Sarah Palin will be in Columbia, South Carolina on Friday to endorse state Rep. Nikki Haley for governor…

“It is a tremendous honor to receive Governor Palin’s endorsement,” Haley said Thursday in a statement. “Sarah Palin has energized the conservative movement like few others in our generation.”

***
Is the Tea Party a women’s movement? More women than men belong—55 percent, according to the latest Quinnipiac poll. And while no movement that uses Michelle Malkin as a poster girl could fairly be described as feminist, the party has become an insta-network for ambitious women like Zelenik. Some are aspiring candidates who could never get traction within the tight, local Republican Party networks. Some are angry-mom-activist types who, like their heroine Sarah Palin, outgrew the PTA. But some would surprise you with their straightforward feminist rage. For the last few years Anna Barone, a Tea Party leader from Mount Vernon, N.Y., has used the e-mail handle annaforhillary.com: “The way they treated Hillary is unforgiveable, and then they did it to Sarah Palin,” she said. “I’ve been to 15 Tea Party meetings and never heard a woman called a name just because she’s powerful. I guess you could say the Tea Party is where I truly became a feminist.”…

And so the conservative mama bear has become a fully operational, effective political archetype. She is mother as übercompetent CEO, monitoring with vigilance her own family bank account, the local school bank account, and, as a natural extension, the nation’s. “Women are sitting at home and balancing their checkbook, leaving money for groceries and utilities and fun stuff,” says Jenny Beth Martin, one of the Patriots’ national coordinators. “They realize that these things that apply to their household budgets also apply to government.” In explaining their view on the stimulus money, several Tea Party mama bears used examples they’d heard at PTA meetings. Why should the school waste money on a part-time Chinese teacher who gets full benefits? Why should the government waste money on ant farms and exotic fish?

***
I am a working mother, journalist, author of four best-sellers, and blogger outside the Beltway who started a web enterprise from scratch in 2004, launched another one in 2006, and sold it successfully this year in an era when newspapers and magazines are falling like flies.

Like the Tea Party moms she profiles, I multi-task from home — and have been doing so since I voluntarily left an MSM newsroom in 1999 for an independent, self-directed career tailored for my family.

I point this out not for the purpose of horn-tooting, but to once again expose what I dubbed the “Sisterhood of the Protected Female Liberal Journalists” last fall.

Conservative “poster girls” not welcome, of course.