Since no one in the media has addressed this piece of information, I will do it for them.
Sarah Palin is attacking Barack Obama for “palling around with terrorists,” twisting media accounts to falsely connect Obama with the Weather Underground figure Bill Ayers. Let me say that I have no sympathy, and never had, for the anarcho-syndicalist craziness and bona fide infantile leftism, that Ayers and his associates represented nearly 40 years ago, when Obama was in the 3rd grade.

By contrast, Sarah Palin has real and documented connections to the Alaska Independence Party, which is far more extremist than even the most far right of the Republican Party. The main platform of that party, as Alaska Independence Party leaders have stated, is a rejection of the United States and an effort to cause Alaska to leave the union. Given what this party represents today, Palin’s ties to that party deserve to be an issue in the campaign.

Alaska Independence Party leaders have also claimed that Sarah Palin was a member before she was elected mayor of Wasilla, which the McCain campaign has denied. Officially, records show that Palin was a registered Republican since 1982, six years before she married her husband Todd, British Petroleum supervisory employee, self-employed fisherman, and snowmobile mobile racer.

The Director of the Alaska Division of Elections has stated that Todd Palin, however, was a registered member of the Alaska Independence Party from 1995 to 2002. Todd Palin, all sources agree, has played a significant role as a policy adviser to his wife’s administration. There is significant disagreement about Sarah Palin’s attendance at Alaska Independence Party conventions before she became mayor of Wasilla. She did visit their convention after she became mayor, however, which the McCain workers try to downplay as a mere courtesy call. As governor, she sent a video tape to the most recent 2008 convention telling the delegates to “keep up the good work” and calling their convention “inspiring.”

Here is a little history on the Alaska Independence Party. The Party was founded by an ultra-rightist gold miner, Joe Vogler in the 1970s with an “anti-American” platform. Palin has denounced those abroad in oil rich countries who “hate America.” Joe Vogler hated America. He said in the 1970s, “I’m an Alaskan, not an American. I have no use for America or her damned institutions.”

Later Vogler said that “the fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred of the US government. And I won’t be buried under their damn flag….when Alaska is an independent nation they can bring my bones home.” He said this in an oral history interview at the University of Alaska in 1991, at which time Bill Ayers had rejected his own past and had become respectable. Two years later Vogler disappeared. A criminal subsequently confessed to murdering him in a conflict over the sale of plastic explosives (which may suggest terrorism).

Like I have said in the past that I really detest the whole premise of guilt by association.  I mean there are many of us that would be guilty if that was the law of the land.  But I guess it is win at any cost.