Sarah Palin, Who is she...

As the Republican convention gets underway despite Gustav’s interference--- Can you just imagine, this beautiful lady is potentially a heart beat away from being the president of the United States of America.

By de Andréa

The judges must be crazy!
Of course she looks a little more mature these days. Here she is, Miss Alaska. Well not quite, as I said the judges must be crazy, she was first nunnery-up in the Miss Alaska beauty pageant. Let’s hope she is not runner up as vice president.

In a few weeks you might just be one of the lucky people who will have the privilege to vote for this lady to be the second in command of the most powerful and influential country in the world. I think the Framers would approve. Reaganisque in her politics, Governor Sarah Palin may just be the energy that catapults Senator McCain over the top and into the white house. In reading below about Governor Palin’s early life you will soon recognize a pattern of leadership emerging right from the get go.



Sarah Louise Heath Palin; was born February 11, 1964 and is the current governor of the great northern state of Alaska.

Sworn in On December 4, 2006, Sarah Palin became the first woman and youngest person to hold the office of governor of Alaska. She defeated incumbent Republican governor Frank Murkowski in the Republican primary and former Democrat governor Tony Knowles in the general election. Palin served two terms on the Wasilla, city council from 1992 to 1996, and then won two terms as mayor of Wasilla from 1996 to 2002.

After an unsuccessful campaign for lieutenant governor of Alaska in 2002, she chaired the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission from 2003 to 2004 while also serving as Ethics Supervisor of the commission. And they say she has no experience, tisk, tisk…

Sarah’s early life and education
Palin was born Sarah Louise Heath in Sandpoint Idaho, the daughter of Sarah Heath Sheeran, a school secretary, and Charles R. Heath, a science teacher and track coach. She is of English, Irish and German ancestry. Her family moved to Alaska when she was just an infant. She and her father would sometimes wake at 3 a.m. to hunt moose before school, and the family regularly ran 5K and 10K races. As Dick, a subscriber of mine says, amen and pass the ammunition! This is the first time in this campaign that I was Happy and excited, not exasperated!! Any woman who gets up and has shot her moose before breakfast gets my vote!!

Sarah Palin attended Wasilla High School in Wasilla Alaska, where she was the head of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter at the school and the point guard and captain of the school's basketball team. Despite having an ankle stress fracture at the time, she helped the team win the Alaska small-school basketball championship in 1982 by hitting a critical free throw in the last seconds of the game... She earned the nickname "Sarah Barracuda" because of her intense play and was the leader of team prayer before games. In her high-school yearbook, she stated that her professional ambition was to sit in a broadcast booth with sports journalist Howard Cosell and broadcast basketball games starring her boyfriend at the time, Todd Palin.

In 1984, Palin won the Miss Wasilla beauty contest, and subsequently finished second in the Miss Alaska pageant, at which she won a college scholarship. In the Wasilla pageant, she played the flute and won Miss Congeniality. .Palin attended Hawaii Pacific College in Hilo Hawaii in 1982 for a semester, where she majored in Business Administration, and then transferred in 1983 to North Idaho College. In 1987, Palin received a Bachelor of Science degree in communications-journalism from the University of Idaho, where she also minored in political science. She worked briefly as a sports reporter for KTUU-TV in Anchorage, Alaska, and also helped out in her husband’s family commercial fishing business.

Personal life and family
Palin is a self-described "hockey mom" and mother of five. She hunts, goes ice fishing, eats moose-burgers, rides snowmobiles, has run a marathon, and fly’s her own floatplane

Religion
Sarah Palin was originally baptized as a Roman Catholic, but her parents switched to the Wasilla Assembly of God, a Pentecostal church where she was re-baptized at age 12. When she is in the capital, she attends Juneau Christian Center, another Assemblies of God church. Her current home church in Wasilla is The Church on the Rock, an independent congregation. Although initial reports described her as the first Pentecostal ever named to a major party's presidential ticket, Palin describes herself as a non- denominational Christian.

Palin eloped with her high-school boyfriend, Todd Palin, on August 29, 1988, when she was 24 years old. "It was a shock but she did it because we couldn’t afford a big white wedding", her mother said. Todd works for the oil company BP as an oil-field production operator, , and is registered to vote as an independent ("non-partisan").He is a Bristol Bay salmon set-netter and owns a commercial fishing business. He is a champion snowmobiler, winning the 2,000-mile (3,200 km) "Iron Dog" race four times. The family lives in Wasilla.

The couple has five children: sons Track (19) and Trig (4 months) and daughters Bristol (17), Willow (14) and Piper (7) [ages as of August 2008]. Palin's son Track enlisted in the Army on September 11, 2007, subsequently joining an infantry brigade, and Palin has said he will be deployed to Iraq on September 11, 2008. Palin's youngest child, Trig, has Down syndrome. While Sarah Palin was encouraged by the medical community to abort the child she has said that she feels blessed that God chose them to raise the special child... The pro-life community has applauded her decision to have the baby.

Early political career
After her leadership roll in her children’s PTA Sarah began her political career in 1992 when running for Wasilla city council, supporting a controversial new sales tax and advocating a safer, more progressive Wasilla. She won and served two terms on the council from 1992 to 1996.

In 1996, she challenged and defeated incumbent mayor John Stein, criticizing wasteful spending and high taxes. Palin fulfilled campaign promises to reduce the salary of the mayor, and to reduce property taxes by 40 percent. She increased the city sales tax to pay for construction of an indoor ice rink and sports complex. At this time, state Republican leaders began grooming her for higher office. She ran for re-election as mayor against Stein in 1999, winning by a 50% margin. Palin was also elected president of the Alaska Conference of Mayors. In 2002, term limits prevented Palin from running for a third term as mayor.

