums, county historical associations. So the people who really got hurt were those small organizations across the state,” Eric Waggoner, the head of the West Virginia Humanities Council, told NOTUS. They had planned to send their 250th anniversary funding to West Virginia University, local libraries, and small museums.“I’m sad to say we had to scrap it,” Waggoner said. “Since we’re the only organization that does this kind of grant-making in West Virginia, without us, there’s really not much.”“This is a pretty significant national event,” Cyders said. “Look, I’m probably not going to be alive for the 300th anniversary.”Trump also took funding from America 250, the federal bipartisan organization that was supposed to be planning the semiquincentennial celebrations, and redirected it toward his own pet Freedom 250 projects. The president seems to have ruined what could have been amazing celebrations for the entire country with his ego, and who knows what could have been going on at the National Mall instead of a tacky “Great American State Fair.”

'Disappointed': Fox Business crew frets as Trump hit with poor economic numbers

The Fox Business team was greeted with bad news on Thursday as job numbers came in shockingly low."We came in underneath expectations," said Cheryl Casone. "We came in at 50,000 nonfarm jobs. The Street was looking for 110,000. The unemployment rate fell to 4.2 percent, down from 4.3 percent, which it had been holding steady at for about three months."Furthermore, she noted, the underemployment rate, or rate that includes people who are working in lower-pay or lower-hours jobs that don't use all their skills, is 7.9 percent — and payrolls from earlier in the year were revised down by over 70,000. And health care and social assistance went up, but leisure and hospitality jobs went down.This isn't the report Wall Street wanted, Casone noted — and when Maria Bartiromo tried to spin it as a "Goldilocks story" because the Dow Jones went up slightly on the news, right-wing economic analyst and former Trump adviser Stephen Moore disagreed."Well, I'm just looking at some of the other numbers, and look, I mean I'm a little disappointed in this, frankly," said Moore. "If you look at the household survey, it showed half a million fewer Americans working. So I'm a little puzzled by this."