One person commented: "On the one hand, one would think it couldn't possibly be true because no one, not even Sarah Palin, would be so reckless to accept the VP nomination if it were true.
On the other hand, none of the details about the birth add up. In addition to the other details that don't add up, I find it especially perplexing that the birth wasn't listed on the hospital website with the other births that day (especially after Sarah Palin made such a big deal about having the baby at that hospital and no other hospital) and that suddenly the doctor is no longer affiliated with that hospital."
If everything I am postulating is true, I think that the Palins had managed to convince themselves that the story was dead. The people in Alaska who had had their doubts had said, "Who knows, but I am not going to worry about it anymore," and it was - in Alaska - last week's news.
In comes the McCain campaign and is about to make this small-state governor who barely managed to graduate from college the most amazing offer of her life. We KNOW that his vetting process was minimal. They never reviewed the newspapers in Wasilla from the time she was mayor because they are all on microfiche and to do it someone would have had to have gone to the office and sit there, and no one did. This has been confirmed by the paper in Wasilla.
My guess is that they did NOT uncover this rumor, or if they did they did not understand how deep it had gone or that a lot of people had actually believed it. (Curiously, McCain had also been accused of a "baby-related" rumor (that was completely FALSE! let's be clear here) that his dark-skinned adopted daughter was really a "love child with a black woman." So they may have tended to be very sympathetic to a "ridiculous" baby rumor, if they had heard about it.)
So what's she supposed to say at this point? "Well, sir, I'd love to be your VP candidate except I can't because, oh, gee, I faked my pregnancy last winter." So everyone hoped for the best, and hey, so far, except for a few holdouts, like ME, for example, they seem to be getting away with it.
As far as the baby's birth being announced. Two facts. First, not all babies are announced. I have spoken to the hospital and they do about 60 births a month . About 45 seem to make it up on-line (on average.) So not being on the website in and of itself doesn't mean all that much. But here's the rub. By manipulating the Google cache, we can prove that he was on the website at one point and the announcement was taken down! Now why would someone do that?
I have read several places that Cathy Baldwin Johnson's name was "dropped" from the staff list at Mat-Su. All I can confirm is that it's not there now. I can't track down when it was there, or when it disappeared. This whole odd story with the doctor is really one of the strangest aspects of a saga that is already utterly bizarre. Several people have said that she's "MIA." I don't know if that is true, but I'll tell you, she's like B'rer Rabbit: She's sure layin' low.
15 comments:
Wow! Just for other readers who were wondering, Audrey's info on the proof that there was once an entry for Trig Palin on the Mat-Su website is under "Palin Birth Questions" on her main site home page. I had NO idea; I thought it was pretty much assumed that he had never been on there...fascinating.
If that is true that there was once an entry for Trig Palin on the Mat-Su website, then that may be the single most bizarre thing I have heard about this whole thing.
Why would the entry be taken down? If the birth story were true, and, if in fact, the birth was documented on the Mat-Su website, the announcement should still be there to quiet all the naysayers.
If Sarah Palin is not really the mother of Trig Palin, you really would have thought that she would have graciously declined the vice presidential nomination with the excuse that she needed to spend more time with her special needs newborn. So there are only two conclusions. Either she is truly the mother of the baby or she is a narcissistic pathological liar who thinks she can get get away with anything. The latter possibility truly scares me.
Unless I'm missing something why is it that doing the Google cache search for "trig palin" along with additional search terms like "sarah" or "todd" doesn't bring up any results? Or if you just do "sarah" or "todd" as search terms by themselves, you don't get any results that match up with what must have been the birth picture listings on 4/18? You get search results if you plug in other mother & father names. So was Trig on the site but with no parents' names listed? (Or please correct me if I'm mistaken.)
Audrey,
there are many....I repeat MANY people who feel that this story just does not add up. It's called a "gut" feeling or "common sense". Something as a country we have lost track of. I personally DO NOT want anyone in public office representing me in any way, shape or form who would lie to this degree. Sarah Palin owes it to the public to answer these questions because it goes to the very core of WHO she is. And any people in Alaska who have information regarding this story have an obligation to disclose the truth.
