During the last months, we extensively covered Sarah Palin's so-called "Wild Ride", her trip from Dallas to Wasilla on April 17, 2008, after her water had supposedly broken early in the morning of April 17, 2008 (read all our post about Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy HERE).
Especially for readers who are new to this blog, it might be worth listening to Sarah Palin's press conference on April 21, 2008, in which she explains how her water had broken during the night of the 16th to the 17th April 2008:
The "wild ride" has been in the focus since citizens started to question and investigate Sarah Palin's pregnancy. The first questions were raised even immediately after April 18, 2008, as we for example know from Sondra Tompkins.
Over time, we were able to collect a lot of valuable material. We collected facts that in my opinion conclusively prove that the "Wild Ride" is a fantasy, that it has never happened, that it couldn't have happened. Sarah Palin was not pregnant, as we also know in addition from multiple sources in Alaska.
Today we can present a new piece of documentation, and due to our previous efforts we are able to compare it with already existing material. This comparison proves to be very interesting indeed!
One of our readers recently contacted Alaska Airlines and asked for a statement regarding the flight on April 17, 2008. Our reader received quite a long reply by Alaska Airlines on October 7, 2010, longer than any other previously published statement:
So what Alaska Airlines is basically telling us in this letter is that nobody on board had a clue that Sarah Palin was highly pregnant.
But how does this go along with the fact that according to the official version, Sarah Palin, a tiny, 5.4 woman, gave birth to a baby weighing 6 lbs. 2 oz. several hours later - and that on the famous "Gusty pictures" on April 13, 2008 (named after KTVA-reporter Andrea Gusty), Palin looked pregnant indeed.
The "Gusty pictures" which mysteriously appeared on flickr on August 31, 2008, the day of Sarah Palin's nomination, have been examined intensively. As a result, there are now two facts (not rumors, not assumptions, but facts) on the record, which directly contradict each other:
1. On the Gusty-pictures, taken on April 13, 2008, Sarah Palin looked highly pregnant.
2. During the flight on April 17, 2008 from Dallas to Anchorage, no flight attendant noticed that Sarah Palin was highly pregnant, despite that fact that flight attendants are trained to be very observant.
Even given just these two facts, every critical journalist would have to realize that something doesn't sound quite right. As we now know, after the publication of the famous "JournoList" emails in July 2010, there were a number of "liberal" and/or "moderate" journalists who were questioning the Trig-pregnancy. But in the end, the opinion prevailed that it could be damaging for the Democratic cause to touch this issue. On July 26, 2010, Andrew Sullivan wrote a long post about the publication of the "Journolist Trig emails" and concluded:
"This is your liberal media, ladies and gentlemen: totally partisan, interested in the truth only if it advances their agenda, and devoid of any balls whatsoever. And people wonder how this farce of a candidate now controls one major political party and could well be our next president. One reason is that we do not have a functioning adversarial media uncorrupted by partisan loyalty and tactics."
Let's now have a close look at the available documentation.
As a result of the controversy of the "Gusty-pictures" in the spring of 2009, KTVA was "forced" to publish the two known pictures together with a third picture in a higher resolution than was previously available. Andrea Gusty also aired a "special report" in the spring of 2009, explaining that the pictures were indeed "genuine", which at the time was questioned by some of the "Trig Truthers."
Two pictures exist from April 13, 2008 in a higher resolution (1500x1125). They were saved togther with the other material and can be viewed HERE and HERE. The full album is HERE.
If we crop these pictures and focus on Sarah Palin and Andrea Gusty, we have the following shots:
In addition, Sarah Palin belly becomes more visible after enhancing brightness and contrast:
This is the "pregnant woman" that the flight attendants of Alaska Airlines were not able to spot!
Here is a clip which we haven't posted for a long time - Andrea Gusty explains on the air that these pictures were indeed taken on April 13, 2008:
Another clip with the actual live broadcast from April 13, 2008, can be viewed HERE. The part with Andrea Gusty and Sarah Palin starts around 3:00.
The "Gusty-pictures" are officially still the main piece of evidence for the existence of the Palin-pregnancy, as crazy as it sounds - despite the fact that they have long been deleted from flickr, where they originally appeared.
Let's take a a look at this example: For "factcheck.org", the main Gusty-picture and the assumption that "it couldn't have been Bristol" was enough to conclusively prove that Sarah Palin gave birth Trig. No further questions have to be asked, no actual documentation has to be reviewed, according to factcheck.org - that's how Sarah Palin got away with her great lie in September 2008, and it still boggles the mind:
"We spoke with Gusty, who sent us this copy of the photo, and she told us she was surprised the photo had made it onto the Internet. “I was under the impression that nobody had it except for me.” When we asked her if the photo circulating online had been altered in any way, she said there was “no photoshopping,” and that the photo was taken during a live interview with Palin in mid-April 2008, at the end of the state Legislature’s regular session. “About a week after that picture was taken, [Palin] actually gave birth to Trig,” Gusty told FactCheck.org. “I actually did an interview with her about two or three days after she had given birth. And that’s when she and Todd introduced the baby to the world.” The Palins formally announced the birth of their fifth child on April 18.
Aside from the photo, the rumor is also contradicted by Palin’s recent announcement of Bristol’s (confirmable) pregnancy. If Bristol is in fact five months pregnant – and again, we’re not obstetricians either – then she couldn’t be 5-month-old Trig’s mother."
