Author: Debra Saunders

The star of a CNN film, “Documented,” journalist Jose Antonio Vargas went to Texas to bring attention to the 57,000 unaccompanied minors who have crossed the border illegally since October. On Tuesday, authorities detained Vargas at McAllen/Miller International Airport because his Philippine passport lacks a U.S. visa. Within hours, Immigration and Customs Enforcement released him. […]

California is in the midst of a sort-of statewide election recount. Will it be like Florida in 2000? Hardly. This isn’t a heated national contest to see which party occupies the Oval Office. It’s about the unsexy state controller’s office and which Democrat — former Assembly Speaker John Perez or Board of Equalization member Betty […]

A group called Fossil Free UC wants regents to divest the University of California’s endowment fund of all fossil fuel holdings. “As one of the leading public institutions in the world, we have the privilege and the responsibility to take action where we can influence change,” Fossil Free UC explains on its website. This is […]

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews he thinks that Mitt Romney will run for president in 2016 and that “he will be the next president of the United States.” The former Massachusetts governor lost the GOP primary in 2008 and then the general election in 2012. What would his 2016 slogan be, “the […]

In January, President Barack Obama outlined his strategy for 2014. “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” he said. The president planned on using his pen to sign executive and administrative orders and his phone to call outside groups — not Congress — to rally behind his pet programs. Obama forgot to mention […]

Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., and Republican Texas Gov. Rick Perry faced off Thursday at a House Homeland Security Committee field hearing in McAllen, Texas, on the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. There’s no question there’s a crisis. In 2011, some 4,000 unaccompanied children were caught after crossing into the United States. In 2012, the number […]

A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences could mean bad news for environmental doomsayers. Forget all those warnings about the million tons of plastic debris floating in the ocean. Ignore the photos that you think show the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Andres Cozar of the University of Cadiz in Spain […]

How did women get birth control before President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act? Before Obamacare, a woman could go to a doctor and get birth control. She often had to pay or make a copayment for contraception. But in the 2014 political lexicon, that means she had no access. On Monday, the Supreme Court issued […]

When I think of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, I think of the decadeslong building of the new eastern span, the shameless political grandstanding for a project that ran $5 billion over budget — and the construction headaches that live on. Brian Maroney, Caltrans’ chief engineer for the bridge, sees something entirely different. He sees […]

It’s time to pass the hat for Hillary Clinton. The former secretary of state has tried to distance herself from her weeks-ago assertion that after husband Bill left the White House, the couple were “dead broke.” She told PBS that the line was “inartful,” but only after she told a British paper that she does […]

The New York Times reports that House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy is considered “the best hope” to win passage of a comprehensive immigration reform bill in Congress after he becomes majority leader in July. It’s sort of quaint how the Gray Lady wants to believe in miracles. If a comprehensive bill — such as the […]

“Pee in a cup” is a phrase you should prepare to hear frequently this election season. A requirement that doctors be subject to random drug and alcohol testing is the curb-appeal provision in a measure that will be on the California ballot in November. The brains behind the initiative titled the Troy and Alana Pack […]

“We have to send a clear message. Just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay. So we don’t want to send a message that is contrary to our laws or will encourage more children to make that dangerous journey.” Who said that on CNN on Tuesday? Anti-amnesty […]

When Barack Obama became the Democratic presidential front-runner in 2008, Europeans went gaga. An estimated 200,000 turned out to hear Obama proclaim himself “a fellow citizen of the world” in Berlin. The Guardian described the speech as “a promise to end the unilateralism of the early Bush years” and said that “the crowd could not […]

National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden has found the court of public opinion to be far more receptive than a court of law. He conducts the occasional interview with seemingly sympathetic journalists. NBC News aired one such interview with anchorman Brian Williams on Wednesday night. “Do you see yourself as a patriot?” Williams asked. “I […]

