Women like Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, and Sarah Palin owe nothing to the lefty feminist movement.

Brains, competence, courage, character, and the right understanding of political issues equip them for  leadership, for directing whole nations, for steering the ship of state.   

The Wall Street Journal contrasts Sarah Palin with Hillary Clinton: 

Many younger women didn’t learn what it means to be an achieving woman from dormitory feminism. She didn’t abandon her hometown for the big city. She stayed home, had babies, helped her snowmobiling husband with his commercial fishing business and with him, tried to assemble a life.

She got into politics in Wasilla with zero connections – no famous father, no financing husband, no mentor, nothing. She got elected mayor. She got into politics to improve her community, not to launch herself on some career path she had figured out while in college.

Then came the interesting part. Under the standard model, you deploy your superb IQ to maneuver upward around the oppressors. Sarah Jock, learning her self-discipline in such weird pursuits as morning moose-hunts with her dad, ran at the system. Doing something few women and no males would do, she went after the men who run Alaska’s inbred politics, the machine. And cleaned their clocks. The people elected her governor.

I asked a number of women this week to account for Sarah Palin’s sudden appeal. Here are the common threads.

The angry woman-as-victim drives them nuts. They hate victimology. As one woman said, "The point is that across the ages women have been doing pretty much what Sarah Palin has been doing: bearing children, feeding families, bringing in an income, working to improve their communities."

Another woman said, "Her story reflects a more normal reality" of active women; "the harder you work, the luckier you get." Hillary Clinton still plays the victim card. Sarah Palin gives off no victim vibes. These women mentioned her grit, determination and character.

Read the whole thing here.

 In relation to the issues of energy and national security, Alaska is right now the most important state in the US, not only for America but also for its allies in Europe and the Far East. In this consideration alone, Palin is an excellent choice of McCain’s to be his running-mate. 

 Investor’s Business Daily explains:  

Palin knows energy. She’s already figured out how to deliver energy to the U.S. without Congress — by championing state legislation to create a 1,712-mile natural gas pipeline across Canada to the U.S.

It was a major feat, negotiating with the Canadian government, educating lawmakers and getting the public behind her. In a decade, the $30 billion project will ship 4.5 million cubic feet of gas a day from the North Slope to Houston’s air conditioners, Iowa’s farm machines and Boston’s winter furnaces.

There’s little doubt this is the kind of leadership the U.S. needs. Not only will getting serious about Alaska help the economy, it will also help our allies in Europe and the Far East whose economies are severely battered by high energy prices and who are seeing some of the most direct threats from the petrotyrants.

John McCain’s pick of Palin shows he’s serious about energy — and about securing America’s future. Congress mustn’t ignore Alaska any longer. Petrotyranny is moving beyond economics and becoming a national security issue. Alaska is a big part of the answer.

 

 Investor’s Business Daily carries this in an editorial today:

Forget warnings of catastrophic melting polar ice and rising sea levels, though, and consider for a moment the effects of a warming Earth.

Food output would increase as growing seasons become longer and climates now too cold for agriculture evolve into temperate zones that can support crops. With a world population that is expected to grow from its current 6.7 billion to 8.9 billion in 2050, harvests will have to become more abundant to keep up with the demand.

A warming Earth would also mean a healthier human race. Heat kills, but it’s not as deadly as cold. A 1990s study found that cold-related deaths kill 80,000 year in the United Kingdom — 100 times the number of those who die heat-related deaths.

Cold weather is lethal because it increases blood clots, which can lead to heart attacks and strokes, and promotes the transmission of respiratory diseases, such as pneumonia and influenza, that are among the top causes of death in the U.S. and other developed nations. Thomas Gale Moore of the Hoover Institution figures that a temperature increase of 2.5 degrees Celsius would cut deaths due to respiratory and circulatory diseases by roughly 40,000 a year.

While global warm-ongers talk in gloomy tones about SUV-induced droughts, higher temperatures would actually boost precipitation. There is little or no argument among scientists about this. On a planet with a growing population where as much as 40% of the human race could be living in regions with insufficient water supplies by 2035, an increase in precipitation is not insignificant.

Finally, a warmer planet would be a greener planet as well. Isn’t this what the environmentalists want — more green? Or is their real goal to roll back concrete, asphalt, steel and glass, the building blocks of human advancement and prosperity?

No one can be sure how the sun will behave in the coming decades. There’s even disagreement over August’s solar activity. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now thinks it saw a small sun spot on Aug. 21 while UCLA researchers still say it was a spotless month.

But if historical patterns hold, the sun is entering a down cycle that will make ours a more frosty world. The facts are enough to make Al Gore shiver.

 In foreign affairs, no presidential candidate since Thomas Jefferson has had experience. Fortunately, many have had good judgment. Not so Barack Obama, as Thomas Sowell says:

Out of the four presidential and vice-presidential candidates this year, only Governor Palin has had to make executive decisions and live with the consequences.

As for Senator Obama, his various pronouncements on foreign policy have been as immature as they have been presumptuous.

