From Part 11 of a 15 part Joint Investigative Report by the NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, Chicago Tribune, LAT, AP, and CSM:

...Sarah Palin has repeatedly refused to comment on the issue, leaving many to speculate on whether she was in fact born in Nunavut and not in Idaho as she claims.

Before the election, she posted on her website a picture of what she 'claims' is her birth certificate. However, a team of over one hundred Ivy League legal experts pointed out that what's shown on her website is simply a picture and is not in fact proof that she was born in Idaho. Further, Idaho officials have refused to comment on the matter. "A picture of a document isn't the same thing as the document itself. Can you eat a picture of a sandwich?", highly-acclaimed Harvard University professor David Cutler points out.

Acclaimed constitutional scholar Alan Dershowitz - a recognized international expert in legal matters - pointed out that there's no "chain of custody" for the image, and there's "no proof" that what's on her site matches whatever she received from Idaho: "if, in fact, she ever received anything from Idaho".

The Palin campaign has responded anemically, pointing to supposed newspaper announcements from the Boise Messenger and Idaho Express newspapers. Experts contacted as part of this investigation agreed that the announcements aren't proof; they don't even list which hospital Palin was supposedly born in and no one has provided evidence showing how the announcements appeared in the papers.

None of those highly rational arguments have stopped the so-called "Birthers", a political fringe group that top psychologists agree are literally insane. Those much-despised "Birthers" claim that Palin is telling the truth. Per their spokesman Arly Lootz - a disgruntled former rodeo clown and embattled used car salesman - "the claims from her opponents would require Palin's parents to have planted those announcements in expectation of her running for president."

Famous University of Chicago professor Cass Sunstein - known throughout academia and the world for his intellectual honesty and credibility - points out that such claims are a strawman argument.

"The announcements could have been placed for other reasons such as in case of a custody battle", he stated in an interview he was gracious enough to provide to this investigation. "Further, there's no evidence that the announcements could have only come from an Idaho birth hospital; Palin could have been born in Nunavut as most sane people believe but the announcements simply placed in Idaho due to other factors", the extremely credible and acclaimed Sunstein continued.

Further, non-partisan, award-winning journalistic watchdogs FactCheck and Politifact have weighed into the debate. FactCheck highlighted claims by the non-partisan Howard Dean that Palin was born outside the U.S., and Politifact gave Palin's claims their "Unsure" rating. Both have called into question the "Birthers" and their obscure theories.

And, in a Joint Investigative Report, FactCheck and Politifact pointed out that Arly Lootz previously served as a treasurer of a fringe GOP group and on weekends he's been known to dress up as a medieval knight as part of the "Society for Creative Anachronism", a group that is currently under government scrutiny for subversive activities.

World-famous linguistics expert George Lakoff of the world-famous University of California at Berkeley - working under a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation as well as under major grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Ford Foundation - has analyzed over 1000 hours of Palin's voice recordings using the supercomputers at the Lawrence Livermore labratory. "Our research shows that Palin has a strong Nunavut accent... she clearly has a lot of '' 'explainin' '' to do."

[...33 paragraphs deleted...]

While some observers admit that no evidence has emerged that Palin was born in Nunavut as most credible sources claim, questions persist...

ADDED: The New York Times / Washington Post / MSNBC / Chicago Tribune / Los Angeles Times / Associated Press / Christian Science Monitor Special Joint Investigation has won the Los Angeles Times Award For Best Coverage as well as the New York Times Golden Eagle Award for Excellence in Journalism and the Annenberg Foundation's Soros Award for Investigative Reporting.

ADDED: The NYT/WaPo/MSNBC/Tribune/LAT/AP/CSM Special Joint Investigation has just won the Pulitzer Price for investigative journalism.