Author: Debra Saunders

In the “Star Trek” movies, San Francisco serves as headquarters of Starfleet Command. This cracks me up to no end, as I cannot imagine the Board of Supervisors approving construction of Starfleet Academy or the oddly shaped high-rises you see in the background. And if City Hall somehow did approve the project, you know there’d […]

Pete Stark’s name didn’t come up Tuesday night at the Castro Valley Library candidates forum for the congressional district Stark represented from 1972 to 2012. The fact that nobody seemed to miss the California Democrat should serve as a warning to politicians who think they own their seats. So thought Stark, until fellow Democrat Eric […]

Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy and his well-armed supporters forced the well-armed federal government to back down and return Bundy’s seized cows — which were seized because Bundy, 67, stopped paying grazing fees in 1993. How does anyone get the government to back down? At first blush, Bundy seemed to have right on his side. […]

The Social Security Disability Insurance program is in big trouble. In 2016, the program’s trust fund is expected to run out of money. When that happens, there will be “large across-the-board cuts for all beneficiaries,” warn James Lankford, the Republican chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees entitlements, and Jackie Speier, the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat. […]

Barbara Bush was right when she pooh-poohed son Jeb’s interest in running for the White House in 2016. Forget political dynasties — Bushes, Kennedys and, yes, Clintons — the former first lady told NBC last year. “We’ve had enough Bushes.” She also said: “There are a lot of great families, and it’s not just four […]

“While painful, the events of the last week show exactly why we need the (Web). So all of us can engage freely in the tough conversations we need to make the world better.” That moment of fantasy came courtesy of Mozilla Chairwoman Mitchell Baker as she announced last week that Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, […]

After the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 5-4 decision Wednesday that threw out a cap on the total amount wealthy donors can give to federal candidates in an election season, Democrats and self-proclaimed do-gooders cried foul at the prospect of more big money’s tainting Washington politics. Federal law continues to cap individual contributions to congressional […]

Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, gave $1,000 to Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure passed by a majority of California voters to limit marriage to one man and one woman. The U.S. Supreme Court voided the measure, but the hate campaign against its supporters lives on. There’s a Twitter campaign to force Eich to step […]

Should Congress repeal Obamacare? If you had asked that before the botched Affordable Care Act rollout, I would have had a hard time answering yes. I didn’t see how the scheme could work, but I also believed that Washington owed the millions of Americans who I was told had been waiting desperately for years for […]

Observers have likened the federal case against state Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, and 25 others to the film “American Hustle,” about an FBI Abscam-like sting that used a small-time con man to win corruption convictions against public officials. I hope it is not like another Hollywood film, “The Departed,” about a well-connected FBI informant […]

Actor-turned-producer Robert Redford boasts that his new CNN series, “Death Row Stories,” is “about the search for justice and truth.” That’s odd, because the series has aired three episodes and they’re all about victims of prosecutorial abuse. So far, nobody’s really guilty. The second episode features a woman who never spent a night on death […]

Until this month, supporters of racial preferences in California have enjoyed a cozy narrative. They were able to dismiss the 55 percent of voters who passed Proposition 209, which barred race and gender preferences in university admissions, hiring and public contracts in 1996, as over-entitled fear-obsessed white folks with little understanding of and sympathy for […]

Of course Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg is right to point out that “bossy,” the other B-word, is often used to discourage girls — and later women — from becoming leaders. “Words like bossy send a message: don’t raise your hand or speak up,” says the website of her “Ban Bossy” campaign. “By middle […]

Even though it was in Burlingame, one might have expected the California Republican Party’s weekend convention to feel a bit like the last days of Pompeii. The Dems hold every statewide office and control both houses of the Legislature. Still, GOP Chairman Jim Brulte managed to halt an orgy of panic. In a chat with […]

Billionaire David Green’s success story could come straight from Silicon Valley. He started his business in a garage in 1970. Through hard work and innovation, he built a business that employs more than 13,000 full-time workers. He determined to treat his employees well, providing health care and setting a higher in-house minimum wage for staff. […]

