With Oprah Winfrey, the intersection of politics and education is making for strange bedfellows. Federal tax returns and other reports confirm that she’s accepted at least $5 million for her self-named South African girls’ school from perhaps Barack Obama’s single greatest political enemy.

Oprah was front and center in her support of Obama's presidential bid -- not so for her acceptance of $5M in contributions from one of his staunchest foes.

Oprah is probably the most well-known celebrity to back Senator Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency. She threw him a lavish launch party, endorsed him on her show, stumped for him in the early primaries, and cried — as captured by photographers — in a Chicago park when he won the election. Her loyalty seemed fierce.

But it turns out that Winfrey is very close friends with Dallas billionaire named Harold Simmons, a leading Republican donor and supporter of John McCain.

This past August it was revealed that Simmons was the single donor to a 527 committee called American Issues Project. Its only issue: to run ads linking Obama to William Ayers, the political activist who was once part of the Weather Underground. Simmons paid $2.9 million to try and make Ayers the Obama campaign’s “Swift Boat,” an issue that might have sidelined permanently the Illinois senator’s chances and advance John McCain — Simmons’s candidate — to the White House.

Nevertheless, Winfrey has cultivated her friendship with Simmons on many social fronts since 2001, resulting in his being second only to her in donating funds to her Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa.

According to the 2006 federal tax filing for the Oprah Winfrey Operating Fund, Winfrey accepted a $1 million donation to the school from Simmons. That amount, The Dallas Morning News reported in 2007, was only part of a $5 million pledge to the Academy. Simmons is considered Dallas’s leading philanthropist to worthy causes. In this case, though, it might have been unnecessary, since Winfrey herself has donated over $60 million to the school.

It’s not like Simmons is a new Republican donor. He gave over $100,000 in the 2007-2008 election cycle to Republican candidates, separate from his Ayers campaign. He has always been an active Republican. In 2004 he was a major donor to the Swift Boat Veterans, the group credited with destroying the campaign of John Kerry for president.

Winfrey has long been close friends with Simmons and his wife Annette. She’s their neighbor in Montecito, California, having bought the estate next to them in 2001. As recently as two weeks ago, Oprah mentioned the couple on her show during a telephone discussion of the Montecito fires with another neighbor, actor Rob Lowe.

(Winfrey was not available for comment, according to her representative. Simmons, who doesn’t have a press representative, did not return our call.)

The Dallas Morning News—thanks to the dogged byline of Alan Peppard — is full of stories over the years documenting Oprah’s friendship with the Simmonses. They are often at each others’ homes and parties. When Oprah’s significant other, Steadman Graham, spoke to a group in Dallas, it was noted that he dined with the Simmonses. In April, 2006 — two years after the Swift Boat scandal was revealed — Oprah sent a camera crew to a Dallas luncheon hosted by Annette Simmons showcasing the thousands of tulip bulbs surrounding the lake on her property.

It’s unlikely though that the Simmonses were at Oprah’s house next door on September 9, 2007. That’s when she hosted an all-star fundraiser for Obama with Stevie Wonder and guests like Halle Berry, Will Smith, and other A-list Hollywood names. One can only imagine what Simmons thought as the sound of “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” blared over the loudspeaker system.

Interestingly, that was the last time either Oprah or Graham, for that matter, contributed any money either to the Obama campaign or to the Democratic Party. While they could have each made donations to Obama’s presidential bid, they gave just for the primary. And neither of them showed any interest in the Party itself, which funneled money to Obama.

Simmons, on the other hand, is a regular and constant Republican donor. And it’s not like the Obama campaign hasn’t taken notice of him. On August 21st and 25th, Robert Bauer, general counsel for Obama for America, wrote letters to John C. Keeney, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division, concerning the American Issues Project.

On the 25th Bauer wrote: “New facts have come to light that underscore the patently illegal nature of AIP’s formation and operation, and also demonstrate a knowing and willful violation of law on the part of its contributor, Howard Simmons [sic].” Bauer then attaches the Federal Election Committee filing by AIP that states its sole purpose: to defeat Barack Obama. Contran Corporation, owned by Simmons, is listed as AIP’s owner.

