Sarah Sanders booted so restaurant could uphold 'certain standards,' co-owner says: report

A co-owner of a restaurant that refused to serve White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Friday reportedly cited morality and living up to "certain standards,” as the reason why.

The Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va. (A separate restaurant in Washington, also called the Red Hen, is not affiliated with the Virginia restaurant.)  (Facebook)

Stephanie Wilkinson recalled the moments leading up to the encounter in an interview with the Washington Post, starting with a phone conversation she had with an employee, who revealed that Sanders was dining at the Red Hen in Lexington, Va.
After her chef reportedly told her that “the staff is a little concerned,” Wilkinson left her home and headed for the restaurant.
“I’m not a huge fan of confrontation,” Wilkinson told the Post. “I have a business, and I want the business to thrive.”
SARAH SANDERS SAYS SHE WAS THROWN OUT OF VIRGINIA RESTAURANT BECAUSE SHE WORKS FOR TRUMP
“This feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals,” she continued. She also reportedly described the actions of Trump’s White House as “inhumane and unethical.”

“This feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals.”

After arriving, Wilkinson recalled to the Post that Sanders’ party had some appetizers on the table, but had not yet received their entrees. She said she spoke to her employees, asking them how they wanted her to move forward.
“I can ask her to leave,” she suggested to the staff, according to the Post.
“Yes,” the employees replied.
Wilkinson then told the Post that she approached Sanders, introduced herself, then asked Sanders to “come out to the patio” to talk.
“I was babbling a little, but I got my point across in a polite and direct fashion,” Wilkinson told the Post. “I explained that the restaurant has certain standards that I feel it has to uphold, such as honesty, and compassion, and cooperation,” before saying, “I’d like to ask you to leave.”

“I was babbling a little, but I got my point across in a polite and direct fashion. I explained that the restaurant has certain standards that I feel it has to uphold."
- Stephanie Wilkinson, co-owner, Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va.

VIDEO SHOWS DHS BOSS KIRSTJEN NIELSEN BEING HECKLED, HARASSED AT DC RESTAURANT
She reportedly said the press secretary replied simply by saying “That’s fine. I’ll go,” before she and her entire party left the restaurant.
Wilkinson told the Post that the Sanders group had “offered to pay,” but Wilkinson declined, telling them that there was no charge for their order.
Following the exchange, TMZ reported that Sanders was kicked out of the restaurant on “moral grounds” and cited a waiter who said that Sanders was served “for a total of two minutes before my owner kicked her out along with seven of her other family members.”
Sanders confirmed the events on Twitter, saying she was told to leave by the owner because she worked for the president.
“Her actions say far more about her than about me,” she tweeted. “I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so.”
Looking back, Wilkinson told the Post, she "would have done the same thing again."
Meanwhile, an unaffiliated restaurant in Washington, also called the Red Hen, was working to convince customers that it was not involved in the Sanders dispute, which took place in Virginia.
"Good morning! @PressSec went to the unaffiliated @RedHenLex last night, not to our DC-based restaurant," the Red Hen in Washington tweeted.

Obama Cartoons

Obama cyber chief confirms 'stand down' order against Russian cyberattacks

President Obama is pictured in 2013.  (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)

Former Obama administration National Security Council cybersecurity coordinator
 Michael Daniel confirmed on Wednesday that a "stand down" order was given to counter Russian cyberattacks during the 2016 election.
During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, asked Daniel about a passage in the book Russian Roluette. The passage was about a staffer from Daniel's team, Daniel Prieto, retelling the time that Obama's national security adviser Susan Rice told Daniel and his team to halt their efforts and to "stand down" in countering Russia's cyberattacks.
Daniel was quoted saying to his team that they had to stop working on options to counter the Russian attack: "We've been told to stand down." Prieto is quoted as being "incredulous and in disbelief" and asking, "Why the hell are we standing down?"
"That is an accurate rendering of the conversation at the staff meeting but the larger context is something that we can discuss in the classified session," Daniel said. "But I can say there were many concerns about how many people were involved in the development of the options so the decision at that point was to neck down the number of people that were involved in our ongoing response options. It's not accurate to say all activities ceased at that point. "
Daniel and his team were tasked in developing options to Russia's cyberattacks on the United States. Russian hacked the Democratic National Committee servers in 2015 and into voter registration systems of several U.S. states in 2016.

