Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin couldn't be getting more use out of palm-gate if she did it on purpose. Remember how the media so cleverly caught some notes she made on her hand when being interviewed after her National Tea Party Convention speech and how everyone went absolutely nuts over it?

And remember how Obama's spokesperson Robert Gibbs showed reporters his own ink-scribbled palm at a White House press conference?

Palin, for one, wants to make sure nobody forgets. At the March 12 Lincoln Day dinner in Orlando, Florida, where the state's Republican Party invited her to speak, Palin used palm-gate as the theme of her speech.

She segued into the subject by noting that Lincoln used to scribble down ideas and put them into the brim of his hat.

"But I've gotta tell you when taking notes," she said, "the palm of one's hand does suffice too."

She then chirpily chastised the media for making "such a big darned deal" of what she described as her attempt at "keeping it old school."

She upbraided Gibbs and the White House for focusing on it "at a time like this," and quoted some passage from the Bible about writing on palms.

This isn't all new. Palin's been weaving palm-gate into interviews since it happened. But what is new is how she's been able to use the incident as the basis for her stump speech, which she called at the dinner her "palm point address." The notes on her hand -- energy, tax cuts, and lifting American spirits -- are indeed the solutions to what ails us, she said.

As she's wont to do, she took credit for getting the Alaska gas pipeline "off the dime," and talked about how she worked on renewable energy solutions to Alaska's energy crisis, but none of the "snake oil, Utopian, green-dreaming stuff" that Obama talks about. It didn't end there. She went on about all the good things she did for Alaska.

What she failed to mention is that she quit before she was halfway through her term and that neither the pipeline nor the renewable energy pushes are realities. (Why the quitting factor isn't mentioned in every single media account about her is as mysterious as how the media didn't see that palm-gate was, as they say, going to play right into the palm of her hand.)

Palin also vaguely attacked Florida Rep. Alan Grayson, a Democrat, saying, "Piper is with me tonight, so I won't say anything about Alan Grayson that can't be said around children."

Grayson responded in true Grayson style: "I look forward to an honest debate with Gov. Palin on the issues, in the unlikely event that she ever learns anything about them," he said. "Scientists are studying Sarah Palin's travel between Alaska and Florida carefully. They hope to learn more about the flight patterns of that elusive migratory species, the wild Alaskan dingbat." To top it off, he called her an "Alaskan chillbilly."

Palin might be politically brilliant enough to use the response to her advantage, and "Alaskan chillbilly" does have a certain "Valley trash"-style T-shirt-ready ring to it. But it's hard to figure how she could politically appropriate the phrase "wild Alaskan dingbat" -- that one might fly a little too close to home.