Bauer finishes his letter demanding Simmons’s prosecution: “We reiterate our request that the Department of Justice fulfill its commitment to take prompt action to investigate and to prosecute the American Issues Project, and we further request that the Department of Justice investigate and prosecute Howard [sic] Simmons for a knowing and willful violation of the individual aggregate contribution limits.”

Simmons, Bauer complained, had exceeded his personal donation limit because he’d given $2.88 million — roughly $2.7 million more than was allowed by FEC guidelines that state only $42,700 may be given to organizations other than candidate committees or party committees.

It wasn’t the first time Simmons had had trouble with political donations. In 1993, the FEC fined him just under $20,000 for exceeding limits in donations from 1988 and 1989. According to the New York Times, Simmons’s Swift Boat group was fined almost $300,000 for illegally spending $20 million to influence the election. Another Simmons-backed anti-Kerry group, Progress for America, was fined $750,000. They’d spent $31 million.

Simmons’ contentiousness is not limited to the backing of the Swift Boat Vets and the Ayers campaign to smear Obama. In December 1997, according to reports in the New York Times and elsewhere, Simmons was sued by two of his four daughters for abusing his powers in controlling millions of dollars he placed in trust funds for them. A jury agreed that he’d breached his financial duty as guardian of their inheritance, but were undecided on other issues. The case ended in a mistrial. Unusually, the case had been catalyzed when Simmons served her legal papers on one of the daughters by dropping them in her baby’s crib. The child had been born premature and was susceptible to infection, according to the New York Times and other reports.

Read more at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,460109,00.html

Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers speaks out on the criticism Barack Obama fielded during the presidential campaign for his ties to the 1960s radical.

Bill Ayers, the Sixties radical whose ties to Barack Obama dogged the president-elect during the presidential campaign, accused his critics on Friday of trying to “exploit the politics of fear” by encouraging others to dig into their relationship.

FILE: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn walk with their son in New York in 1982. (AP Photo)

The co-founder of the Weather Underground, which carried out bombings at the Pentagon and the Capitol, also defended his violent past, repeating a line he has said before: “I don’t think we did enough.”

Ayers used the interview, his first since the election, to downplay his relationship with Obama. Ayers said there is “no dark, hidden secret.”

“It’s not at all true that [Obama] sought me out to listen to my radical ideas, or that I sought him out,” Ayers told ABC News’ “Good Morning America.”

“The truth is we came together in Chicago in the civic community around issues of school improvement, around issues of fighting for the rights of poor neighborhoods to have jobs and housing and so on, and that’s the full extent of our relationship.”

Ayers and Obama served on a Chicago school reform group and a foundation board, and Ayers hosted a meet-and-greet for Obama more than a decade ago. During the campaign, Republicans suggested their relationship ran deeper than that. John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, said in the run-up to Election Day that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.”

Ayers, who kept a low profile during the campaign — unlike Obama’s controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. — dismissed such charges on Friday.

“This idea that we need to know more, like there’s some dark, hidden secret, some secret link — it’s just a myth. And it’s a myth thrown up by people who want to kind of exploit the politics of fear,” he said.

Ayers, now an education professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said he doesn’t believe that “guilt-by-association should be any part of our politics.”

But Ayers says in a new afterword to his memoir that he and Obama were neighbors and “family friends.”

Ayers’ reflections appear in a new paperback release of his 2001 memoir, “Fugitive Days.” The Associated Press obtained a copy of the new afterword Thursday.

“In 2008 there was a lot of chatter on the blogosphere about my relationship with Barack Obama: we had served together on the board of a foundation, knew one another as neighbors and family friends, held an initial fundraiser at my house, where I’d made a small donation to his earliest political campaign,” Ayers writes.

Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt declined comment on Ayers’ new writings. Obama has denounced Ayers’ violent past and has said Ayers was never involved in his presidential campaign.