Reality Winner to plead guilty in national security leak case: report

Reality Winner, 26, will reportedly plead guilty to leaking a classified government report to a media outlet as part of a plea deal.  (Lincoln County Sheriff's Office)

Reality Winner, the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who was accused of leaking a classified report to a news outlet, will reportedly plead guilty as part of a plea deal.
Winner, 26, is being held at the Lincoln County Jail near Augusta, Georgia. She was arrested in June 2017 for allegedly feeding a classified report with information on Russia's involvement in the 2016 presidential election to the outlet.
The Air Force veteran entered a plea deal on Thursday following a phone call with U.S. Magistrate Judge Brian Epps, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Winner was charged, under the Espionage Act, with removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet.
She was working as a contractor with a Top Secret security clearance with Pluribus International Corporation at a federal facility in Georgia when, according to the Justice Department, she printed out a sheet of paper with classified information and mailed it to a news organization.
While the DOJ didn't specify which outlet reported the secret information, Winner's charges were announced just as The Intercept published details of a NSA report on Russian hacking efforts.
NSA CONTRACTOR ACCUSED OF LEAKING TOP SECRET REPORT ON RUSSIAN HACKING EFFORTS
The report seemingly contained information detailing how Russian hackers got into a U.S. voting software supplier and sent so-called "spear-phishing" emails to more than 100 local election officials ahead of the 2016 election.
Winner's plea hearing is reportedly scheduled for Tuesday morning in Augusta.

Californians divided on whether, how to ... divide

The movement to slice up the state of California is reeling from internal clashes over what’s the best way to rearrange the state.
The Cal 3 measure, which seeks to break up America’s most populous state into three smaller states, recently gathered enough support to earn the right to appear on the Nov. 6 state election ballot, giving voters a historic chance to improve their representation on the national level.
But rather than get behind the upcoming vote, the separatist movement has fractured into multiple camps, each offering their own plans and criticizing each other for unfair dividing lines, the Washington Times reported.
Paul Preston, vice president and co-founder of the New California movement that want a two-state solution in California, based on rural-urban lines, says venture capitalist Tim Draper’s partition plan -- the one on which voters will vote in November -- wouldn’t address the issue of voter representation, as it would merely create two deep blue states and one swing state.
“With Draper, he makes sure every area has an urbanized zone that will ultimately be blue. You still have the rural-urban thing going on in his formula,” Preston told the Times. “The rural people will be shafted again.”

“With Draper, he makes sure every area has an urbanized zone that will ultimately be blue. You still have the rural-urban thing going on in his formula. The rural people will be shafted again.”

Yes California’s Louis Marinelli, meanwhile, opposes both the Draper and Preston initiatives, claiming all of them are just Republican plots to “chip away at the voice California lends to the republic as a solid blue state.”
Marinelli’s plan, dubbed Calexit, seeks to make California a wholly independent country and secede from the U.S. altogether – a step too far for other separatists.
“That’s secession. That’s what happened in the Civil War,” Preston said, nothing that his group would not support the initiative. “They want to create a new country, and that’s just not going to happen. First of all, it’s illegal under our Constitution. There’s no base out here to support that.”
Separatists have long argued that the current state of California is too big to function and address local problems.
In May, the U.S. Commerce Department said that California now boasts the world's fifth-largest economy, surpassing that of Britain, the Sacramento Bee reported.
“I think the same type of voter frustration that leads people to Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders is the fuel behind these types of efforts,” Dan Schnur, professor at USC’s Annenberg School of Communications, told the outlet. “When you’re one of 40 million people, you don’t feel like you’re getting enough attention, and this [Cal 3] is a solution that will give you three times as much attention.”
The Cal 3 initiative managed to attract more than 400,000 signatures and paving the way to appear on the ballot in November, but other separatists say they are unlikely to achieve much.
“The three Californias measure is dead on arrival,” said Preston. “It’s not constitutionally sound, and everybody recognizes it. Everybody I’ve been talking to — and I get flooded because we’ve got 50 counties engaged in our program — everybody’s absolutely appalled by it.”
Preston’s New California group, meanwhile, is set to hold a July 21 constitutional convention and expect to make a case to the state legislature so the lawmakers can then proceed to split the state. He argues that the only way to achieve a partition of California is to follow the U.S. Constitution’s Article IV, Section 3, which states that no new states can be created “without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.”
The Cal 3 measure, if successful, would ask the governor to ask Congress approval and then leave the rest of the process to the state legislature.
“I think the rest of the country will just want to do what’s right for California,” Draper, who will bankroll the Cal 3 initiative, told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson back in April.
“It takes up the same land mass as 15 states on the East Coast. The population is the equivalent of an average of six or seven states. So I think it’s appropriate to have California represented by at least three states.”