How is it possible that the FBI agent who shot and killed an associate of a suspected Boston Marathon bomber has been pocketing more than $50,000 annually in disability benefits since he retired as an Oakland, California, police officer in 2004 at age 31? On May 22, 2013, Ibragim Todashev of Orlando, Florida, allegedly had […]

If his story were a movie, then Gus’ tale would start before he was born in December 2009. It would begin in a fertility clinic, where actor Jason Patric donated sperm so that his ex-girlfriend Danielle Schreiber could have a baby. Later, his parents would reunite and then split up and then, after a contentious […]

“San Francisco, open your Golden Gate. You’ll let nobody wait outside your door.” Those are the lyrics of the city’s signature song, but now somebody should call “rewrite.” On Tuesday, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency voted to bar nonresidents’ cars from the crooked part of Lombard Street on Saturday and Sunday afternoons between June […]

Academia is hell. In the latest higher-education fad, students want “trigger warnings,” according to The New York Times. It appears that some students are so fragile that they want university staff to protect them from big bad ideas. Students around the country say they want “explicit alerts that the material they are about to read […]

There are certain elections that make you want to wash your hands before voting. And that usually has something to do with the candidates. In California’s 10th Senate District, two Democrats who have served in the California Assembly want to fill the state Senate seat of termed-out Ellen Corbett. Former Assemblywoman Mary Hayashi is best-known […]

First the censorious left went after Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born critic of Islam’s treatment of women, after Brandeis University had invited her to receive an honorary degree. Bowing to political correctness, Brandeis rescinded the invitation. Then the academic mob went after Rutgers’ choice for commencement speaker, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She withdrew. […]

A poll released last week reported that 7 percent of American journalists say they are Republicans. The survey also found that the news force is aging, having a median age of 47. And 62 percent of journalists are men. A mere 8.5 percent of full-timers are minorities. Less than 1 in 4 are “very satisfied” […]

It tells you how completely California has become a one-party state that practically no one in Sacramento believes that a Republican can beat Gov. Jerry Brown in November. But GOP big shots think it is very important which Republican loses to Brown, 76, in November — former Treasury official Neel Kashkari or Assemblyman Tim Donnelly. […]

“It’s time to burn the beret and bury the blue dress,” Monica Lewinsky, now 40, writes in a Vanity Fair essay due for digital release today. All I can say is: You go, girl. The 1998 revelation of L’Affaire Lewinsky and its fallout should have made one thing clear to American women. Forget “You’ve come […]

“Dude, this was, like, two years ago.” Thus spake former National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor on Thursday after Fox News Channel anchorman Bret Baier asked him whether he had been involved in changing talking points to prepare then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice for Sunday talk shows in the wake of the […]

MOBILE, Ala. — “That situation didn’t define who I was,” Clarence Aaron, 45, told a group gathered for a weekend celebration at the Mobile high school he attended about two decades ago. When, at age 24, he found himself in federal prison in 1993 — after he was convicted and sentenced to life without parole […]

News reports this week were filled with lamentations from death penalty opponents about the messy and unnecessarily painful execution of Oklahoma’s Clayton Lockett. As Andrew Cohen wrote in The Atlantic, Oklahoma corrections officials “were using an untested mix of lethal drugs, never previously used in that dosage combination, obtained through secret means, which precluded the […]

If ever there was a city built on the bedrock belief that the government should stay out of the bedroom, it is San Francisco — unless you own the bedroom. Then you are not free to do whatever you want with the bedroom, because people who are not owners control what you can do with […]

According to experts cited by The New York Times, President Barack Obama’s eventual decision on the Keystone XL pipeline — last week, the administration once again postponed a decision — “will have a marginal impact on global warming emissions.” The global economy releases lots of greenhouse gas — 32.6 billion metric tons of carbon in […]

When Barack Obama ran for the White House in 2008, federal inmates and their families believed that if he won, miracles would follow. They were convinced that the former law professor and critic of federal mandatory minimum sentences would be liberal with his unfettered constitutional power to free low-level and nonviolent offenders sentenced to decades, […]