It doesn't look like much of a strech to be honest.

Honestly the mind just boggles at this. Either direction you want to go in - 10-16 hours of labour (can't seem to get a definitive number here) and refusing to go to a hospital just to deliver some speech? Or the other direction of the classic "our daughter has mono so we pulled her from school, but actually she's pregnant" ploy.

I was really skeptical of this story until I saw the other pictures showing Bristol's bulge (not shown in pics above), as well as Palin's previous pregnancy picture. And mono for 8 months? The whole thing is just too suspicious to ignore - if this does end up as main stream media stuff instead of just blogosphere, maybe they'll shut it up with some DNA testing. If they refuse DNA testing, that would be pretty damning.

Part of my family are very conservative catholics, and this actually happened to a great aunt of mine. She got knocked up, parents took her out of school claiming she had some wasting illness, when the kid was born it was adopted by her cousin's family. I tell you, the crazy shit grandma tells the family when she thinks she's on her deathbed.

I really don't like the ultra conservative religious douches on that side of my extended family :(

The only reason I am not saying this is a COMPLETE stretch is because it happens. Parents assume responsibility for child, so their daughters life can go on normally.

But the fact I would doupt this got through the vetting proccess, And trust me, this was not a desparation pick. McCain had been gaining in the polls steadily for months, and was deadlocked 47/47 going into the dem conv.

It's like she stole the story from Desperate Housewives. It's epic. :P She's like Brie Vandercamp. Haha.

My thoughts exacly, except the 9.2 part.

This is why politics + internet = awesome.

 I was curious about this as well - there are a lot of blogs that claim Palin was not actually vetted at all, I didn't find any of them too credible - but this piece from ABC seems to say that the vetting process was just a couple of days, and only one discussion between her and McCain - http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/08/how-palin-came.html

Interesting. That could have been a serious mistake if true.

Isn't it the other way around?

I thought Bubbles was right, but searching through yahoo answers shows a ton of women asking why they look bigger in their second or third pregnancy than their first.

Apparently muscle memory causes the uterus to grow faster during later pregnancies, even though the child doesn't actually grow faster.  Also, first pregnancies show less since the muscles have never been stretched out at that point, so they hold everything in better.

Which makes the pictures line up even more with the theory that the child might be Bristol's 0.o