Ayers lives a few blocks from Obama on Chicago’s South Side with his wife, former fellow radical Bernardine Dohrn. Now a law professor at Northwestern University, Dohrn was a fugitive for years with her husband until they surrendered in 1980. Charges against Ayers were dropped because of government misconduct, which included FBI break-ins, wiretaps and opening of mail.

Ayers writes that Obama’s enemies saw their connections as a chance to “deepen a dishonest narrative about him.”

“That he is somehow un-American, alien, linked to radical ideas, a closet terrorist, a sympathizer with extremism,” Ayers writes.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Read more at: http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/11/14/ayers-accuses-critics-using-politics-fear/

The New York senator and former first lady is being considered for secretary of state by President-elect Barack Obama, sources say.

CHICAGO — President-elect Barack Obama has met with his former rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and is considering her as a possible candidate for secretary of state, Democratic officials said.

Clinton was rumored to be a contender for the job last week, but the talk died down as party activists questioned whether she was best-suited to be the top U.S. diplomat in an Obama administration. The talk resumed Thursday, a day after Obama named several former aides to President Bill Clinton to help run his transition effort.

A Democratic official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information, said the two met Thursday afternoon in Obama’s Chicago office.

Clinton’s motorcade — she receives Secret Service protection as a former first lady — was seen leaving the office complex shortly before Obama left for the day. Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines would say only “Senator Clinton had no public schedule yesterday,” and referred questions to the Obama transition team, which said it had no comment.

Clinton pushed Obama hard during the campaign, and was rumored to be a possible pick for vice-president after she lost the nomination to the young Illinois senator. Obama instead chose veteran Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate, prompting speculation that that, among other reasons, he didn’t want to be saddled with Clinton’s restless husband, former President Bill Clinton.

Bill Clinton was cool toward Obama following the bruising nomination battle between Obama and his wife. However, any lingering animosity was put aside when both Clintons gave rousing endorsements of Obama at the Democratic National Convention in August, and later campaigned for him.

Since then, Obama has surrounded himself with several former staffers of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Some of them are pushing Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. Other senators, including Democrat John Kerry of Massachusetts and Republican Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, also are thought to be under consideration.

The two Democratic officials who spoke Thursday did so on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering Obama and his staff.

In his first two weeks as president-elect, Obama has struck a bipartisan tone. He paired a Republican and a Democrat to meet with foreign leaders this weekend on his behalf in Washington, for example, and on Friday his transition office announced Obama would meet with vanquished Republican rival John McCain on Monday.

The meeting will be the first since Obama, the Democratic Illinois senator, beat McCain, an Arizona senator, by an Electoral College landslide in the Nov. 4 election.

“It’s well known that they share an important belief that Americans want and deserve a more effective and efficient government, and will discuss ways to work together to make that a reality,” Obama spokesman Stephanie Cutter said in announcing the meeting.

Cutter also said the two will be joined at Obama’s Chicago transition office by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a McCain confidant, and Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois Democrat whom Obama has chosen to be his White House chief of staff.

Read more at http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/11/13/officials-obama-considering-hillary-clinton-secretary-state/

FOX News’ Greta Van Susteren went to Alaska to get Gov. Sarah Palin’s reflections on the presidential election.

After a whirlwind campaign alongside Sen. John McCain, Sarah Palin is defending herself against criticism stemming from the tens of thousands of dollars spent on her wardrobe as well as several reported foreign affairs missteps.

Nov. 9: FOX News

“When I arrived at the convention, there were clothes waiting for me, and clothes being ordered for me and the family, for eight of us,” the Alaska governor told FOX News’ Greta Van Susteren, in an interview that aired Monday night. “And ever since then, those clothes, knowing that they didn’t belong to me … we boxed them all up, sent them back to the rightful owners, the Republican National Committee, and that’s the story on the clothes.” 

Attorneys for the Republican National Committee are still trying to determine exactly what clothing was bought for Palin and exactly what has been returned, The Associated Press reports.

Palin dismissed the controversy over the reported $150,000 bill as “irrelevant,” along with claims from Republican aides that she could not identify the members of NAFTA or that she thought Africa was a country — and not a continent.

