The homepage of the CBS News “Political Hotsheet” website contains ten stories. Let’s sample, oh, four of them displayed Tuesday night.

Story #1:

Palin confident she could beat Obama

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was met by a gaggle of reporters outside of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall Tuesday, on day three of her “One Nation” bus tour.

The question du jour: Will she or won’t she run for president?

Story #2:

Sarah Palin meeting with Donald Trump tonight

Potential Republican presidential candidate Sarah Palin will meet this evening with real estate mogul Donald Trump, who earlier this year flirted with a presidential campaign, according to a Trump adviser.

The two plan to go out to dinner and meet at Trump’s “primary residency” at Trump Tower in New York City. Trump’s wife Melania Knauss-Trump will be present at dinner.

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Like most Americans, we would just prefer to ignore Sarah Palin at this point — unless she says something notably retarded, of course — but as someone more clever than us said over the weekend, she puts the Me in Memorial Day, and here we are.

So, first: About her unexpected debut as a Motorcycle Mama Grizzly. Organizers of the DC Rolling Thunder event said they had no fucking clue she was showing up. Someone in the Palin camp said they warned the publicist, or something. This reminded us of the frequent claims that Palin would be gracing one event or another, only to be scolded that her appearance was not confirmed, and how amateurish it was to say otherwise. Clearly the situation is different when you’re the glamorous gate-crasher.

Or, to draw the all-too-obvious conclusion: The Rules Don’t Apply to Sarah Palin.

Which is why, on the basis of an unannounced aimless bus trip, Palin Prez Chatter is back! She doesn’t have to organize a campaign like lamestream candidates — she’s Sarah Fucking Palin, and she’ll win by spontaneous combustion!

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The Management apologizes in advance for spoiling whatever delicious holiday meal you have planned today, but after spending a couple of hours trying to nail down any fact whatsoever about the yfrog stuffed-undies photo, The Management can only wonder whether it’s even Weiner’s wiener.

All we can say with certainty is that late Friday night, Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website posted a screenshot purportedly from Weiner’s Twitter-linked yfrog photo account, and showing some tighty grays stretched over a suspiciously large package:

The photo was reportedly sent to a woman on Twitter. We’ve protected her name and her account, which was at one time verified to be active but has since been deleted after the photo in question was deleted. Coincidentally, the rest of the photos in the congressman’s alleged yfrog account were also deleted around 11 p.m. eastern.

“Hacked or hung?” asked writer Publius — being very clear not to say, or even strongly imply, that Weiner himself posted the photo.

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WorldNetDaily, Wednesday:

Billionaire businessman Donald Trump, who staged a weeks-long public campaign questioning Barack Obama’s eligibility to be president during March and April — and rose to the top of the pool of potential candidates for the 2012 GOP nomination then as a result — says he believes the “birth certificate” released by the White House is forged.

His comments came yesterday in a telephone call to WND senior reporter Jerome Corsi, Ph.D., who is appearing on wall-to-wall radio programs — between 10 and 20 per day — to respond to questions about his latest best-seller, “Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama is Not Eligible to be President.”

Donald Trump to Mother Jones, Thursday:

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Only in San Francisco Eugene Park Slope Toronto:

“So it’s a boy, right?” a neighbour calls out as Kathy Witterick walks by, her four month old baby, Storm, strapped to her chest in a carrier…

The neighbours know Witterick and her husband, David Stocker, are raising a genderless baby. But they don’t pretend to understand it.

While there’s nothing ambiguous about Storm’s genitalia, they aren’t telling anyone whether their third child is a boy or a girl.

The only people who know are Storm’s brothers, Jazz, 5, and Kio, 2, a close family friend and the two midwives who helped deliver the baby in a birthing pool at their Toronto home on New Year’s Day.

Also in the dark: Storm’s grandparents.

Golly, where to begin?

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If we’re not in the fourth quarter, we’re in the third quarter of the chronological clock. It’s something you start to notice when you can’t remember where you put your keys can’t get it up discover that you’re older than candidates for Preznit and Vice Preznit, as we did in 2008:

This fall, we’re taking over the country. The torch has been passed to a new generation, and this time it’s personal. It’s the Barry & Sarah Show, hosted by Jon Stewart, fortysomethings all. Joe and John will have walk-on parts, but they’re both irrelevant to the story. It’s our world now, and you kids will just have to deal with it.

In other words, 2008 was the first post-Boomer election. Will 2012 be any different?

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Our guest colloquists are Time reporter Michael Crowley and Tim Pawlenty, who formally announced Monday his parody campaign for United States President. Our lawyers advise you not to read the following if you plan on driving or operating heavy machinery in the next eight hours.

TIME: I think [Haley Barbour] phrased it well: You have to be ready for a ten-year commitment to this onslaught. And you are going to go into the history books, and you will be sending people to their deaths. And all that gravity, it must start stirring up, I don’t know, in the middle of the night. I mean, in other words, surely before the fall of 2009 you started to think to yourself, ‘Can I do this? Am I one of these chosen few in history?’ And where did that germinate from?

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