With a headline like that from ABC News, I think we can pretty much see how this Rezko trial is going to impact Obama. The press is signaling that it is no longer his friend.

The latter, one of Britain's richest men, has a long history of shady financial dealings as well as numerous connections to Saddam Hussein, who he helped to power. According to the Times, Auchi sent a lot of money to Rezko just before his wife bought property adjacent to the Obamas in a land deal that has already raised a lot of eyebrows:

A British-Iraqi billionaire lent millions of dollars to Barack Obama's fundraiser just weeks before an imprudent land deal that has returned to haunt the presidential contender, an investigation by The Times discloses.

The money transfer raises the question of whether funds from Nadhmi Auchi, one of Britain's wealthiest men, helped Mr Obama buy his mock Georgian mansion in Chicago.

A company related to Mr Auchi, who has a conviction for corruption in France, registered the loan to Mr Obama's bagman Antoin "Tony" Rezko on May 23 2005. Mr Auchi says the loan, through the Panamanian company Fintrade Services SA, was for $3.5 million.

Three weeks later, Mr Obama bought a house on the city's South Side while Mr Rezko's wife bought the garden plot next door from the same seller on the same day, June 15.

Why is this important to the land deal?
Mrs Rezko paid the asking price for the garden but the Obamas bought the house for $1.65 million, - $300,000 less than the asking price. The sellers deny they offered the Obamas a discount on the house because the garden had fetched full price from Mrs Rezko.

They took 15% less than the asking price? That's a rather remarkable discount. And how exactly did the Rezkos afford to buy the adjacent plot? It cost $625,000, and they needed to make a $125,000 down payment on the land. Yet at the time, Tony Rezko had "no income, negative cash flow, no liquid assets, no unencumbered assets [and] is significantly in arrears on many of his obligations" -- according to a sworn court statement a year later. His wife had an income of $37,000 and assets of around $35,000.

How could they qualify for a mortgage on the adjacent plot? Where did they get the money for the down payment? More importantly, why did Auchi lend so much money to Rezko, when Rezko had been in such financial straits? And why was Auchi so interested in Rezko in the first place?

Let's take another look at Auchi:
Auchi's brother was among the many Baathists killed by Saddam, but the execution did not inhibit Auchi's business dealings with Iraq which, he says, didn't stop until the Gulf war of 1991. His first coup in the West was to broker a deal to sell Italian frigates to the Iraqi Defence Ministry, for which he received $17m in commission. Italian investigators claimed that a Panamanian company owned by Auchi was used to funnel allegedly illegal payments. Auchi denied he had done anything wrong.
In the mid-1980s he got to know Pierfrancesco Pacini Battaglia, a man whose role in directing money to politicians led Italians to call him 'the one below God'. Saddam Hussein had ordered the construction of a pipeline from Iraq to Saudi Arabia. Battaglia and Auchi secured the contract for a Franco-Italian consortium. In a statement to New York lawyers Battaglia alleged he knew how. 'To acquire the contract it was necessary, as is usual, especially in Middle Eastern countries, to pay commission to characters close to the Iraqi government... In this case, the international intermediary who dealt with this matter was the Iraqi, Nadhmi Auchi.'

Nick Cohen suggests that Britain only extradited Auchi to France to face fraud charges in 2003 because our invasion of Iraq had ended his usefulness as an expert on the Hussein regime for MI-6. In any case, Auchi also allegedly had a hand in defrauding the UK's National Health System after his fleecing of the French oil company Elf.

Obama is not the Agent of Change. He is a calculating politician who plays the game the same way politicians have been playing it for hundreds of years - receiving money in exchange for favors from government for his friends and cronies, influence selling, the sweetheart deals, and all the rest of this sleazy mess.

The "real" Obama is the one who is considerably more opportunistic than altruistic, who has happily let others do the groundwork so that he can come in at the last minute and claim victory, has downplayed his friendship with Tony Rezko.  He claims to have the ability to effect change in DC, but his three years there have not exactly been revolutionary - what kind of person lobbies to get the plum chairmanship of a Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Europe and then fails to hold a single hearing, visit a single head of state, be any kind of advocate for repairing our relationships with our European allies - and then brushes off criticism using the excuse of a presidential campaign?  Hey, Barack - if you're too busy, maybe there's someone else who could have been actually doing the work that comes with that position!  Reminds me a lot of Lieberman, who stomped his feet and threatened to caucus with the GOP if he didn't get his chairmanship, and once he had it, has put in the same kind of mediocre performance as Obama.

The deafness and blindness that afflicts the media is all so eerily - and sickeningly - reminiscent of what happened in 2000 and 2004, and in the run-up to the war.  Whatever ugliness that tried to surface on Bush was ignored, excused or downplayed by the media.  The voices that opposed the war, the conflicting information - oh, who needed that when we had the administration telling us everything we really needed to know?

Obama responded he only had 5 billable hours for Rezko entity.....The issue there was being a slumlord....

Innuendo sells....

So we're left with a possible situation where the Repubs benefit from the nastiness.

Most of us take no joy in any of this.  We want a candidate who can win the GE and one of the arguments for Obama's candidacy is that he has a better shot.  That could change if this stuff gains traction.

I mean, at what point does the infatuation end? Is there anything he could do or have done that would lead you to question your loyalty? Or is your devotion truly blind?

But, now that you raise that specific point, ABC didn't mention it but it's in the Indictment and Government pleadings. Example: Joseph Aramanda.

Aramanda is identified as "Individual D" in Rezko's indictment.

Also, from the Chicago Tribune:

According to Saturday's Chicago Sun-Times, which cites an unnamed source, Obama was the unnamed "political candidate" referred to in a Dec. 21 court document that accuses Rezko of orchestrating a scheme in which a firm hired to handle state teacher pension investments first had to pay $250,000 in "sham" finder's fees.

From that money, $10,000 was donated to Obama's successful run for the Senate in the name of Glenview entrepreneur Joseph Aramanda, the story said.

Rezko also recommended Obama hire Aramanda 's son as an intern. He was hired but only worked 5 weeks.

Just this week Rezko and the Government have been dueling about whether Amaranda's financial dealings with Robert Kjellander, Illinois' Republican national committeeman, can come into evidence. The Judge ruled for Rezko on this one, saying it was too complex and would confuse the jury, but the Government has filed a motion for reconsideration.

It's very easy to do an MLS search and see what someone paid for a piece of property as well as how they paid--cash, mortgage, how much down, etc.  I wonder if anyone has bothered to find out who at the mortgage company gave a 500K loan to a woman making less than 37K a year...?  Also, where the down payment of 100K+ and change came from...?

Thanks for digging that up, tree.  Jay Stewart is such an unusual name.  I can see why the original poster made a mistake.

I'd rather have an inexperienced Democrat over McCain -- and Obama supporters should prefer a Democrat who's been there before and in their eyes doesn't represent change in Washington to McCain.