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein “reluctantly” accused the CIA on Tuesday of spying on her committee. The CIA should be very afraid. DiFi has stood out as Langley’s fiercest Democratic defender. Now she threatens to become the agency’s biggest nightmare. Edward Snowden accused Feinstein of hypocrisy for protesting when spooks spy on Congress but […]

“It is time to give America a raise,” President Barack Obama proclaimed in support of his proposal to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 by 2016. Many Republicans in Washington oppose the Democrats’ proposed wage hike of nearly 40 percent. Former Republican candidate for governor of California Ron Unz, however, […]

Former IRS official Lois Lerner invoked her Fifth Amendment right Wednesday not to incriminate herself when she testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the IRS targeting of tea party groups. Oddly, the news media and Democratic leaders don’t think it’s a big deal when a federal official — Lerner was […]

The story starts with a former journalist and Harvard Law School graduate who wanted to improve conditions for Ecuadorean people living in the Amazon rain forest, polluted by a big oil company. In 2011, attorney Steven Donziger won a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron Corp. But don’t expect a happy ending for his clients. On […]

Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Calif., set out to celebrate Cinco de Mayo in 2010 in a “spirit of cultural appreciation.” It didn’t work out that way. Some students decided they wanted to celebrate by wearing shirts with the American flag. Other students objected. A student warned an administrator she thought there would […]

The first thing you should know is that I’m guilty. I am a part-time professional dress code offender. I wear jeans to work when I don’t plan on interviewing anyone that day. I used to keep a pair of flip-flops under my desk. For all I know, they’re still there, buried under something else. When […]

President Barack Obama called Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s bluff Tuesday. Obama let it be known that because Karzai is unlikely to sign a bilateral security agreement — essential to keeping some U.S. troops in Afghanistan after 2014 — he had asked the Pentagon to work on a plan to withdraw all troops before 2015. Obama […]

It is a happy conceit in the climate change community that true believers are sophisticated, fact-based practitioners of science and that skeptics essentially are a bunch of superstitious nitwits who refuse to respect the — all bow — climate change consensus. If that were true, you would expect the science-loving know-it-alls to welcome opportunities to […]

On the day that Facebook paid $19 billion for the aptly named WhatsApp, San Francisco’s Gap Inc. announced it would raise its minimum wage for American employees to $9 per hour this year and $10 per hour in 2015. The announcement probably won’t make a dent in the income inequality gap in the Bay Area, […]

Let the reader beware. At a recent confab at a billionaire’s ranch, an elite gathering of business titans agreed to spend $100 million — thanks to legal loopholes that allow them to skirt federal campaign contribution limits — to elect like-minded politicians who will help them halt the wheels of government, move their party further […]

I have found the issue that can bring America together. Republicans and Democrats, urban hipsters and country folk, corporate scions and infrequent fliers — they all seem to agree: The federal government must not allow mobile phone use on planes. If the Federal Communications Commission allows airlines with properly equipped planes to open the cellphone […]

Do Americans want another Clinton in the White House? As former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton flirts with running in 2016, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., also a potential White House candidate, has put an interesting spin on Bill Clinton’s White House years. Democrats shouldn’t accuse the GOP of waging a “war on women,” he recently […]

In 2010, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi touted the Affordable Care Act as a bill “not only about the health security of America; it’s about jobs. In its life, it will create 4 million jobs, 400,000 jobs almost immediately.” A newly released Congressional Budget Office analysis reported that Obamacare is expected to shrink the workforce by […]

The apparent heroin overdose death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman already has become a hockey puck in the war over the war on drugs. During a House subcommittee hearing on federal marijuana policy Tuesday, critics of the war on drugs hammered a White House drug official for putting too much emphasis on marijuana when Washington […]

The real “war on women” isn’t happening in Washington; it is happening in Hollywood and New York or wherever men such as Woody Allen and Roman Polanski sit in a director’s chair and are feted as great artists and hence great men. As Elizabeth Taylor once said, “success is a great deodorant.” Over the weekend, […]