2002 run for Lieutenant Governor
In 2002, Palin made an unsuccessful bid for lieutenant governor, coming in second in a five-way race in the Republican primary.

Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commissioner
Governor Murkowski appointed Palin to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, where she chaired the Commission from 2003 to 2004, and also served as Ethics Supervisor. Palin resigned in January 2004 in protest over what she called the "lack of ethics" of fellow Republican members.

After resigning, Palin filed formal complaints against the state Republican Party's chairman, Randy Ruedrich, and former Alaska Attorney General Gregg Renkes. She accused Ruedrich, one of her fellow commissioners, of doing work for the party on public time and working closely with a company he was supposed to be regulating. Ruedrich and Renkes both resigned and Ruedrich paid a record $12,000 fine.

From 2003 to June 2005, Palin served as a director of "Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service, Inc.," a 547 group that was designed to serve as a political boot camp for Republican women.

In 2006, running on a clean-government platform, Palin defeated then-Governor Murkowski in the Republican gubernatorial primary. Her running mate was State Senator Sean Parnell

In August, she declared that education, public safety, and transportation would be the three cornerstones of her administration. Despite spending less than her Democratic opponent, she won the gubernatorial election in November, defeating former Governor Tony Knowles 48.3 percent to 40.9 percent.

Sarah Palin’s first order of Business challenged the state Republican establishment.
Palin endorsed Parnell's bid to unseat the state's longtime at-large U.S. Congressman, Don Young. Palin also publicly challenged Senator Ted Stevens to come clean about the federal investigation into his financial dealings. Shortly after, Stevens was indicted on corruption charges. This is one tough lady…oh yea!

On energy and environment
Palin has strongly promoted oil and natural gas resource development in Alaska, including in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), where such development has been the subject of a national debate. She also helped pass a tax increase on oil company profits. Palin has followed through on plans to create a new sub-cabinet group of advisers to address climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions within Alaska. However, when asked about climate change after becoming Senator McCain's presumptive running mate, she stated that it would "affect Alaska more than any other state", but she does not "attribute global warming to being man-made".

Sarah cleans house
Shortly after taking office, Palin rescinded 35 appointments made by Murkowski in the last hours of his administration, including that of his former chief of staff James "Jim" Clark to the Alaska Natural Gas Development Authority. Clark later plead guilty to conspiring with a defunct oil-field-services company to channel money into Frank Murkowski's re-election campaign.

Budget
Shortly after becoming governor, Palin canceled a contract for the construction of an 11- mile gravel road outside Juneau to a private mine. This reversed a decision made in the closing days of the Murkowski Administration.

She also followed through on a campaign promise to sell the Westwind II jet purchased on a state government credit account by the Murkowski administration. In August 2007, the jet was sold for $2.1 million.

In June 2007, Palin signed into law a $6.6 billion operating budget—the largest in Alaska's history. At the same time, she used her veto power to make the second-largest cuts of the construction budget in state history. The $237 million in cuts represented over 300 local projects, and reduced the construction budget to nearly $1.6 billion.

Governor Palin scrapped plans for what became known as the "Bridge to Nowhere", Palin Stated that we should rely less on federal funding, she recalls that, I told Congress, thanks but no thanks on the Infamous bridge to nowhere.

Palin is a long-time member of the National Rifle Association, and is popular among those who believe in the original Americium Constitution and the Bill of Rights such as gun rights activists. She also supports gun safety education for youth.

Palin's foreign policy positions are unknown, although she has had considerable experience dealing with at least two foreign countries that border both sides of her state, Russia and Canada. She has supported President Bush's efforts to stop terrorism; but she has criticized the lack of an exit strategy in Iraq. Palin has tied the war to the protection of energy supplies, saying, “We are a nation at war and in many [ways] the reasons for war are fights over energy sources, which is nonsensical when you consider that domestically we have the supplies we need, ready to go”

Political positions
In 2002, while running for lieutenant governor, Palin called herself as "pro-life as any candidate can be.” She even opposes abortion for rape and incest victims, supporting it only in cases where the mother's life is in danger, and suggested that requiring parental consent for abortions, be added to Alaska's constitution. Palin does support contraception, and is a member of Feminists for Life, Palin is also a strong supporter of abstinence-only education.

Palin opposes same sex marriage and supported a non-binding referendum for a constitutional amendment to deny state health benefits to same-sex couples. Palin has stated that she supported the 1998 constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

In a televised debate, Palin said she supported teaching both Creationism and Evolution in public schools. She clarified her position the next day, saying that if a debate of alternative views arose in class she would not be in favor of prohibiting its discussion.

Palin is in favor of capital punishment. She has stated that: "If the legislature passed a death penalty law, I would sign it. We have a right to know that someone who rapes and murders a child or kills an innocent person in a drive by shooting will never be able to do that again.

Although as a teenager she tried marijuana, Palin does not support the legalization of marijuana in Alaska stating concerns about the message re-legalization would send to her children.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Looking at Sarah Palin’s political positions and personal values, I have to say that they almost nearly mirror my own. We will never find a more pro-American candidate to occupy the second place in the White House, nor for that matter the first place. I sure hope she runs for top billing against Hillary in 2012.

McCain-Palin in November

de Andréa