I was just recently on the Young Turks with Tina Dupuy discussing Palin’s blood libel gaffe, the murder of Judge John Roll, and extremism in Arizona. Here is a clip:

David Samel has more at Mondoweiss on the exploitation of the blood libel by Alan Dershowitz, who has stepped forward to defend Palin (he apparently doesn’t want to be robbed of one of his favorite smear tactics).

Italy’s leading newspaper, Europa, has excerpted the new epilogue to Republican Gomorrah. Read the full epilogue in English here.

When David Neiwert, an expert on extremist groups in the Northwest, and I concluded our exhaustive investigative report for Salon.com about Sarah Palin’s involvement with the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party, we emailed the McCain camp a detailed synopsis of our findings and requested a response. We were met with silence.

But when Neiwert appeared on Tuesday on Rick Sanchez’s CNN Newsroom, the McCain-Palin campaign went into full damage control mode, blasting out an indignant statement in the middle of the Neiwert’s segment. The statement, written by McCain deputy communications director Michael Goldfarb, a neoconservative former Weekly Standard editor, reads:

CNN is furthering a smear with this report, no different than if your network ran a piece questioning Senator Obama’s religion. No serious news organization has tried to make this connection, and it is unfortunate that CNN would be the first.
We are trying to arrange to have one of the Governor’s people come on air to respond in the event you do run this piece.

By referring to Obama’s “religion,” the McCain-Palin campaign, obviously attempted to provoke the most inflammatory charge leveled against Obama’s character: What religion is he? Is he a crypto-Muslim?The McCain campaign also asserted an equivalency between Obama’s religion and Palin’s political ties to a far right group. The McCain campaign suggests that Obama’s religion and Palin’s politics are both beyond the pale, as it were. But the rapid response raises another question: Is this a disciplined campaign messaging operation? Does the McCain campaign really mean what it suggests?

The McCain-Palin response to our report came as the already beleaguered vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, was suffering a damaging series of setbacks, including the resignation of Alaska’s rural affairs director, claiming as a reason the governor’s lack of commitment to racial diversity in her administration. That blow immediately followed my video report in The Daily Beast on Palin’s strained relations with Alaska’s African-American community.

Though McCain-Palin campaign condemned the report on her links to the AIP piece as a “smear,” the facts went unchallenged.

The campaign would not, and could not, discredit the revelation that Palin worked hand-in-glove with former AIP chairman Mark Chryson to undermine the character of her opponent in Wasilla’s 1996 mayoral election and sought to advance Chryson’s agenda once she was elected. As Chryson told us, Palin supported his lobbying to loosen local gun control laws, an effort he initiated to facilitate the formation of anti-government “Patriot” militias. Palin also invited him before Wasilla’s city council to denounce a local ordinance to ban guns from schools and bars.

The McCain-Palin campaign also offered no explanation for why Palin attempted to appoint Steve Stoll, a John Birch Society activist, to the city council seat she had vacated, overlooking Stoll’s reputation in Wasilla as “Black Helicopter Steve,” a conspiratorial figure rumored to have buried high-powered automatic weapons in his front yard in case the New World Order arrived. When a council member who considered him a “violent influence” blocked Stoll’s nomination, Palin considered consulting attorneys about a backdoor means of appointing him.

The strange saga that began during Palin’s early political career, when she cultivated close political ties with an anti-government extremist organization that helped her advance her ambitions, now has turned increasingly strange as the McCain handlers seek to suppress factual reporting of her past. These tactics, especially equating Palin’s politics with Obama’s religion, only underline the questions about Palin’s background, as well as about the McCain campaign’s ability to control its message in the critical three weeks before Election Day.

Palin's pastor, Larry Kroon, warns God "is gonna strike out his hand against" America

On July 20, 2008, the pastor of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s home church, Larry Kroon, delivered a sermon called “Sin Is Personal To God.” Kroon, the senior pastor of the non-denominational Wasilla Bible Church in Wasilla, Alaska, used the book of Zephanaiah as his reference point for discussing “that great day of the Lord when God will finally bring closure to human history… a day of wrath.” According to Kroon, “all things and all people” are going to bear the brunt of God’s “intense anger.” “There’s anger with God,” he proclaimed. “He takes sin personal.”

Kroon placed Zephaniah in a modern context, warning that the sinful habits of Americans would invite the wrath of God. “And if Zephaniah were here today,” Kroon bellowed, “he’d be saying, ‘Listen, [God] is gonna deal with all the inhabitants of the earth. He is gonna strike out His hand against, yes, Wasilla; and Alaska; and the United States of America. There’s no exceptions here — there’s none. It’s all.’”

(Kroon’s sermon can be heard here; a full transcript is here.)

While Kroon has cautioned his parishioners against the mass marketed End Times prophecies of Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye, he has nonetheless invoked doomsday scenarios that mirror those on the pages of Lindsey and LaHaye’s bestselling tracts.

“It’s so very possible that God, instead of responding by granting spiritual renewal and sustained prosperity,” Kroon said in a sermon on July 13, 2008, “could just as easily…it’s conceivable that He could just as easily, for example, raise up a revived, prosperous and powerful Communist Russia with a web of alliances across the Middle East. And our gas pumps would go dry. The dollar would collapse. And the markets would crash. The kayak could go upside down. And it could happen in a matter of weeks. That could happen. It could happen by this fall.”

Palin joined Wasilla Bible Church after leaving Wasilla Assembly of God, a Pentecostal church where she delivered a controversial sermon asking her audience to pray that the war in Iraq is “God’s plan.” When she is working in Alaska’s capitol, she worships at the Juneau Christian Center, another Pentecostal church where charismatic displays like speaking in tongues and dancing in the spirit are encouraged. Palin describes herself as a “Bible-believing Christian.”

Palin’s presence at Wasilla Bible Church has not been confirmed for the days Kroon warned of God “striking out his hand against… the United States of America” and “rais[ing] up” an alliance of nations to ruin America.