That's not a "factcheck", but just an embarrassment. It always was, it will always be.
It's a shame that factcheck has obviously never taken a look at the compelling documentary about the "wild ride" that lidia17 created for Palingates - together with her two other documentaries about the faked pregnancy HERE and HERE:
And now for a surprise at the end:
While writing this blog post, I discovered "by accident" that one of the key reports about Trig's birth has been scrubbed from the internet: Lori Tipton's story on the KTUU website from April 18, 2008, which also included the only pictures of the newborn Trig which were taken on April 18, 2008.
Screenshot from this story on the KTUU-website I had used in an earlier post:
The link to the story is definitely dead. I myself used this link several times in our stories, and we also examined Lori Tipton's account in detail (HERE and HERE).
The link was: http://www.ktuu.com/global/story.asp?s=8194634
It now leads just to the KTUU homepage.
You can see in google that this link was used in the past a lot, as it was a very important story and contained the first pictures of Trig:
However, I do NOT claim that the scrubbing of this article is a "conspiracy." I get the impression from the KTUU website that they have a policy of deleting all articles after 2 1/2 years - I could find no article on the website from before June 2008.
This is one of the pitfalls of the internet: Important stories can just "disappear." Fortunately, in my "insatiable urge" to collect as much material about the pregnancy as possible, I also made a PDF-hardcopy of this story, which can be downloaded HERE.
It would have been really bad if this "key story" had been lost!
After all, the photos in the article show a quite healthy and chunky looking Trig in public in the arms of his grandparents - that despite the fact that Trig was supposedly just born a few hours earlier, prematurely, with Down Syndrome and with holes in his heart (and in a hospital which is not certified for high risk births). The "magical birth of Trig" has nowhere been better depicted than in this KTUU article.
Sarah Palin, by the way, was nowhere to be seen on April 18, 2008. Not one witness is on the record who has seen Sarah Palin at Mat-Su hospital on April 18, 2008.
But don't count on "factcheck.org" to find anything strange about all these pesky facts.
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UPDATE:
One of our readers informed me that the KTUU birth story from April 18, 2008 can still be found in the KTUU archive. However, you can apparently only search via the date of the article in the KTUU archive, so it's very difficult to find particular stories, because you have to know exactly when they were published. The archived story from April 18, 2008 is HERE and doesn't contain all the pictures any more, just the first of the three pictures, and no further explanation to the picture.
In addition, another important story has gone completely missing and is not available in the KTUU archive any more. On April 7, 2008, KTUU reported that Sarah Palin's "fifth child is a boy":
You can also download the PDF of this article HERE.
This story has always bothered me. According to Sarah Palin's own description of her pregnancy, for example in "Going Rogue", she knew already in week 12 of her pregnancy that the baby was a boy. But they waited until 11 days before the "birth" to announce it, and why didn't Palin make this announcement already on March 5, 2008, when she revealed her invisible pregnancy to the world?
One reader also pointed out that KTUU reported in the article from April 18, 2008:
Palin was asked at the forum whether or not she would accept an offer by Republican presidential candidate John McCain to share the national ticket as vice presidential nominee.
She said she would accept, according to reports from a Texas newspaper.
So here we have a Governor whose water had just broken the night before, who is about to deliver a premature Down-Syndrome child, who cannot know what will happen during the next months with her child, but who announces at the same time that she would happily accept the vice-presidential nomination?
What bothers me most is that there are journalists out there who believe that this is all just perfectly normal and fine.
Sarah Palin is the greatest "con woman" of our times, and so far, she got away with everything.
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UPDATE 2:
The email that the Alaskan citizen John Carlile sent Sarah Palin on April 18, 2008 was discussed earlier in the comments. Here it is again:
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Please re-tweet:
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Also good for revisiting:
Andrew Sullivan's excellent article in the UK Sunday Times from November 22, 2009 - the only major MSM publication which ever dared to write about Sarah Palin's "wild ride" from April 17, 2008 in detail. Excerpt:
"So she was a mother eight months pregnant with a special-needs child thousands of miles from home. She wakes up in the middle of the night with contractions and amniotic leakage and she tells her husband she doesn’t want to call her doctor because it would wake her up at 1am. And she is the sitting governor of a state and her doctor is a close personal friend. Not only that, but she gives the speech as planned in the afternoon, during which she makes a rather good joke. She then tells us what happens next: “Big laughs. More contractions.”
After the speech, does she then go to a local hospital to get checked out? Nah. She gets on two separate aeroplanes all the way back to Alaska, with a stopover in Seattle, because she is determined to have the child in her home town and she just knows that the contractions and amniotic leakage are not signs of imminent delivery. She has had four previous kids so she has experience. “I still had plenty of time ... It was a calm, relatively restful flight home,” she explains of the next 15 hours.
You might imagine that an airline would have some qualms about letting a woman in some sort of labour at eight months, and pregnant with a Down’s syndrome child, get on a long transcontinental flight. What if the baby were born in mid-flight? The plane would have to be diverted. What if something happened to the baby? The airline could be liable. Palin never told the flight attendants. Couldn’t they tell, one might innocently ask. In the Anchorage Daily News story about the birth, Alaska Airlines said: “The stage of her pregnancy was not apparent by observation. She did not show any signs of distress.” Palin makes Xena, the warrior princess, seem fragile."
Here is Andrew Sullivan on the Joy Behar Show talking about the "Wild Ride" in December 2009:
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