The story begins with a very expensive fund raiser dinner by most standards. This dinner cost $21,000 for an eight seat table. Fortunately the money never reached the USA. The money was raised to influence relatives of native Nigerians to vote for Obama by running advertisements.

The money was seized by some very astute Nigerians.

Nigerian anti-graft investigators have seized money raised by the head of the Nigerian Stock Exchange to support US presidential candidate Barack Obama.

The money will be returned to the individuals in Nigeria that attended the soiree according to The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. They also had this to say:

The EFCC said it had seized 74m naira ($630,000, £314,000), but said no Nigerian laws had been broken.

According to the BBC, the Obama campaign distanced itself from the group. Unfortunately the Nigerians left their footprints on Obama’s website. More on that:

Stock exchange chairwoman Ndi Okereke-Onyuike is also the head of Africans for Obama, a Nigeria-based support group.

She was interviewed by the EFCC after media reports that the Obama campaign had disassociated itself from the group.

Obama manages to escape everything with any appearance of illegality. He either disassociates himself from people or he is allowed to plead “mea culpa” as in the case of the Gaza Strip brothers and fraudulent reports to the FEC concerning Citizens Services Inc. a front company for ACORN. Mrs Okereke-Onyiuke said,

“We never said we were going to donate money for the campaign,”

“We paid for the hall and the entertainers and the surplus, we said it would be spent on advertisements aimed at persuading Nigerians to tell their relatives in America to register to vote.

“There is not one Nigerian who doesn’t have a relative or friend in America. Our aim was to encourage those people to tell their family who have the right to vote in America to vote for Obama.”

A statement from the EFCC said they had ordered Mrs Okereke-Onyuike to “steer clear of such activities in future”.

Mrs Okereke-Onyiuke said the press was trying to attack her because they were jealous of her success.

“I am a woman of the highest integrity,” she told the BBC News website.

By all appearances Obama’s activity with this lady and her group looks like his activity may not have been on the up and up. I will leave that conclusion to you!

The interviewer asked McPeak: “So where’s the problem? State? White House?”

McPeak replied: “New York City. Miami. We have a large vote — vote, here in favor of Israel. And no politician wants to run against it.”

Translation (as if it’s needed): Jews — who put Israel over every American interest — control America’s policy on the Middle East. And McPeak has the audacity to accuse Bill Clinton of McCarthyism.

For more on Gen. McPeak, read Larry Johnson’s post, “Senator Obama, Have You No Decency?” [The photo above comes from Saturday's rally in Medford, Oregon. Larry quotes from their speeches at that rally.]

Below, “Obama church published Hamas terror manifesto: Compares charter calling for murder of Jews to Declaration of Independence,” along with the PDF of the actual Obama church bulletin:

More:

Sen. Barack Obama’s Chicago church reprinted a manifesto by Hamas that defended terrorism as legitimate resistance, refused to recognize the right of Israel to exist and compared the terror group’s official charter – which calls for the murder of Jews – to America’s Declaration of Independence.

Yet more:

The revelation follows a recent WND article quoting Israeli security officials who expressed “concern” about Robert Malley, an adviser to Obama who has advocated negotiations with Hamas and providing international assistance to the terrorist group.

In his July 22, 2007, church bulletin, Wright reprinted an article by Mousa Abu Marzook, identified in the newsletter as a “deputy of the political bureau of Hamas.” A photo image of the newsletter was captured and posted today by the business blog BizzyBlog. The Hamas piece was first published by the Los Angeles Times, garnering the newspaper much criticism.

According to senior Israeli security officials, Marzook, who resides in Syria alongside Hamas chieftain Khaled Meshaal, is considered the “brains” behind Hamas, designing much of the terror group’s policies and ideology. Israel possesses what it says is a large volume of specific evidence that Marzook has been directly involved in calling for or planning scores of Hamas terrorist offensives, including deadly suicide bombings. He was also accused of attempting to set up a Hamas network in the U.S. …

He tried to set up a Hamas network in the U.S. Yet, Obama’s pastor for 20 years thinks so highly of him that he posts his writings in the CHURCH BULLETIN? I hardly know what to say.

NOTE: I have uploaded the actual church bulletin: tuccbulletin_july22.pdf

The “Pastor’s Page” (Jeremiah Wright’s page) features this: “A FRESH VIEW OF THE PALESTINIAN STRUGGLE,” written by Mousa Abu Marzook.

An American woman — Sidney Misal, 49, “working for a nongovernmental organization, the Asian Rural Life Development Foundation” — has been kidnapped in Afghanistan along with her driver. Meanwhile, reports the Gulf Times, the “UN urges review of journalist’s death sentence.” Do any of you know if there’s an online effort to help this blogger? Details below, along with a fun story about David Mamet’s new play:

More from the Gulf Times:

KABUL: The death sentence handed down to a reporter in Afghanistan has prompted the United Nations and several press freedom organisations to call on the Afghan government to intervene in the case.
Sayed Parvez Kambakhsh, 23, a journalist for the daily Janan-e-Naw, and a student of Balkh University, was detained in October for downloading from the Internet and distributing to classmates an article written by an Iranian scholar that contained anti-Islamic sentiments.
The article allegedly questioned why men are allowed to have four spouses in Islam while women are denied the same right.
On Tuesday Kambakhsh was presented before a court of three judges in northern Mazar-e-Sharif and handed the death penalty in a closed session without any legal counsel.
The Afghan Independent Journalists Association was outraged that no lawyer, journalist, or human rights representatives were permitted entry to the court during Kambakhsh’s trail.
The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan on Thursday issued a statement saying the case is a “possible misuse of the judicial process” that does not “serve the cause of justice.”
Paris-based Reporters Without Borders and the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which has offices in Kabul, believe the real intent by the court is to intimidate Kambakhsh’s older brother, Ibrahimi, who recently published an article implicating an Afghan legislator in a series of killings and kidnappings. …

God, would I love to see this play. From the New Yorker:

Presidential Pratfalls
David Mamet’s Oval Office satire.
by John Lahr January 28, 2008

A professional skeptic and an inspired word jockey, David Mamet can lay claim to the same connoisseurship of human folly as H. L. Mencken, who once observed that, in America, “only the man who was born with a petrifie diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night.” Mamet’s new Oval Office satire, “November” (well directed by Joe Mantello, at the Ethel Barrymore), is a hilarious demonstration of the fact that we live in an age of equality: all classes are criminal.

As the curtain rises on “November,” the President of the United States, Charles H. P. Smith (Nathan Lane), who is on the eve of losing his bid for a second term (his numbers are “lower than Gandhi’s cholesterol”), asks his trusted aide Archer Brown (the expert Dylan Baker) what has happened to his public support. “Why, why?” he moans. “You’ve fucked the country into a cocked hat,” Archer replies. (The guffaws from the audience acknowledge our outrage and disillusion with our own current leaders.) For farcical purposes, Mamet is quick to add financial desperation to Smith’s woes. In the last days of his election campaign, Smith has no money for TV ads. He has no money for a Presidential library or to guarantee his own future; even his security guards have gone walkabout.

At once a barbarian, a bully, and an idiot (“I always felt that I’d do something memorable—I just assumed it’d be getting impeached,” he says), Smith brings oxygen to Mamet’s rhetorical brilliance … DO read all!

What else is going on?