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

AP photographer tracks down family of terrified children split by war

This photo of an 11-year-old girl carrying her 3-year-old niece as she looks for her parents in the village of Kiwanja, eastern Congo, drew reaction from people around the world wanting to help them.

Eleven-year-old Protegee carried her sobbing niece on her back as they searched for relatives in a sea of people in eastern Congo.

An Associated Press photograph of the girl — using her filthy T-shirt to wipe the tears from her face as 3-year-old Reponse clung to her neck and wailed — prompted hundreds of e-mails from people around the world hoping to help them.

I returned to Kiwanja on Sunday to try to reunite the girls with family and even succeeded in finding them. But it turned out that not all problems in Congo can be solved by an outsider’s sympathy.

When I first photographed Protegee on Nov. 6 in a crowd of thousands in the town of Kiwanja, she told me only her first name and that she was looking for her mother.

I learned later that she and Reponse had wandered alone for three days after being separated from Protegee’s mother on Nov. 3 as the family fled on foot from their village of Kiseguru, about 12 miles away.

Protegee had spent one night sleeping in a church, huddled with Reponse under a flimsy scarf. “I had no food or water,” she said, speaking in the Kiswahili language.

Hundreds of children have been separated from their families since fighting flared in eastern Congo in August and more than 1,600 children in the province were seeking their parents last week alone, according to UNICEF. The children’s young ages and inability to give detailed information — plus the lack of official records in the Congolese countryside — make it even more difficult to track down their families.

Faces of desperation
When I set out to search for Protegee, I had little certainty of success but I was determined to try to help. As a journalist, I’ve photographed war and refugees all over the world since the early 1980s.

But I was particularly moved by readers’ reactions to this photograph of two little girls, their faces wrenched in fear and desperation. I knew that the chances of finding them again were slim, as I see children walking alone on the roads every day. But I found myself imagining how it would feel if I were searching for my own daughters — and having two, that was not difficult.

Years of sporadic violence in eastern Congo intensified in August, and fighting between the army and its allied militia on one side and fighters loyal to rebel leader Laurent Nkunda on the other has displaced at least 250,000 people since then — despite the presence of the largest U.N. peacekeeping force in the world. Some fear Congo’s current crisis could again draw in neighboring countries. Congo’s devastating 1998-2002 war split the vast nation into rival fiefdoms and involved half a dozen African armies.

Reaching Kiwanja meant crossing an uneasy front line just a few miles north of Goma, with hundreds of heavily armed rebels and government troops deployed on either side. Then it was a bone-jarring two-hour drive on what was once a paved road, and is now one giant pothole.

In the name of hope
Kiwanja is a typical African town, with one strip of dirt road as the main drag, a few small shops on each side, one roundabout, one crossroad, and huts sprawling to infinity on the hills to the east and the valley to the north.

Armed with the photograph of Protegee and Reponse, I started asking around. Women frowned — they did not know the girls. I traveled to the school yard, to the clinic. No luck.

As I was about to head back to Goma, I stopped near a U.N. base. Just a few days earlier its outskirts were refuge to thousands. But now it was a nearly empty lot with the skeletons of makeshift huts and a white UNHCR tent.

I ventured inside the tent. There, Maria Mukeshimani’s eyes lit up at the sight of the photo — the woman, who had been displaced herself by the violence, knew these children. She had seen them in that very tent five days earlier. And she knew Protegee’s mother: Her name is Esperance Nirakagori.

Esperance — the French word for hope.

Esperance had taken refuge at the local Catholic church in Kiwanja. When I arrived there, I was greeted by the sounds of a choir. It was evening Mass.

“Does anyone know if Esperance is around?” I asked.

An elderly man replied that she was in a small house nearby.

Wearing a yellow and red dress, Esperance greeted us. She had sweat dripping from her headscarf and spoke softly.

‘Happy to see your mother’?
I showed her the picture and she smiled at the sight of the girls. Then, to my surprise, she said they had already found her, but she had sent them back to their village, alone and on foot. She feared for their safety in Kiwanja and believed they would be more secure in the care of her elder daughter; she was too weak to make the journey herself.

She kept staring at the photo. Only when I told her I would return the next morning and drive her to rejoin the girls in Kiseguru did her face light up in a wide, genuine smile.

We set off the next day after stopping for food at a restaurant in town. Esperance was quiet as we drove the 20 minutes to the village. She clutched the girls’ photo as she walked through the streets, a trail of excited children in her wake.

The reunion with Protegee and Reponse, in a small mud hut, was brief. They smiled at each other. No one spoke. I prompted Protegee, a shy girl who was only 2 months old when her father was killed in Congo’s last bloody war.

“Are you happy to see your mother?” I asked.

She answered, in a soft voice: “Yes.”

Protegee told how she had arrived exhausted in Kiseguru on Nov. 12. But when she did, she found her family’s hut empty — her sister and other relatives had already fled toward Uganda. For five days she waited for an adult to come for her. No one did. She was planning to set off for Kiwanja that very day to rejoin her mother, when I arrived instead.

Rather than remain in their village, Esperance asked me to take them all back to Kiwanja.

‘When the war is over’
In the streets of Kiseguru, we had seen 20 men wearing civilian clothes and toting Kalashnikovs. When I asked her who they were, her answer was swift and certain: “Mai Mai.”

Earlier this month, Kiwanja residents were terrorized by the pro-government Mai Mai militia, who the U.N. said killed people accused of supporting the rebels. Then the rebels won control and killed those they claimed had supported the militiamen.

And now the Mai Mai were in her family’s village.

Protegee, Reponse and Esperance are back in Kiwanja now. They have set up a cot in the corner of a room on the Catholic church grounds. Outside, the U.N. World Food Program is distributing food, but the situation in the town remains volatile.

Before I left, I gave Esperance the photograph of her daughter and granddaughter. She handed it to Protegee, who, with Reponse in her lap, gazed at the image. I left them there on their cot, clutching the photo, one of their few possessions.

Asked when they would return to their village, Esperance replied: “When the war is over.”

Jerome Delay is AP’s chief photographer for Africa. Associated Press writer Anita Powell contributed to this report from Kiwanja, Congo.

Read more at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27790850/?GT1=43001