“It just seems like such an irrelevant issue when you consider what is going on in the world today and how a new administration is being ushered in and people being concerned about the direction of the nation and policies that will be adopted,” Palin said. “Clothes just seem irrelevant.”

Palin continued, “I just think that there was unfair criticism that maybe lingers today, that my family and I asked for anybody to pay for any our clothes.”

Regarding the reported Africa gaffe, Palin said, “And never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or is it a continent? I just don’t know about this issue. So I don’t know how they took our one discussion on Africa and turned that into what they turned it into … Along those same lines, of course, was the criticism that supposedly I didn’t know who the participants in NAFTA were.”

Amid speculation nationwide about Palin’s political future, the governor told FOX News that she’s unsure of what 2012 will bring, but added that she doesn’t intend on running away from future criticism.

“Your life is an open book and you open yourself up to criticism and you’d better be ready to take that criticism,” Palin said. “In other words, don’t run for office if you can’t handle it.”
Palin, who could seek re-election in 2010 or potentially run for president in four years, said she will rely on faith.

“Putting my life in my creator’s hands — this is what I always do,” she said. “I’m like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I’m like, don’t let me miss the open door … And if there is an open door in ‘12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I’ll plow through that door.”

Palin’s father, Chuck Heath, told the Associated Press that Palin spent part of the weekend going through her clothing to determine what belongs to the Republican Party.

“She was just frantically … trying to sort stuff out,” Heath told AP. “That’s the problem, you know, the kids lose underwear, and everything has to be accounted for. Nothing goes right back to normal.”

Palin’s father said his daughter told him the only clothing or accessories she personally had purchased in the past four months was a pair of shoes.

The McCain-Palin campaign said last week that about a third of the clothing was returned immediately because it was the wrong size, or for other reasons. However, other purchases apparently were made after that, a campaign official told AP.

In Wasilla, her hometown backers welcomed their former mayor, putting aside their disappointment over her unsuccessful bid.

Jessica Steele, proprietor of the Beehive Beauty Shop and keeper of the governor’s up-do since 2002, cannot wait to see what Palin does next move.

“That’s something I want to talk to her about: What’s our vision for her hair?” Steele told AP. “I can’t wait to see her and say, ‘OK, I’ve got you alone for three hours. Just relax, and how are you, really?”‘

While Palin remains popular, the reality of defeat is evident.

Bags of fan mail, as many as 400 letters a day, partially fill a room at her parent’s house. But Palin’s parents no longer meet Secret Service agents when they pick up their children at Cottonwood Creek Elementary, where Palin’s youngest daughter, Piper, is a student. The reporters and camera crews are gone from the Palin home on Lake Lucille, once patrolled by Coast Guard boats. Now a thick sheet of ice covers the lake.

Four state troopers still guard the governor 24 hours a day, Heath told AP — something Palin never had before.

And in a bit of familiarity, Heath said he brought a pot of moose chili to Palin’s house this past weekend.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
More at http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/11/10/sarah-palin-defends-criticism-post-election-interview/

The president-elect’s advisers quietly craft a proposal to ship dozens, if not hundreds, of imprisoned terrorism suspects to the United States to face criminal trials

President-elect Barack Obama’s advisers are quietly crafting a proposal to ship dozens, if not hundreds, of imprisoned terrorism suspects to the United States to face criminal trials, a plan that would make good on his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison but could require creation of a controversial new system of justice.

During his campaign, Obama described Guantanamo as a “sad chapter in American history” and has said generally that the U.S. legal system is equipped to handle the detainees. But he has offered few details on what he planned to do once the facility is closed.

Under plans being put together in Obama’s camp, some detainees would be released and many others would be prosecuted in U.S. criminal courts.

A third group of detainees — the ones whose cases are most entangled in highly classified information — might have to go before a new court designed especially to handle sensitive national security cases, according to advisers and Democrats involved in the talks. Advisers participating directly in the planning spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans are not final.

The move would be a sharp deviation from the Bush administration, which established military tribunals to prosecute detainees at the Navy base in Cuba and strongly opposes bringing prisoners to the United States. Obama’s Republican challenger, John McCain, had also pledged to close Guantanamo. But McCain opposed criminal trials, saying the Bush administration’s tribunals should continue on U.S. soil.

