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Debra Saunders      

Columnist & White House Correspondent for The Las Vegas Review-Journal

Debra J. Saunders (born 1954) is a conservative columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Syndicated by Creators Syndicate, her thrice weekly column is also carried by newspapers throughout the country and on townhall.com. Saunders also blogs for the Chronicle under the moniker Token Conservative. Between 1987 and 1992, Saunders was a columnist and editorial writer for the Los Angeles Daily News. She has previously worked for conservative advocacy groups and for a Republican leader of the California State Assembly. In addition to her columns, she has also written for The Wall Street Journal, National Review and Reader's Digest. She is the author of one book, The World According to Gore (ISBN 1-893554-14-7). Saunders is married to Wesley J. Smith, a lawyer, author, and senior fellow in bioethics at the Discovery Institute. Although viewed by some as a conservative Republican, Saunders consistently opposed the War on Drugs. She has also campaigned in her column for President Bush to issue more pardons and sentence commutations and supports same-sex marriage. Saunders voted against Proposition 22 but was critical of the California Supreme Court decision which legalized same-sex marriage. In 2007, she penned an article that criticized the imprisoned freelance blogger Josh Wolf, although she opposed his imprisonment. Saunders is also a vocal global warming skeptic who believes neither worrisome predictions of global warming nor optimistic economic scenarios underlying the fight against climate change. In 2011, she was the first to break the story about the comic and trading card series Foreskin Man,[8] which was being used to promote a ballot initiative to ban circumcision in San Francisco.

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