Toothpick trick did not work for me, or anything similar. So, I took it apart to get a look at the logic bord. I reverse-engineered the connections I could access from the bottom of the PCB under the audio jack. While doing so, I found that you can jump two connections (one is sleeve ground and the other I believe is a connection from the switch inside the jack. After doing so, the headphone jack will not work as an audio output for either analog or optical, but the internal speakers will work fine. This is b/c the switch is basically bypassed, the macbook will never know whether there is a headphone plugged in to the jack or not. This fix is fine for me, especially since I had no other option b/c I'm out of warranty and I'm not spending $400 on a new logic board haha.
BTW, I'm a Ph.D. Computer Engineering student, I didn't just do this all willy-nilly out of the blue, haha. You do need a decent sodlering iron to do this and you must make sure you have a very small gauge wire (insulated). This fix can always be undone... if you need to for some reason. Below is an imgur link to a couple photos I took of the area and connections to jump.
NOTE: This is one a late 2008, a1278 MacBook unibody. The macbook pros may be slightly different, but you can figure it out with a connectivity meter and some fiddling maybe. :) They also could be exactly the same, I don't know.
http://rmn87.imgur.com/macbook_audio_jack_fix#SvfTV
Good luck!