Thanks for the questions. I have to admit that this came in to me as a tip, I don't fully understand how it works. I do know though that I did the search and got the results that led the screen shot I posted. I have NO idea why when you plug in parents' names the same search results are not found. I will write to the person who sent me the tip - he seems quite familiar with the Google cache system - and I will post an answer.
As far as to why the entry would be taken down, it my ongoing attempts to be even-handed, it's possible that after these issues were raised in the press, that page (and thus the whole site) started to get such heavy traffic that it was crashing the whole site. I read somewhere that in the weekend after the announcement, the whole Mat-Su site was down. It's back up now but the links to the birthing center virtual tour are still broken. But it is possible that it was just removed because it was getting so many hits.
FYI, Cathy Baldwin-Johnson is a featured speaker at the Child Maltreatment Conference in Anchorage next month. Judging from her bio, she does NOT appear to be an obstetrician. Her sessions are all about child sexual abuse. Here's the bio:
Cathy Baldwin-Johnson, MD, FAAFP Dr. CBJ‖ is a family physician, life-long Alaskan, and mother of two grown children. She started the practice that grew to become Providence Matanuska Health Care, a multispecialty clinic in Wasilla, Alaska. She is a 1980 graduate of the University Of Washington School Of Medicine and completed the Swedish Hospital Medical Center Family Practice Residency program in 1983. She is the co-founder and volunteer medical director of The Children’s Place, a Child Advocacy Center in the Mat-Su Borough. She is also the part-time medical director for Alaska CARES, the CAC in Anchorage, and oversees the SCAN (Suspected Child Abuse and Neglect) Teams at Mat-Su Regional and Providence Alaska Medical Centers. She has served on the Alaska Children’s Justice Act Task Force since its inception, and is current chair. Honors have included:
2006 Horowitz-Barker Professional Leadership Award from the National Children’s Alliance
2002 National Family Physician of the Year from the American Academy of Family Physicians
2002 Certificate of Appreciation from United States Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office for Victims of Crime
2000 Alaskan Family Physician of the Year from the Alaska Academy of Family Physicians)
1999 First Lady’s Volunteer of the Year Award from Alaska First Lady Susan Knowles
A pdf file of the workshop schedule is here:
http://hss.state.ak.us/ocs/ChildrensJustice/documents/ACA_200807_workshops.pdf
Oops, URL got cut off. Trying again:
http://hss.state.ak.us/ocs/ChildrensJustice/documents/ACA_200807_workshops.pdf
And again: go here http://hss.state.ak.us/ocs/ChildrensJustice/default.htm
and then click Workshop Listings on the left.
If you do a google search like:
baldwin johnson site:www.matsuregional.com, you do get a few hits where Dr. baldwin-Johnson is the mother or baby's doctor, but not necessarily the doctor who delivered the baby. She was the delivering doctor in one instance I saw. Of course, it's been pointed out that not all babies make it onto a hospital's website. We always had to give permission to have pictures taken in the first place, and then also before the hospital could post anything.
Also, I did a cursory set of searches looking for anything that matched the published birth weight/time of birth/etc. and didn't come up with anything on the site matching Trig's info. So maybe his name was listed at one point with no other information?
Per Anon's second comment, I vote for "narcissistic pathological liar who thinks she can get away with anything." And yes, we should be scared.
I thought Hillary was ambitious. Then along came Sarah, who makes Senator Clinton look like an underachiever as far as moxie is concerned.
And that's interesting info about Dr. Johnson. In the ADN interview, Palin said that Dr. Johnson had delivered "lots" of babies, and left the impression that the woman was a 20 year veteran baby catcher.
I'm thinking that the birth information for Trig is off the hospital Web site and the doctor is laying low for legal reasons.
My mind is kind of wandering, but wouldn't the Governors state insurance plan have paid for the delivery? Doesn't someone in government know who processed the paperwork, which must exist somewhere. Too bad the HIPPA rules are so stringent. Those regulations are like a wall folks can hide behind.
Okay, here is something interesting for inquiring minds.
The infamous Dr. Cathy Baldwin-Johnson is the founder of the medical group MatSu Valley Physicians.
There are nine physicians in the group. http://www.providence.org/Alaska/matsu/matsu_physicians.htm
Pretty prestigious to be the founder of a nine-person medical group.
