Over?

Audrey has been quiet today. Audrey had way too much wine to drink last night.

WAY.

TOO.

MUCH.

As a result, on a creativity scale of 1-10 I was through most of today, hovering in the 0 range.

I do want to thank everyone who took the time to write to me today to thank me for the blog and the research I've done through the last two months. I don't know if, in the end, I made one whit of difference, but it doesn't matter. I felt strongly the day I started this that there was something wrong here, and someone had to do something. I became that someone. I don't regret a moment of it.

People want to know what my plans are.

I still have numerous posts "in me" that have never been made. I've done research on the board at Mat-Su Hospital that I've never put together into a final post. I have some thoughts on the Mercedes Johnston photos that I've never made public.

So here's the answer to that question: First, I have considered seriously today what impact the "medical statement" will or should have. My conclusion: not much. While it is more than we had before, and it does contain the statement that Sarah Palin is Trig Palin's mother, Cathy Baldwin-Johnson never states that she was actually present at the birth. As I pointed out in my last post on the topic of the statement, it also contains the information that Sarah Palin was pregnant in 1989. This was data provided to CBJ and accepted as true, probably without supporting documents, just like any of us might tell a current doctor we had chicken pox in the 1970s.

There is no clear distinction in this statement between information provided to CBJ in "history," and information CBJ knows because she was personally involved or present. The pronoun "I" is used multiple times, except in the paragraph relating to Trig's birth, where it is not used once. Is the information about Trig's pregnancy and birth derived from "medical history," or "first-hand observation?" We're supposed to assume it's "first-hand," an assumption were encouraged to draw because it's recent, but the fact is there is no way to tell from reading. No way at all.

This bland and mostly useless statement took weeks to produce. It is crafted with excruciating care. Andrew Sullivan referred to it as "giving the finger to the press," and he's dead-on, partly because it has almost no new info about her health, and partly because it was released less than eight hours before the first polls opened. The McCain campaign KNOWS that we were waiting for the simple statement from CBJ that she was personally present at the birth of Trig Palin on April 18th, 2008. They did not give it to us. There could be many reasons for this, but the most plausible is that she would not say it because she was not there.

My feeling is that the statement is not nearly conclusive enough that I am willing to accept it in toto and cease my efforts to get a final answer on the questions I still have about the birth of Trig Palin.

So... I'm not going anywhere. I will continue to post my thoughts, impressions, and any new research I unearth, definitely through December... then we'll see. Perhaps not quite as often as I have posted the last two months, but certainly 2-3 times a week.

Thanks for visiting... thanks for reading... thanks for all the kind comments and compliments.

Audrey