The wisdom of Charles Krauthammer

Long-time Fox News panelist Charles Krauthammer, a psychiatrist, Pulitzer Prize-winner and bestselling author, who died Thursday at age 68, regularly commented on issues great and small.
Following is a selection of his wisdom from exclusive, in-depth interviews he has done with Fox News:
GETTING IT RIGHT
“I decided to become a writer so I could write about politics, because I thought that’s the most important thing one can involve oneself in. In the end, all the beautiful, elegant things in life, the things that I care about, the things that matter, depend on getting the politics right. Because in those societies where they get it wrong, everything else is destroyed, everything else is leveled.”
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
“America is the only country ever founded on an idea. The only country that is not founded on race or even common history. It's founded on an idea and the idea is liberty. That is probably the rarest phenomena in the political history of the world; this has never happened before. And not only has it happened, but it's worked. We are the most flourishing, the most powerful, most influential country on Earth with this system, invented by the greatest political geniuses probably in human history.”
GO WHERE THE EVIDENCE TAKES YOU.
“I was a Great Society liberal.  I thought we ought to help the poor, we ought to give them all the money we can.  And then, the evidence started to pour in. The evidence of how these grand programs, the poverty programs, the welfare programs--everything was making things worse.
I didn't have a dog in that fight.  I was willing to go where the evidence led.  As a doctor, I'd been trained in empirical evidence.  If the treatment is killing your patients, you stop the treatment.”
THE RIGHT WORDS MATTER
“[Playwright] Tom Stoppard once said the reason he writes is because every once in a while you put a few words together in the right order and you're able to give the world a nudge. And sometimes I'm able to do that.”
HOW TO PERSUADE OTHERS
“You don't want to talk in high-falutin’, ridiculous abstractions that nobody understands. Just try to make things plain and clear.
The one thing I try to do when I want to persuade someone is never start with my assumptions, because if I do, we're not going to get anywhere. You have to figure out what the other person believes, and then try to draw a line from what they believe into what you believe in by showing them a logical sequence. But you’ve got to lead them along and you have to have it clear in your head from the beginning or you'll never get there.”
HOW HE MELLOWED
“I've calmed down a bit from where I thought: this is it, it’s the end, we're done. I’ve sort of accepted the fact that there's an organic evolution to society, and as long as we keep civil society strong and in constraint to some extent, we're going to do okay.  So I guess you could say I've become a mellow conservative.”
THE IMPORTANCE OF STRUCTURE
“When you write anything--a column, an essay--if you have the structure right, everything is easy. You get the structure wrong, you'll never get it right. You’ll spend hours whacking your way through the weeds with a machete and you won't be able to escape the marsh.”
INDIVIDUALS MAKE A DIFFERENCE
“In our sophisticated historical analyses, we tend to attribute everything to these large underlying currents, to certain political ideologies, or social changes like industrialization or the growth of women's rights and all that. But that’s missing the obvious—there’s usually a person who influenced things in a way that all the underlying forces cannot account for.
In American history, (there’s)  Washington, Lincoln, FDR, Reagan--they all stand out.  It’s a way of looking at history that's less abstract, and is more recognizing the individual, which we tend not to do.”
FAITH
“Faith is something that one has or doesn't have; one doesn't construct it. The one thing I do believe is that of all the possible views of God, atheism is the least plausible. The idea that there's no meaning or purpose or origin--that the Universe is as it always was, is to me entirely implausible for reasons of physics, apart from faith. Because if you reason back to first causes, and if you’re an atheist, you get to a logical contradiction.”
BEAUTY DOESN’T NEED A PURPOSE
“In major league baseball you can see the highest level of play—it’s irresistible. I love the game
And there's such a beauty in the intricacy of chess--you use words that to a non-player seem nonsensical—elegance, romance—people don’t see it when you push a piece of wood across a board.
Anything done at a high level of excellence always intrigues me because it's the ultimate expression of being human, that you do something, something you don't have to do.
What's the point of playing chess?  There is no point.  There doesn't have to be a point.  It's just the beauty of the exercise and the difficulty of it that make it worthwhile, admirable and very pleasurable.”
HIS LUCK
“[Writing commentary] is more than passion.  It's purpose.  I'm very lucky to have ended up where I am by pure blind luck--how I stumbled upon what I was meant to do.  It turns out I have some aptitude for it and I love it and I think it's important.  That's a great rarity in life. And I appreciate every day I wake up that I can do that and it turned out that way.”
HIS PARALYSIS
“All it means is whatever I do is a little bit harder and probably a little bit slower. And that's basically it. Everybody has their cross to bear-- everybody.
I made a promise to myself on day one [after my injury].  I was not going to allow it to alter my life.
It's very easy to be characterized by the externalities in your life. I dislike people focusing on it. I made a vow when I was injured that it would never be what would characterize my life.  I don't want it to be the first line of my obituary. If it is, that will be a failure.”

