Palin Bio-Sketch

Sarah Palin was born February 11,1964 and is the governor of Alaska. She is the Republican Party’s vice-presidential candidate for the 2008 United States presidential election with senator John McCain. She was the second woman, and the first Alaskan, to run on the national ticket of either major party. Governor Palin was born in Sandpoint, Idaho and she is the third of four children. When Sarah was very little, not even able to walk, her family and her moved to Alaska. As a child, she sometimes went moose hunting with her father before school. Palin attended Wasilla High School in Wasilla, which was located 44 miles north or the Anchorage. She was the head of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter at the school and the point guard and captain of the school's girls' basketball team that won the Alaska state championship in 1982. Then in 1982, she enrolled at Hawaii Pacific College but left after her first semester. She transferred to North Idaho community college, where she spent two semesters as a general studies major. Sarah Palin was in a lot of beauty pageants. She won the Miss Wasilla Pageant, then finished third in the 1984 Miss Alaska Pageant, at which she won a collage scholarship and the “Miss Congeniality” award. Afterwards, Palin attended the Matanuska-Susitna community college in Alaska for one term. The next year she returned to the University of Idaho where she spent three semesters completing her Bachelor of Science degree in communications-journalism, graduating in 1987.

On August 29, 2008, in Dayton Ohio, Republican presidential candidate John McCain announced that he had chosen Palin as his running mate. Palin has promoted oil and natural gas resource exploration in Alaska, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. She brought suit to overturn the listing of polar bears under the federal Endangered Species Act, and also opposed strengthening protections for beluga whales in Alaska’s Cook Inlet. On global warming, Palin said that "A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made." She later said that "Man's activities certainly can be contributing to the issue" and that "John McCain and I agree that we got to do something about it. "Regarding foreign policy, Palin supports the Bush Administration's policies in Iraq, but is concerned that "dependence on foreign energy" may be obstructing efforts to "have an exit plan in place". Palin supports preemptive military action in the face of an imminent threat, and supports U.S. military operations in Pakistan. She declined to give a yes or no answer regarding whether U.S. military forces should make cross-border attacks into Pakistan without the approval of the Pakistani government.