In addition to Dr. Baldwin-Johnson, the group (according to its website) consists of the following doctors: Barbara Doty, M.D., Adam Greathouse, D.O., Lisa Harrison, M.D., Jenn Hronkin, M.D., Valerie Krozel, M.D., Elowyn Smith, D.O., Therese Tomasoski, M.D. and Angela Torres, M.D.
So the group has nine doctors, including its founder Dr. Baldwin-Johnson. With the exception of Dr. Baldwin-Johnson and Drs. Hronkin and Torres, all of the physicians are listed as having staff privileges at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center. (check out the hospital's website - you have to search under both family physicians and pediatrics).
http://matsuregional.com/staff/show_speciality.php?speciality=Family%2FGeneral+Practice
http://matsuregional.com/staff/show_speciality.php?speciality=Pediatrics
Okay, let's look at the two doctors other than Dr. Baldwin-Johnson who lack privileges. If you check with the State of Alaska online, Dr. Jenn Hronkin is listed as residing in Colorado. http://www.commerce.state.ak.us/occ/OccSearch/Detail.cfm?Board=MED&LicType=S&LicNum=5687 Perhaps she has recently relocated to Alaska, thus explaining why she does not yet have privileges at Mat-Su.
Okay, let's move on to Dr. Angela Torres, the only other physician in the group who does not have privileges at Mat-Su. The State of Alaksa's website
http://www.commerce.state.ak.us/occ/OccSearch/Detail.cfm?Board=MED&LicType=S&LicNum=5293
shows that Dr. Torres lives in Anchorage and also that a "formal accusation" has been filed against her. So perhaps she lacks privileges at Mat-Su because she recently relocated to the area and/or has a "formal accusation" pending.
Now is it just me, but does anyone else think it is beyond strange that Dr. Baldwin-Johnson, the founder of this prestigious medical group, no longer has privileges at Mat-Su? We know she must have once had privileges, because otherwise she could not have delivered Trig Palin at the hospital.
Why does she no longer have privileges when most of the other doctors at the medical group she founded have privileges?
When something doesn't add up, it makes my brain hurt, and my brain is hurting over this.
Let me just add to my prior comment.
First, I was wrong, there are 10 physicians who practice at MatSu Valley Physicians, the group that Dr. Cathy Baldwin-Johnson, founded. The tenth physician, Nancy Ouimet, M.D., was not pictured. A quick review of the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center website shows that Dr. Ouimet, like almost all of the other physicians at Mat-Su Valley Physicians, does have staff privileges at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center.
Mat-Su Valley Physicians is in Wasilla. I believe Mat-Su Regional Medical Center in Palmer is the closest hospital. So of course the physicians at Mat-Su Valley Physicians are going to have staff privileges at the closest hospital - where else are they going to admit their sick patients? So why on earth does the head physician, Dr. Cathy Baldwin-Johnson, suddenly no longer have privleges?
This has got to be the smoking gun. I really wish someone would follow up on this.
Looking at the Mat-Su site where all the births are announced, I randomly went back to July 2007 clicking on the baby names and could not find one other baby that Dr. Cathy Baldwin Johnson had delivered. Isn't that odd. She must have done a very special "favor" for her friend the governor.
I'd be curious how many babies Dr. Baldiwn-Johnson, the head of a ten-physician family practice, has delivered in the last 5 years. She is not an oby-gyn and I'm guessing that with a busy family practice, she doesn't deliver a lot of babies, if any other than the Palin child.
Also, do you want to bet dollars to donuts that Trig is the first "known" Down's baby she has ever delivered? Yeah, family practice doctors routinely deliver high-risk babies? I don't think so, not even in the suburbs of Alaska.
To be clear, Gov. Palin had five separate things that designated her as "high risk" on April 18, 2008.
1. She was 44 years of age.
2. She was "grand multiparous" meaning she had had five or more viable pregnancies.
3. She was carrying a Down's baby.
4. She was in labor at 35-35 weeks of gestation. This is considered premature. 37 weeks is the cutoff for "term."
5. Upon arrival at Mat-Su, her membranes had been ruptured for nearly 24 hours.
A review of the births posted on the hospital's website revealed, among other things, only one set of twins in over 1000 births reviewed. I conclude from this that that was an "accident," (i.e, no one knew that mom was pregnant with twins) and and that even twins are considered too high risk for Mat-Su.
Now go back and read Gov. Palin's list.
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