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This blog has attempted to give Palin the benefit of the doubt on this from the get-go. The Dish was one of the first blogs to post a photograph - of only four - showing Palin somewhat pregnant. At the time, on August 31, 2008, I asked:

Please give us these answers - and provide medical records for Sarah Palin's pregnancy - and put this to rest.

A short time later, I asked simply:

What harm
would it do to release the medical records showing that Sarah Palin
delivered Trig on April 18 in Wasilla? This is not hard: there must be
an obstetrician, medical records, and data that can easily refute this
rumor. It is not out of the ordinary either: candidates routinely issue
medical records. So let's have them. And then we can move on.

 On September 3, Palin was cut off from the press for the following reasons:

In an extraordinary and emotional interview, Steve Schmidt said his
campaign feels "under siege" by wave after wave of news inquiries that
have questioned whether Palin is really the mother of a 4-month-old
baby, whether her amniotic fluid had been tested and whether she would
submit to a DNA test to establish the child's parentage.

On September 5, Ben Smith reported that the medical records would be released "very soon". We kept being told that in the campaign and they never were - until the brief doctor's note was issued a few hours before midnight before Election day.

So here are the simple questions the Dish has been trying to get an answer for much more than a year. They are easily answered and could have been at any moment since August 31 2008 when I first asked them. Here they are:

Can you please provide independent medical documents/sides/reports that prove that Trig is Palin's biological child? If this is deemed too private, then please provide them off the record to a reporter who can vouch for them to the rest of us?

Can you please provide Trig Palin's birth certificate listing his biological mother and father?

Can you please ask Catherine Baldwin-Johnson to discuss these questions with medical reporters so this whole thing can be put to rest for good and all?

If you refuse to do these things, why?

Please, governor Palin, let's put this behind us. Only you can. I pledge to post any and all material you can provide debunking these stories soon as I receive any. I'd like this line of inquiry to end as soon as possible - for the sake of all of us, but especially the innocent child caught up in something he doesn't deserve.

"Obama's
attitude was, this is an elderly gentleman in a country where this kind
of greeting is customary. It does not seem extraordinary to show this
kind of gesture to him. The Fox news poll said that 67% of
Americans thought it was a good thing for him to have done. When the
president heard that some people had complained, I'd characterize his
reaction as: The notion that the United States is somehow humbling or
humiliating itself by showing respect for a local custom, when it is
transparently the most powerful country in the world, leaves me
speechless."

"We
closed some of the gap but not all of the gap. The Chinese do not wish,
three weeks out of Copenhagen, to be seen working hand in glove with
the US to impose a "G2" solution to the G77. They have their own
reservations about how far things should go. But they also don't want
to be seen as the stumbling block or odd man out.

"We kept making the argument, We're the #1 and 2 emitters, so we
have a special responsibility, a special role. We got some movement.
They are taking substantial mitigating steps, which they didn't
enumerate but we know what they are. As best we can tell, they are
prepared to submit those as their "target" in Copenhagen, and of course
we want them to be "commitments" rather than targets. There is still a
stumbling block on the issue of accountability, which is always a hard
one with the Chinese. We'd like to have an independent peer review of
whether doing what you said you would do.  There are lots of different
ways to do that... But we haven't closed that part of the gap yet.

"Prime
Minister Rasmussen [Lars Loekke Rasmussen of Denmark, with obvious
involvement in the Copenhagen talks] has been saying that while a
binding legal treaty by this December is not possible, he has been
calling for a politically-binding accord at Copenhagen. Then there
would be the task of turning it into a treaty over the next year. The
Chinese have bought into that general framework. And we made a lot of
agreements with them on clean energy [details here]. So on climate change, there were no miracles, but we moved them out out of the position of being
blockers to being part of the game.