Welcome to the World, Baby Palin (Oops, I Mean Johnston)

18-year-old Bristol Palin, daughter of also-ran Vice Presidential candidate and current Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, gave birth to a son on Saturday. She and fiance Levi Johnston named the new addition Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston. Depending who you ask, this is either Bristol’s first child or her second.

Bristol did not finish high school (neither did her brother Track, who is in the army, which brings Sarah Palin’s total of high school graduate offspring to 0/5), but will earn her GED via correspondence courses. Levi, who is also a high school dropout, is training to work as an electrician. Lest we worry that the young couple won’t be able to support themselves financially, People magazine has reportedly ponied up $300,000 for the first photographs of little Tripp. Perhaps I should have seen that coming – after all, People got to break the news of the baby’s birth, and the magazine has earned a reputation for paying outrageous sums of money for celebrity baby photos (past ‘gets’ included the Brangelina twins, Knox and Vivienne, J.Lo’s twins, Max and Emme, and Nicole Richie’s daughter Harlow).

If People is willing to drop a lot of coin for pictures of your infant, I guess that makes you by their logic a celebrity. What does this mean? It means that, for now, we’re stuck with Bristol, Levi, Tripp, and the rest of the gang. That doesn’t just include Sarah Palin, it includes Tripp’s other grandma, Sherry Johnston, who got busted last week for selling OxyContin to an undercover police informant. Apparently Johnston’s arrest and the subsequent media attention helped drive up the price of the baby pictures.

To quote an old Irish poem about a mother talking to her baby: "I hurl you into the world and pray."

X-posted at Offsprung.