Debra Saunders – Will be pepper-sprayed for cash

Commenting on the settlement received by the U.C. Davis students who were pepper sprayed during a peaceful sit down demonstration on campus last November, Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders offers to get herself pepper sprayed for the $30,000 settlement each student was awarded by the University. http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/UC-Davis-pepper-sprayed-students-settle-3896116.php  (Read the very thoughtful comments too; they are eloquent and make me feel this blog is redundant.) 

I’d like to see that.  

The trouble with this story, as with much of Saunders’ jaundiced and skewed view of the world, is that she twists the truth just enough to weight the story in her favor.  In Debra’s world, because the students sat down in protest of tuition hikes, they were asking to be pepper sprayed, and cannot now cry foul over that treatment. What she doesn’t say is that the Davis students were also protesting police brutality used against peacefully protesting Berkeley students just days before.  http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/11/20/18700509.php

 

But Debra doesn’t let the facts get in way of good rant.  In some bizarre alternate reality, Debra tells us the students surrounded the cops, refused to leave and got pepper-sprayed for their threatening posture.  Once again, it is clear to me that Debra must phone this column in from outer space.  Her own paper carried the story and the photos showing students seated on the ground, arms linked together  being pepper sprayed. While other students may have protested outside the police circle, the ones who got sprayed were the ones on the ground.   

Civil disobedience is a longstanding tactic of the civil rights movement, but where does it say that when college students engage in it, whether protesting tuition hikes, striking for free speech or showing solidarity for fellow students, those people protesting become willing participants in having their eyes doused in chemicals designed to be used to subdue vicious dogs, riot control or personal self-defense.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_spray

 

Here are some other fun facts about pepper spray Debra might want to ponder before offering up her eyes:

 “When sprayed directly at the face, the effects of pepper spray can be severely incapacitating, invoking temporary blindness, breathing difficulties, a long-lasting burning sensation and severe coughing, with effects lasting anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes. Although pepper spray is deemed a non-lethal agent, studies suggest that high levels of exposure can have serious health effects. A 1999 report on the health effects of pepper spray by researchers at Duke University and the University of North Carolina states (pdf):

“Depending on brand, an OC spray may contain water, alcohols, or organic solvents as liquid carriers; and nitrogen, carbon dioxide, or halogenated hydrocarbons (such as Freon, tetrachloroethylene, and methylene chloride) as propellants to discharge the canister contents.(3) Inhalation of high doses of some of these chemicals can produce adverse cardiac, respiratory, and neurologic effects, including arrhythmias and sudden death.” Pepper spray by Brianna Lee,   http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/five-things/pepper-spray/12472/

 

So, is pepper spray a proper response to peacefully demonstrating?  Especially the military grade pepper spray used by the Davis police.  There seems to be a trend among the right these days that civil rights were something that happened in the past and are only for African Americans. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/24/ann-coulter_n_1908958.html  (Also see this blog on that very subject, Ann Coulter on "Civil Rights" - Bring on the Exorcist, http://greendogdemocrat.blogspot.com/2012/09/ann-coulter-on-civil-rights-bring-on.html). 

 

Everyone else, I guess, who speaks out about unfair conditions, deserves pepper spray in the eyes. What next, Debra, dogs attacking striking teachers?  Fire hoses for veterans marching for health benefits? How much would you take for those experiences?

Poor Little Desperate Debra Saunders

Really Reaching Saunders:

Poor Debra Saunders, she's getting a little desperate this week.  It must be tough being a Republican in a Democratic Town, but she gets a column in the San Francisco Chronicle at least twice a week, and more this week.  (One of these days they'll get around to firing her and hiring me, or at least inviting me to post my blogs as a counter point, but I'm not holding my breath.)  First there was her column taking the Democrats to task for saying that the Republican's (Mitt's) economic plan was to give tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans while taxing the middle class more to pay for it.  Well, says Debra there's no evidence for that. The Dems just use the analysis provided by the Tax Policy Center.  

Well, Debra, where's your evidence that it's not true?  She doesn't cite a single reference for her supposition. What the Tax Policy Center did was analyze what they know of Mitt's plan pointing out they have to take what he says and make assumptions based on that because "Governor Romney has not offered a fully-specified plan. He has been explicit about the tax cuts he has in mind, including a one-fifth reduction in marginal tax rates from today’s level, which would drop the top rate from 35 percent to 28 percent and a cut in capital gains and dividend taxes for families with incomes below $200,000. He and his team have also said that reform should be revenue-neutral and not increase taxes on capital gains and dividends. But they have not provided any detail about what tax preferences they would cut to make up lost revenue."