He talked publicly about taking military action against Pakistan, one of our few Islamic allies and a nation with nuclear weapons.

Barack Obama’s first response to the Russian invasion of Georgia was to urge "all sides" to negotiate a cease-fire and take their issues to the United Nations. That is standard liberal talk, which even Obama had second thoughts about, after Senator John McCain gave a more grown-up response.

We should all have second thoughts about what is, and is not, foreign policy "experience."

Read the whole article here.

 That lone voice crying the truth in the wilderness of Europe, Melanie Phillips declares in The Spectator:

The message Putin wants to deliver is that no-one messes with Russia. Like a Mafia godfather, he wants respect for his country’s power – and will mow down anyone who fails to offer it. That’s also why Russia is busy murdering those of its own citizens who oppose its fascistic regime. (It is, after all, the only country so far to have carried out an act of nuclear terrorism in Britain by murdering Alexander Litvinenko with Polonium 210 and leaving a trail of radioactive poison across London – for which it has never been brought to account, flicking away our huffing and puffing Foreign Office like a mosquito on the nose of a bear).

It is behaving in this way because it has correctly perceived that America is paralysed and Europe is steadily destroying itself, and so there is an enormous vacuum in global power which it thinks it can fill. It has no less correctly concluded that the west will no longer defend itself or the values for which it once stood. See yesterday’s entirely predictable and futile hand-wringing over Georgia by the EU, full of sound and fury but signifying no action at all. Once upon a time, the west believed it should go to war to defend the sovereignty of nations. Now, it supports instead those who destroy that sovereignty – as it did when it recognised Kosovo as an independent state, thus demonstrating contempt for the sovereignty of Serbia. Who therefore can be surprised that Russia, which not only complained bitterly about Kosovo but had previously insisted on the virtue of its own suppression of the Chechens on the grounds that national sovereignty had to be upheld or else chaos would follow, is now cynically using that very same Kosovo precedent to justify its support for South Ossetia and Abkhazia breaking away from Georgia?

Despite the fact that Russia is threatened by Islamism, there are nevertheless notable similarities between the attempt to re-establish the Russian empire and the attempt to re-establish the Islamic Caliphate. In similar fashion, both employ not only violent force but cultural infiltration and sedition; both use sophisticated propaganda and covert influence; both invert truth and lies; both hijack the concept of victimhood. Thus Russia’s patently absurd claim of genocide in south Ossetia parallels the preposterous Islamist claims of genocide in Iraq, the West Bank and Gaza; thus both claim that their own aggression is merely self-defence against victimisation. Such similarities are scarcely surprising considering that Islamism borrowed so much from Communism (as it did also from fascism). Nor is it surprising that both Russians and Islamists make common cause against the west – their common enemy.

The whole article is a must-read. 

 Whether out of ignorance – which is inexcusable – or to serve some alarming purpose, the DNC gave a platform to America’s worst enemy.

Last week’s opening festivities at the Democrat National Convention in Denver began with an interfaith prayer. As the Democrat Party searches for its newfound interest in faith, it quickly called upon one of the lowest hanging fruit in the American Muslim community – the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Ingrid Mattson, the President of ISNA gave a speech along with Adbur-Rahim Ali of the Northeast Denver Islamic Center. Some may dismiss the selection of nine speakers of faith at the political shindig as irrelevant and simply part of the pomp and circumstance of the DNC Convention.

But propping up ISNA in today’s environment is akin to propping up the Legal Guild (a ‘60s Communist front group) to address the convention during the Cold War. Our civil servants will verify that they have prevented over 30 attacks by militant Islamists upon our nation and our citizens since 9/11. The only ideology that unites the groups set upon our destruction is not violence. It is political Islam – their Islamism. Unless we identify both violent and non-violent political Islam as a root cause of terrorism we will never win this conflict. Militant Islamists, much as non-militant Islamists, seek some form of a transnational Muslim, political movement. They both seek various forms of the ascendancy of Islam with respect to other religions culminating in the establishment of Islamic states.

 

Read the whole article by an anti-jihad Muslim here.

In a side by side comparison, Palin would be more qualified to be president than Obama.

This amusing but factual comparison in Redstate sets it out clearly:  Palin on the left (for once), Obama on the right. Read the whole thing at www.redstate.com posted on 30 August 2008 by Jeff Emanuel.

 ‘Fighting climate change,’ writes Christopher Booker in the Telegraph, ‘has become the single most expensive item on the world’s political agenda.’  One estimate  of the cost is $45 trillion.

The article exposes the ‘outright falsifications’, the ‘bogus science’. the ‘politicization of the IPCC [the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] ‘, and the ‘flimsiness of the case for global warming’.

The ‘hockey-stick’ graph which warmists like Al Gore have used to stir up concern almost to the point of panic is revealed to be a prize piece of nonsense:

The idea that the IPCC represents any kind of genuine scientific "consensus" is a complete fiction. Again and again there have been examples of how evidence has been manipulated to promote the official line, the most glaring instance being the notorious "hockey stick".

