The Palin story? It was basically the only thing the press covered this month, up until now. But it's peaked, right? The Columbia Journalism Review hopes so! The Associated Press all but declares the end of silly season, thanks to WALL STREET CHAOS. Hooray! No more fucking Palin stories. Except, of course, that now Katie Couric is interviewing her for a sexism-off, she's making an almost-joint appearance with Hillary Clinton, and People keeps telling us things we didn't know about her (not the juicy things, either, but stuff like "she's against waxing" [oh christ]). But People misses something very important about Sarah Palin that we did not know! Her involvement with an insane witch-hunting Kenyan pastor. You heard that one yet? So in one of those nutty church visits Sarah Palin has, occasionally, where she says God wants us to win in Iraq and ban books about dinosaurs, or whatever, Palin talked about how a pastor named Thomas Muthee laid his hands on her and prayed for her to get everything she ever wanted which is how she became governor of Alaska and got a pony for her birthday. Muthee founded the Word of Faith Church, you see. That is apparently the same thing as "The Prayer Cave," which he launched in his native Kiambu, Kenya, in 1989, in order to chase out that "spirit of witchcraft resting all over the place," according to Muthee. Turns out the "spirit of witchcraft" was a local lady who had a pet snake.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, six months of fervent prayer and research identified the source of the witchcraft as a local woman called Mama Jane, who ran a "divination" centre called the Emmanuel Clinic. Her alleged involvement in fortune-telling and the fact that she lived near the site of a number of fatal car accidents led Pastor Muthee to publicly declare her a witch responsible for the town's ills, and order her to offer her up her soul for salvation or leave Kiambu. Says the Monitor, "Muthee held a crusade that "brought about 200 people to Christ"." They set up round-the-clock prayer intercession in the basement of a grocery store and eventually, says the pastor "the demonic influence – the ‘principality' over Kiambu –was broken", and Mama Jane fled the town. According to accounts of the witchhunt circulated on evangelical websites such as Prayer Links Ministries, after Pastor Muthee declared Mama Jane a witch, the townspeople became suspicious and began to turn on her, demanding that she be stoned. Public outrage eventually led the police to raid her home, where they fired gunshots, killing a pet python which they believed to be a demon.

Then a couple later Pastor Muthee preached ten sermons at Sarah Palin's church and personally anointed her the new governor of Alaska and eventual Princess of Fairy Heaven, and she bragged about this, in public, as if it wasn't insane. The End. (Oh, right, our point: Sarah Palin won't stop dominating headlines until some time after the three-month Colorado recount battle finally ends in early 2009.)