Hey, am I fired up about McCain's VP pick? You betcha! Here's some interesting facts I culled from the Internet (so they must be true):
Palin was the point guard and captain for the Wasilla High School Warriors, in Wasilla, Alaska, when they won the Alaska small-school basketball championship in 1982; she earned the nickname "Sarah Barracuda" because of her intense play. She played the championship game despite a stress fracture in her ankle, hitting a critical free throw in the last seconds. Palin, who was also the head of the school's Fellowship of Christian Athletes, would lead the team in prayer before games.
And she's hot! In 1984, after winning the Miss Wasilla contest earlier that year, Palin finished second in the Miss Alaska beauty pageant which won her a scholarship to help pay her way through college. In the Wasilla pageant, she played the flute and also won Miss Congeniality.
Her husband is a professional fisherman, he works an oil field in the off-season (a member of the steelworkers union), and is a champion snowmobiler -having won the 2000-mile "Iron Dog" race four times. They were high school sweethearts. The two eloped shortly after Palin graduated from college; when they learned they needed witnesses for the civil ceremony, they recruited two residents from the old-age home down the street.
A regular churchgoer, (Protestant) she's staunchly pro-life. A happily married mother of five, she gave birth to her second son, Trig Paxson Van Palin, who has Down syndrome, a few months ago. She returned to the office three days after giving birth. Palin refused to let the results of prenatal genetic testing change her decision to have the baby. "I'm looking at him right now, and I see perfection," Palin said. "Yeah, he has an extra chromosome. I keep thinking: in our world, what is normal and what is perfect?"
On September 11, 2007, the Palins' eighteen-year-old son Track, eldest of five, joined the Army. He now serves in an infantry brigade and will be deployed to Iraq in September.
She ice fishes. She runs marathons. She owns a float plane. She eats moose hamburgers. She's a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association. When she was growing up, Sarah and her father would sometimes wake at 3 a.m. to hunt moose before school, (presumably for the hamburgers.)
What's not to like?
And she knows what she's doing as a politician. She got the job as governor of Alaska by ousting the sitting governor in her own party. She's the one who killed the Bridge to Nowhere. "The political landscape is littered with the bodies of those who have crossed Sarah," pollster Dave Dittman told the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes. She's the most popular governor in America, (and, yes, that includes Arnold Schwarzenegger) with an approval rating that has bounced around 90 percent.
90 percent!
Have a good weekend, Obama.
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