2018 Dumb Democrat Cartoons

House to vote on high-stakes, longshot GOP immigration bills after sparks fly between top Republicans

Tucker: The Left doesn't believe Americas has the right to stop poor people from coming over our southern border under any circumstances, legal or not. Most voters disagree with that. It would be nice to have an honest national debate about this before the midterm elections. But that's the last thing Democrats want. They'd lose. So instead they're whipping their supporters into a frenzy of mindless rage. #Tucker
The House of Representatives is barreling toward votes on two major Trump-backed immigration proposals Thursday, but both bills appeared to have little chance of passage as tensions between feuding GOP factions boiled over this week.
For congressional Republicans -- who suffered an embarrassing defeat last year in a failed vote to repeal key elements of ObamaCare -- securing immigration reform has been a key goal ahead of November's midterm elections.
The stakes for the votes are particularly high, as they will come just one day after President Donald Trump signed a surprise executive order to end the separations of families who illegally enter the country.
One of the bills, a compromise approach branded by Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., as the "president's bill," would appropriate funding for Trump's proposed border wall, to the tune of $25 billion. It would also provide a pathway to citizenship for nearly 1.8 million so-called "Dreamers," illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. at a young age.
The other bill up for a vote Thursday, put together by House Judiciary Chair Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., takes a more conservative approach. It would afford the nearly 700,000 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients only a temporarily protected legal status that could be indefinitely renewed, rather than a full pathway to citizenship.

Protections for recipients of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program are at stake in the two House votes.  (AP)

And it would authorize approximately $25 billion for the border wall and security on the border -- but the money would not formally be appropriated, which a senior House GOP leadership aide told Fox News was important to the president.
Neither solution faces good odds Thursday. Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., chairman of the influential conservative House Freedom Caucus, openly derided the compromise approach Wednesday.

“The compromise bill is not ready for prime time,” Meadows told reporters. “There are things that were supposed to be in the compromise bill that are not in the compromise bill that we had all agreed to.”
LIVID MARK MEADOWS CONFRONTS PAUL RYAN ON HOUSE FLOOR
In a dramatic moment Wednesday, a visibly irate Meadows directly confronted House Speaker Paul Ryan on immigration on the floor of the House, as both Republicans gestured at one another. Sources told Fox News that the dispute stemmed from confusion over which of two immigration bills the House is expected to consider Thursday.
At one point, Meadows said simply, "I'm done! I'm done!" and walked away.
WATCH THE CONFRONTATION ON THE HOUSE FLOOR:
Multiple Republican members told Fox News they were disturbed by the skirmish between Ryan and Meadows. One source said a few members who were a "hard yes" on the immigration legislation were now "squirming" after seeing the confrontation.
Adding to the confusion, the House has also been toying with a third piece of legislation, a modified version of the conservative Goodlatte bill.
Goodlatte told Fox News the modified bill creates a new merit-based immigration category and expands the eligible DACA population.
“We would vote for the modified Goodlatte bill, and we would prefer that because we think it has a better chance of getting a higher vote count,” Meadows said Tuesday night.
Holding a vote on the conservative Goodlatte bill is important for the House leadership, because it would defuse additional efforts by the House Freedom Caucus to derail the vote on the comprehensive federal farm bill set for some point this week. The farm bill would include tighter welfare restrictions.

Advocates of so-called Dreamers, who arrived in the US as young children, protest outside the Capitol in Washington, D.C.  (Reuters)

The conservative Freedom Caucus had threatened to hold up a vote on the farm bill without a vote on the conservative Goodlatte immigration bill.
But on Wednesday, a senior House GOP source told Fox News that getting the necessary votes to pass either bill would be an uphill battle.