Initially the advocates of global warming had one huge problem. Evidence from all over the world indicated that the earth was hotter 1,000 years ago than it is today.

This was so generally accepted that the first two IPCC reports included a graph, based on work by Sir John Houghton himself, showing that temperatures were higher in what is known as the Mediaeval Warming period than they were in the 1990s.

The trouble was that this blew a mighty hole in the thesis that warming was caused only by recent man-made CO2.

Then in 1999 an obscure young US physicist, Michael Mann, came up with a new graph like nothing seen before.

Instead of the familiar rises and falls in temperature over the past 1,000 years, the line ran virtually flat, only curving up dramatically at the end in a hockey-stick shape to show recent decades as easily the hottest on record.

This was just what the IPCC wanted, The Mediaeval Warming had simply been wiped from the record.

When its next report came along in 2001, Mann’s graph was given top billing, appearing right at the top of page one of the Summary for Policymakers and five more times in the report proper.

But then two Canadian computer analysts, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, got to work on how Mann had arrived at his graph.

When, with great difficulty, they eventually persuaded Mann to hand over his data, it turned out he had built into his programme an algorithm which would produce a hockey stick shape whatever data were fed into it.

Even numbers from the phonebook would come out looking like a hockey stick.

Yet governments are relying on such ‘evidence’ to damage our way of life beyond recognition.

Read the whole article here. 

 … may be in our sights. Gender should not matter in public service, any more than race, but to many it does. 

Sarah Palin, running mate of John McCain, came across in her speech today as strong and competent. 

Her record is one of integrity, probity, energy, common sense, and real accomplishment. 

The only fault I could find with her speech was that she said – or seemed to say – ‘nucular’  (like Homer Simpson) instead of ‘nuclear’. I hope I’m wrong about this, but in any case it’s not a significant flaw.

 … and a worthless speech.

Not worth deep analysis, but Power Line dusts it off effectively:

Fireworks! The perfect end to an evening of BS slinging of historic proportions. Barack Obama is a demagogue who will stoop to any lie or distortion; the question is how many people he can fool. On that, the jury is out. The answer will emerge between now and November.

It will take some time to dissect all of the foolishness we heard tonight, but here are a few observations:

Obama outlined, in the vaguest terms possible, countless billions or trillions of new federal spending. How would he pay for it? By "closing corporate loopholes"–like what? The idea that Obama’s orgy of spending can be funded by "closing corporate loopholes" is frankly childish. By increasing taxes on the top 5% of taxpayers, i.e., precisely those who are grossly over-taxed already. The top 5% already pay 60% of all federal income taxes. And by "eliminating programs that no longer work." Really? Which ones? No one seriously imagines that Obama–let alone the Democratic Congress!–has any intention of eliminating any significant government programs.

Obama says he wants to become independent of foreign oil in ten years. How? By tapping natural gas reserves. I wonder whether Obama, unlike Nancy Pelosi, understands that natural gas is a fossil fuel for which we must drill offshore, in ANWR, etc. There was perhaps some news here: Obama also came out for developing nuclear energy, yet another flip-flop. But does anyone imagine that nuclear energy development would go forward in a Democratic Congress and White House? In one of his many cheap shots, Obama said that we import three times as much foreign oil as when John McCain went to Washington. That’s no doubt true, because the Democratic Party has enacted legislation that makes it illegal to develop our domestic resources.

Obama said he is happy to debate John McCain about who has the judgment and temperament to guide foreign policy. Of course, he has had many opportunities to do so, and has ducked them. Does this mean that Obama will now accept McCain’s challenge to a series of town hall appearances? But what about Obama’s foreign policy judgment? He barely mentioned Iraq–once, in the distant past, his signature issue–but never referred at all to the surge. Obama was dead wrong on the most important foreign policy issue that has arisen during his time in the Senate, and he failed even to mention it, let alone try to justify his error.

Rather weirdly, Obama attacked McCain for alleged unwillingness to "follow Osama bin Laden to the cave where he lives." If this means anything, it means that Obama is still in favor of invading Pakistan. Again, no one really believes Obama will do this; it’s just another example of how he doesn’t feel any obligation to conform his words to reality.

He says we "don’t deter Iran by talking tough," so how, then, do we deter Iran? Obama offers no clue. Likewise with Georgia; "talking tough" won’t stop the Russians. True enough; deterring the Russians requires military capability. Yet Obama has pledged to reduce our military capability. So how, exactly, are the Russians to be stopped?

Obama is utterly unreliable every time he recites a statistic. Examples could be multiplied endlessly; to take just one, he said tonight that "the average American family saw its income go down $2,000 under George Bush." That is untrue. Here are the real median household income figures from the Census Bureau; click to enlarge:

Inflation-adjusted median income during the Bush administration is up, not "down $2,000" since 2001, and it increased again last year.

Of course, Obama has no intention of appealing to the well-informed. Like other Democrats, he feeds on ignorance. Whether a majority of voters are ignorant enough to swallow Obama’s whoppers is, as yet, unknown.

             One last thought: was there a single sentence in Obama’s speech that could not have come from Jimmy Carter?