Such a revenue neutral plan would logically "reduce taxes for high-income households, requiring higher taxes on middle- or low-income households. I doubt that’s his intent, but it is an implication of what we can tell about his plan so far." Understanding TPC’s Analysis of Governor Romney’s Tax Plan by Donald Marron.

Even Debra was forced to admit that Romney was vague about his policies, and that the Tax Policy Center's assumptions were logical given the information provided.  But, she continues, Romney would never raise taxes on the middle class.  Don't hold your breath.

Pro-life Saunders:

In today's column, she asks "where are the pro life Democrats."  Newsflash for Debra, we are all pro-life. We are also mostly pro-choice.  As in women should be able to make their own choices about their own bodies. It's not one or the other.  The anti-choice crowd calls themselves pro-life, but they are for the most part, anti-life, after that life is a born human being anyway.

Easy to love the fetus. No muss, no fuss.  No cost except for pre-natal care, which the I'm not sure how the Republicans feel about paying for for poor women, but I can guess.  Obamacare, as we are all now calling it, is a truly pro-life program.  Just ask that mom of the little girl with the heart condition who won't be kicked off her insurance plan by the time she's five - unless Romney is elected.  

Two Faced Republicans

I guess flip flopping and contradictions are natural to Republicans. Romney was for Obamacare, when it was called Romneycare, and he instituted it in Massachusetts, before he was against it, and Paul Ryan, who is ready to disembowel Obamacare if he and Romney are elected, in 2010 requested a grant that would be funded from that program for his own State.  What's that old song from the cold war era - the era the Republicans want to take us back to?  Oh yeah, "Two Faces Have I" 

Debra Saunders - Half Right

So, in today's Chronicle, Debra Saunders got it half-right.  Her column concerned dunderheaded Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin and his (as Saunders put it) "inglorious answer: 'From what I understand from doctors, that's really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let's assume that maybe that didn't work or something: You know, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist and not attacking the child.'" 

Truly awful, anti-woman, anti-science, inhumane and really, really stupid.  When he tried to backtrack, he just made it worse, revealing incredible ignorance and misogyny.  Again in Saunders' words, his lame apology and stated empathy for women who are raped was "Too late. I think voters know exactly what Akin thinks of rape victims: If they get pregnant, they wanted it."

So far so good, right?  But wait, there's more, as they say on the infomercials for spray on hair and slice and dice-o-matics.  Debra Saunders cannot miss an opportunity to stick it to Democrats, and she gets in her jabs here. 

After making disparaging remarks about Obama, Barbara Boxer and Akin's opponent in the Senate race, sitting Senator Claire McCaskill, she says: "The so-called Republican "war on women" is a crock - a cynical ploy to gin up the Dems' distaff base."  say what?  Didn't you hear what you just said this creep Akin said?  If that's not fueling the Republican war on women, what is it?  He said that because there IS a war on women and he's just a less articulate soldier than his fellow Reps who are busy gutting abortion rights, defunding Planned Parenthood and even trying to take away birth control options.

If it walks and quacks and so forth, it is one genuine Baby Huey.  A big duck bill raspberry for Debra Saunders today.

 

 

Still Talking about Citizens United - Free Speech ain't Free

Debra Saunders, in her latest SFgate column, takes us on a joyride with the corporate spinmeisters now benefiting from the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizen's United, the landmark case that equates speech with money in the most blatant way yet, opening the floodgates to corporations to pour gazillions into ads for their favorite candidates.

But this free speech, says Saunders, merely a level playing field, since labor unions are also afforded this privilege, a comparison that brings to mind the famous quote of Anatole France that "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."  Let's be real, unions may have some clout left on the campaign front, but they are nowhere tipping the scales in their favor when corporate bars of gold weigh down the other side of the political scale.

In this particular column, Saunders' barbed words are aimed at a favorite target of hers: the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, who recently joined a growing number of municipalities calling for a Constitutional amendment overturning the Citizens United decision and undoing the concept of corporate personhood (a concept that first appeared in another Supreme Court decision, the Gilded-Age decision called Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railway Company).  

Corporations says Saunders "don't have the same rights as people: they can't vote and they can't run for office."  No but they can buy votes and decide who runs for, and wins, public office, not to mention grease the halls of Congress and state Capitols with their "free speech" dollars.

If you don't believe that,  you are free to look for them under the bridge with the poor people exercising their free speech rights with signs saying "homeless corporation; will peddle influence for cash."