Author: Debra Saunders

Tuesday was a beauteous night. Republicans won the Senate handily, picked up 14 House seats and won gubernatorial races in Massachusetts, Maryland and Illinois. Good times. Two big losers weren’t on the ballot. San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer’s super PAC, the NextGen Climate, blew through $65 million to help Democrats who agree with him on […]

“Brittany Maynard died with dignity from brain cancer,” read the headline of a press release issued by the organization Compassion & Choices. Suffering from a vicious form of brain cancer and near the end, the 29-year-old died Saturday surrounded by family and friends in an Oregon home to which she moved so that she could […]

“I would not be inclined to make a political decision on something as serious as Ebola,” Gov. Jerry Brown told the San Francisco Chronicle’s Carla Marinucci on Monday. By Wednesday, California had joined New Jersey and New York in mandating 21-day quarantines for people returning from Ebola-stricken areas if they had contact with infected patients. […]

“The students at the University of California at Berkeley represent a diverse array of students from all walks of life,” begins the student petition. Somehow you just know that before the end, the document will demand that the administration muzzle someone — for the sake of diversity. The spirit of far-left censors trumps exposure to […]

“We don’t agonize. We organize,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi chimed after an editorial board meeting with the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday. 2014 is probably not her favorite year. In 2010, the Democrats lost the House, and she lost the speakership. Polling suggests Democrats will lose more seats in November. Pelosi has become the […]

San Francisco is a cauldron of rights, unless you own a home. Buy a property here and you might as well paint a target on your back. That’s what Dan and Maria Levin discovered after they bought a two-unit North Beach home in 2008. They moved in to the upstairs one-bedroom apartment and told the […]

Most years, California offers up supersize election stories — an embarrassment of riches for the opinion columnist. This year, other states are getting all the drama while California looks as staid as a bored accountant. In 2010, the big story was Meg Whitman’s millions vs. Jerry Brown’s cheapskate comeback campaign. Whitman spent $140 million of […]

If you believe Houston Mayor Annise Parker, then you have to believe that when lawyers for her city subpoenaed five local pastors and demanded their sermons, the episode represented an unfortunate instance of lawyer overreach, with no intent to harass or intimidate the opposition. This story begins in May, when the Houston City Council passed, […]

Supervisor David Chiu wants San Francisco to become the first American city to oppose any ban on sex-selective abortions. It apparently has not occurred to him why no other city has chosen to do so. Journalist Mara Hvistendahl, author of “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men,” […]

In its wisdom (such as it is), the California Legislature passed a measure that would change the standard of sexual consent on the state’s college campuses. Gov. Jerry Brown should veto this bill. If the University of California and other institutions that receive state-funded student aid want to demonstrate they have “no tolerance for any […]

President Barack Obama has moved from being disingenuous on immigration to downright undecipherable. Earlier this year, the administration promised a groundbreaking executive action on immigration before summer’s end. Over the weekend, aides announced that the big new change essentially won’t happen until after the midterm elections. What’s up? Obama told “Meet the Press” host Chuck […]

It was not until Thursday night’s debate in Sacramento between Gov. Jerry Brown and his GOP rival Neel Kashkari that I realized what a gift the challenger has given the Republican Party. Up until then, he hadn’t impressed me much. Had Assemblyman Tim Donnelly won the runoff, he likely would have delivered some bon mots […]

President Barack Obama slipped up last week when he told reporters, “We don’t have a strategy yet” to dispatch the Islamic State. These things happen. On “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., dished out a mild but fitting response to the president’s remarks. “He’s very cautious,” she said. “Maybe in this instance […]

On Aug. 24, United Airlines diverted a Newark-to-Denver flight to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport after two passengers got into an argument. It started when a 47-year-old man used a device called the Knee Defender to prevent the 48-year-old woman in front of him from reclining her seat. According to The Associated Press, a flight attendant […]

San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon charged the aunt of a 2-year-old killed by a hit-and-run driver with felony child endangerment. Loyresha Gage, 25, didn’t run over her niece Mi’yana Gregory as the toddler stood alone in a crosswalk after 10:30 p.m. on Aug. 15; an unknown hit-and-run driver hit the child. Yet it is […]

