New York Times columnist Gail Collins refutes Donald Trump's Birther claims one by one.

Apparently The Donald and Gail Collins have been having a back and forth which started on April 1, when Collins wrote an op-ed entitled "Donald Trump gets Weirder." (I CANNOT imagine why that upset The Donald so much.!)

This irritated Trump who fired off a rather nasty response:

Even before Gail Collins was with the New York Times, she has written nasty and derogatory articles about me. Actually, I have great respect for Ms. Collins in that she has survived so long with so little talent. Her storytelling ability and word usage (coming from me, who has written many bestsellers), is not at a very high level. More importantly, her facts are wrong!

As far as her comments on the so-called “birther” issue, I don't need Ms. Collins's advice. There is a very large segment of our society who believe that Barack Obama, indeed, was not born in the United States. His grandmother from Kenya stated, on tape, that he was born in Kenya and she was there to watch the birth. His family in Honolulu is fighting over which hospital in Hawaii he was born in-they just don't know.

He has not been able to produce a “birth certificate” but merely a totally unsigned “certificate of live birth”-which is totally different and of very little significance. Unlike a birth certificate, a certificate of live birth is very easy to obtain. Equally of importance, there are no records in Hawaii that a Barack Hussein Obama was born there-no bills, no doctors names, no nurses names, no registrations, no payments, etc. As far as the two notices placed in newspapers, many things could have happened, but some feel the grandparents put an ad in order to show that he was a citizen of the U.S. with all of the benefits thereto. Everybody, after all, and especially then, wanted to be a United States citizen.

Wow!  And people claim that I am a conspiracy theorist!

Anyhow Collins decided to go ahead and refute the ridiculous assertions made by Trump one by one:

THE GRANDMOTHER STORY “His grandmother in Kenya stated, on tape, that he was born in Kenya and she was there to watch the birth,” Trump wrote. This goes back to a trans-Atlantic telephone call that was made in 2008 by Ron McRae, an Anabaptist bishop and birther, to Sarah Obama, the president’s 86-year-old stepgrandmother. He asked her, through an interpreter whether she was “present when he was born in Kenya.” The translator responded: “She says, yes, she was. She was present when Obama was born.”

It is at this point that some of the tapes floating around the Web stop, which means that the listener doesn’t get to hear the follow-up, which makes it very clear that Sarah Obama misunderstood. The full conversation ends with the interpreter saying, for the umpteenth time: “Hawaii. She says he was born in Hawaii. In the state of Hawaii, where his father, his father was learning there. The state of Hawaii.”

THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE If only Hawaii made its birth records public, and charged people a thousand dollars a pop to look at them, the state’s budget problems would be solved by the conspiracy theorists. However, it doesn’t. If you were born in Hawaii and request a copy of your birth certificate, you get a certification of live birth, which the federal government accepts for passports. Barack Obama requested his in 2007, and his campaign posted it on the Internet.

“A certificate of live birth is not even signed by anybody. I saw his. I read it very carefully. It doesn’t have a serial number. It doesn’t have a signature,” said Trump on “Today.”

The document has the stamped signature of the state registrar. The University of Pennsylvania’s FactCheck.org made a pilgrimage to the Obama campaign headquarters, examined the document, felt the seal, checked the serial number and reported that it looked fine.

THE EMPTY PHOTO ALBUM “Our current president came out of nowhere. Came out of nowhere,” Trump told the Conservative Political Action Conference to great applause. “In fact, I’ll go a step further. The people that went to school with him, they never saw him; they don’t know who he is. It’s crazy.”

This week on CNN, Suzanne Malveaux played Trump clips of Hawaiians reminiscing about the schoolchild Obama for a documentary the network had done on the president.

“Look, I didn’t say that ... If he was 3 years old or 2 years old or 1 year old and people remember him, that’s irrelevant,” Trump responded. “You have to be born in this country.”

There, done, everything refuted and explained so that there is NO confusion.

Now here is what I am thinking.  With all of this in the news, I wonder if we could get just one reporter from the mainstream media to address those same points of evidence when it comes to Sarah Palin's fifth pregnancy. And don't be concerned about receiving the "wrath of the Palin-bots" because just the other day Sarah herself expressed total support for digging into people's birth stories.

Here I will even provide some of the questions:

• Perhaps start off by asking IF Cathy Baldwin-Johnson did in fact okay a plane trip back from Texas after the first female Governor of Alaska started leaking amniotic fluid, and having contractions, without insisting that she visit a Texas hospital first?
• Then ask why there was no birth announcement on the newspaper  Mat-Su  Hospital website (Oops I originally wrote this incorrectly.  I meant to say it was not published with the birth announcements on the Mat-Su website, NOT the newspaper.) when the sitting governor's fifth child arrived? (Even though the Mat-Su hospital was known to do that automatically, unless requested to do otherwise by the parents.)
• Another great question might be to ask WHY Cathy Baldwin-Johnson felt the need to bring her attorney with her while answering routine questions posed by the ADN about the Governor's delivery?
• You could also ask why Palin refused to produce Trig's birth certificate when the "conspiracy" stories were at their zenith at the end of August in 2008, and instead "refuted" the rumors by putting her pregnant daughter on display for all the world to ogle?
• Then you could ask why Palin is wearing a square pillow in this picture when she was supposed to be only 23 days away from giving birth to a six pound two ounce little boy?

There are dozens of other questions that are also worth asking, but if just one journalist would be willing to ask Sarah, or even Todd,  some of these questions, that would do quite a lot to finally refute the "crazy conspiracy talk" about the birth of her fifth child.

And wouldn't it be nice to finally put all of these questions behind us?

After all if people feel it is alright to question President Obama's GRANDMOTHER about his birth place, surely we could find at least one gutsy journalist willing to ask the hard questions of Sarah Palin and her family.  Don'tcha think?