Let's pretend for a moment that Sarah Palin is the real life wonder woman and really had that baby. why would she need to toss her daughter under the bus to stand up to absurd rumors? what a shitty parent! And a stupid response. She doesn't need to toss her daughter in the rumor volcano, unless the rumors are true and she is desperate to rebut them.

think about it.

What exactly are you talking about?

How congenial was she, really?

Start here.

...if there's more to it, we're going to find out. Probably at exactly the same time that the McCain campaign finds out.

here.

From there you're on your own.

McCain is delaying the convention desperately looking for another running mate... proving that the man can stuff water bottles and still run the nation. McCain is definitely stalling; there's no story in New Orleans; that hurricane was predicted to fade west all along; stopping the convention for the hurricane that hadn't done any damage yet and wasn't supposed to, didn't make any sense. He's stalling... looking over his options.

But I will.

So, the daughter has a miscarriage, easily blamed on the Liberal Media and the Obama campaign. Stress, you know.

I'd just like to not be lied to, you know?

... wiki can be edited by anyone, up to a point. They did put some sort of control on her wiki page some time Friday morning, pdt.

if you listen to these yokos. I'm not buying into the wonder woman story ... the baby is her daughter's. Covering it up with Lies is the program, now she is entrenching herself in that Lie. There's some pretty strange shit in that pipe they are smoking, cuz this is not going to fly. Obama was fast to proclaim that his campaign's hands are clean and likely they are; this story came out too fast, Obama didn't expect Palin to be McCain's pick, it wasn't possible his campaign could have unearthed all this the same day McCain announced his choice... this was latent knowledge of folks there in Alaska that likely would never have seen the light of day, except for the VP selection. And Palin is so removed from our world, she really thought the baby ploy was all behind her. Now, she is proving that she can Lie on the fly - the girl's got talent.

The chances of a 16-year-old girl having a Down's Syndrome child are vanishingly small (on the order of 1 in 10,000). For a 44-year-old woman, on the other hand, there is a significant risk.

Plus, if she is now 5 months pregnant...she could not be the mother of her baby brother.

Beyond that, you're into conspiracy theory country to manage the coverup, libelling a 16-year-old girl (although, now, not so much) and libelling her mother, her doctor, etc. But, you're a scumbag, so that won't bother you none.

I do agree, however, on the extreme irresponsibility of flying back to Alaska to have the baby, given the very real risk of neonatal problems

certainly far less than for a 44-yo.

Curiosity piqued, I checked (using your linked source).

Quick regression in Excel for ages 20 (youngest given in your "Table 1" calculator) to 24 yields:

y = 6E-05x - 0.0007, i.e., probability of Downs = 0.00006(age) - 0.0007, with R-squared = 0.9989

which, extrapolated to age 16 yields a probability of 0.00026, or about 3/10,000 -- certainly, as you wrote, "on the order of", but also about threefold as common as your 1/10,000 estimate, but also only about 1/100 the probability for Sarah Palin's age 44 (1/41 or 0.024, also from "Table 1" calculator in your linked source).

I didn't do the calc, so I'm pretty happy with "on the order of" and "vanishingly small" seems apt (how many 16 year old Alaskans will give birth to a Down's Syndrome child this year? Prediction: zero)

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About 53,000 in ages 15-19, or 10,000+/age class.

Agree that, for an order-of-magnitude estimate of the probability, yours was fine -- just a bit low, is all.

If my "conspiracy theory" (whoa, what conspiracy? this is just trash gossip - okay?) was hinged upon ten 16 year olds having down syndrome, then I would agree that it was looneyville. But the odds are bad that mother or daughter would have a down baby, the odds are bad for anyone; but they do happen at every age and often well against the odds. So the odds are not a make or break equation to my gossip theory. Meanwhile the behavior by Palin and McCain has been beyond strange since this gossip hit the internet; there's something fishy in Alaska going on. Normally, I don't do gossip, but hey, this is an election breaker, it's too relevent to the future of the free world to ignore.