The plan being developed by Obama’s team has been championed by legal scholars from both political parties. But it is almost certain to face opposition from Republicans who oppose bringing terrorism suspects to the U.S. and from Democrats who oppose creating a new court system with fewer rights for detainees.

It drew criticism from some detainee lawyers shortly after it surfaced Monday.

“I think that creating a new alternative court system in response to the abject failure of Guantanamo would be a profound mistake,” said Jonathan Hafetz, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who represents detainees. “We do not need a new court system. The last eight years are a testament to the problems of trying to create new systems.”

Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and Obama legal adviser, said discussions about plans for Guantanamo had been “theoretical” before the election but would quickly become very focused because closing the prison is a top priority. Bringing the detainees to the United States will be controversial, he said, but could be accomplished.

“I think the answer is going to be, they can be as securely guarded on U.S. soil as anywhere else,” Tribe said. “We can’t put people in a dungeon forever without processing whether they deserve to be there.”

The tougher challenge will be allaying fears by Democrats who believe the Bush administration’s military commissions were a farce and dislike the idea of giving detainees anything less than the full constitutional rights normally enjoyed by everyone on U.S. soil.

“There would be concern about establishing a completely new system,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, a member of the House Judiciary Committee and former federal prosecutor who is aware of the discussions in the Obama camp. “And in the sense that establishing a regimen of detention that includes American citizens and foreign nationals that takes place on U.S. soil and departs from the criminal justice system — trying to establish that would be very difficult.”

Obama has said the civilian and military court-martial systems provide “a framework for dealing with the terrorists,” and Tribe said the administration would look to those venues before creating a new legal system. But discussions of what a new system would look like have already started.

“It would have to be some sort of hybrid that involves military commissions that actually administer justice rather than just serve as kangaroo courts,” Tribe said. “It will have to both be and appear to be fundamentally fair in light of the circumstances. I think people are going to give an Obama administration the benefit of the doubt in that regard.”

Though a hybrid court may be unpopular, other advisers and Democrats involved in the Guantanamo Bay discussions say Obama has few other options.

Prosecuting all detainees in federal courts raises a host of problems. Evidence gathered through military interrogation or from intelligence sources might be thrown out. Defendants would have the right to confront witnesses, meaning undercover CIA officers or terrorist turncoats might have to take the stand, jeopardizing their cover and revealing classified intelligence tactics.

In theory, Obama could try to transplant the Bush administration’s military commission system from Guantanamo Bay to a U.S. prison. But Tribe said, and other advisers agreed, that was “a nonstarter.” With lax evidence rules and intense secrecy, the military commissions have been criticized by human rights groups, defense attorneys and even some military prosecutors who quit the process in protest.

“I don’t think we need to completely reinvent the wheel, but we need a better tribunal process that is more transparent,” Schiff said.

That means something different would need to be done if detainees couldn’t be released or prosecuted in traditional courts. Exactly what that something would look like remains unclear.

According to three advisers participating in the process, Obama is expected to propose a new court system, appointing a committee to decide how such a court would operate. Some detainees likely would be returned to the countries where they were first captured for further detention or rehabilitation. The rest could probably be prosecuted in U.S. criminal courts, one adviser said. All spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing talks, which have been private.

Waleed Alshahari, who has been following Guantanamo issues for the Yemeni Embassy in Washington, said the plan being discussed by the Obama team was an improvement over the current system. He said, however, he expects most detainees to be released rather than stand trial.

“If the U.S. government has any evidence against them, they would try them and put them in jail,” Alshahari said. “But it has been obvious they have nothing against them. That is why they have not faced trial.”

With more than 90 Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo, the country is home to the largest group of prisoners. The United States and Yemen have negotiated but failed to reach a deal on a prisoner release.

Whatever form it takes, Tribe said he expects Obama to move quickly.

“In reality and symbolically, the idea that we have people in legal black holes is an extremely serious black mark,” Tribe said. “It has to be dealt with.”