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told the Asian Chamber of Commerce last week: “The Asian population is so productive. I don’t think you’re smarter than anybody else, but you’ve convinced a lot of us you are.” In remarks videotaped by the GOP group America Rising, Reid also joked that he has trouble keeping his “Wongs […]

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick announced Tuesday that the San Francisco ride-matching company had hired David Plouffe, the campaign manager for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, as a senior vice president/campaign manager. This means war — an epic war — that will pit Uber and the Obama Whisperer against not only what Kalanick calls “the Big […]

The Los Angeles Ethics Commission voted unanimously last week to ask the City Council to consider “financial incentives, such as a lottery system,” to draw voters to the polls. You just know that if the city embraces this new low, then it will spread like a cancer across the land. The City of Angels has […]

When Al-Jazeera bought Current TV for $500 million in January 2013, former Vice President Al Gore, who co-founded Current, praised the deal. Both Al-Jazeera, a network owned by Qatar’s oil-rich royal family, and his far-left Current TV, Gore said, were founded “to give voice to those who are not typically heard; to speak truth to […]

“You can make money without doing evil” is No. 6 on the list of 10 things Google (the corporation) knows to be true. The Google list leaves out a few caveats. Like: You can make more money flouting antitrust laws. You can pay your brainiacs less if they believe you will retaliate if they try […]

Sen. Dianne Feinstein is a woman on a mission. As chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she has set out to prove the illogical — that enhanced interrogation techniques used for a time under the George W. Bush administration constituted torture: and: that they never produced useful intelligence. Americans are supposed to believe that top terrorists are […]

In the past few weeks, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has referred to Hamas as a “humanitarian organization,” likened the thousands of unaccompanied minors at the U.S. border to the “baby Jesus” and flouted House etiquette by heckling a GOP member. When Republicans talk that way, it’s a story. Not with Pelosi. “Not a single […]

The (well-funded, I am sure) opposition to San Francisco Supervisor Scott Wiener’s ballot measure to tax soda and other sugary drinks calls itself the Coalition for an Affordable City. Its website features owners of corner markets explaining how the proposed tax would hurt their businesses and expressing their bewilderment at City Hall’s picking on hardworking […]

In June, President Barack Obama sent a letter to Congress asking for help to address the surge of illegal crossings at the Texas-Mexico border. Among other items, Obama asked Congress to grant him the legal authority “to exercise discretion in processing the return and removal of unaccompanied minor children from non-contiguous countries like Guatemala, Honduras, […]

The New York Times has seen the light. On Sunday, the paper editorialized in favor of an end to the federal ban on marijuana. According to Tony Newman of the Drug Policy Alliance, The Gray Lady has become the first major national newspaper to support legalizing marijuana. The Times did not celebrate marijuana use; it […]

The FBI’s motto is “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.” But given the FBI sting against Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow — a convicted felon who was freed from prison in 2003 because the feds got him to testify against a confederate — I suspect that a more apt motto might be “Fuggedaboutit.” On Thursday, San Francisco Chronicle columnists […]

Why isn’t Mexico doing more to deter unaccompanied minors from Central America from traversing Mexico to cross the U.S.-Mexico border? If this is a humanitarian crisis, then shouldn’t Mexico be taking in its neighbors? Mexico’s secretary of foreign affairs, Jose Antonio Meade, met with the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board Tuesday, so I had a […]

Who will be the GOP nominee in 2016? I don’t know, but I have a pretty good idea who the running mate will be: Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky. Unless Paul is the nominee. A new NBC News/Marist poll found that Paul would be the top GOP vote-getter against Hillary Clinton in critically important Iowa […]

A — all bow — federal judge has ruled that California’s death penalty is unconstitutional because the state’s “dysfunctional administration” has meted out the punishment to more than 900 murderers but imposed it on “only 13” since 1978. That’s too arbitrary, wrote U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney of Santa Ana. Besides, “the slight possibility […]