The McLaughlin Group did a good job of running through Anthony “Tony” Rezko’s shady past. The group doesn’t think it will effect Obama much, but have no doubt, if he is the nominee the Republicans will make sure this story is known far and wide.

One of the charges against Rezko is that he donated kickback money from state contracts to a campaign of a Illinois candidate. Wanna take a guess who that candidate was?

Something that we should highlight every time this man says he was a activist on the streets of Chicago is his close ties to Rezko, a well known slumlord, who kept his tenants in squalor.

Mrs Larkins, 51, lives just seven city blocks away, in a district where posters advertise “dirt cheap properties” and “foreclosure advice”. She moved there almost a decade ago, taking a subsidised apartment with her 20-year-old daughter and one-year-old grandson in a building that had fallen into neglect when run by Mr Rezko.

The family boiled water on the stove and draped plastic sheeting across the windows in an effort to keep warm during the city’s bitter winters, as the heating was not working. Rubbish piled up uncollected and repeated requests for basic repairs were ignored.

“It was a terrible place to live: there were a lot of drug dealers and people fighting and getting shot,” Mrs Larkins, a widow who receives invalidity benefit, told The Sunday Telegraph.

“The owners never took any interest in the place; they just wanted the rent money. We had to call the city just to get the garbage collected.”

The 44-apartment complex was one of 30 low-income housing projects run by Mr Rezko and his partners with funds from the city during the 1990s. By early this decade, many were boarded up as bills and mortgage payments went unpaid, but Mr Rezko moved into the fast-food business, while tenants like the Larkins struggled with the legacy of his poor management.

Obama says “well, gee, I had no idea.” Sure thing:

Although Mr Obama makes much of his roots as a community activist in Chicago’s poorest districts, he has said he had “no inkling” that there were problems with Mr Rezko’s operations. But the signs should have been easy to spot, according to John Bartlett, of the Chicago-based Metropolitan Tenants’ Association.

“The problems with Rezko were far from hidden. They were so bad that the city has had to take him to court. Anyone who wanted to look into Rezko’s activities could have learned about them,” he said.

To be sure, Rezco won’t be the only fodder for the Republicans. We have his pastor and mentor who recently said this:

“Black women are being raped daily in Darfur, Sudan, in the Congo and in Sub-Saharan Africa. That doesn’t make news,” Wright said in the August 2005 edition of Trumpet Magazine, a publication of his Trinity United Church of Christ.

But, “One 18-year-old white girl from Alabama gets drunk on a graduation trip to Aruba, goes off and ‘gives it up’ while in a foreign country, and that stays in the news for months!” he added. “Maybe I am missing something!”

Or Obama’s pandering in California where he supports giving drivers licenses to those here illegally:

Sen. Barack Obama easily won the African American vote in South Carolina, but to woo California Latinos, where he is running 3-to-1 behind rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, he is taking a giant risk: spotlighting his support for the red-hot issue of granting driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

It’s a huge issue for Latinos, who want them. It’s also a huge issue for the general electorate, which most vehemently does not. Obama’s stand could come back to haunt him not only in a general election, but with other voters in California, where driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants helped undo former Gov. Gray Davis.

Clinton stumbled into that minefield in a debate last fall and quickly backed off. First she suggested a New York proposal for driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants might be reasonable. Then she denied endorsing the idea, and later came out against them.

Asked directly about the issue now, her California campaign spokesman said Clinton “believes the solution is to pass comprehensive immigration reform.”

“Barack Obama has not backed down” on driver’s licenses for undocumented people, said Federico Peña, a former Clinton administration Cabinet member and Denver mayor now supporting Obama. “I think when the Latino community hears Barack’s position on such an important and controversial issue, they’ll understand that his heart and his intellect is with Latino community.”

Obama’s intention is to draw distinctions between himself and Clinton on what are otherwise indistinguishable positions on immigration. Both have adopted the standard Democratic approach of favoring tougher enforcement along with earned legalization.

The Illinois senator is differentiating himself in three key areas: driver’s licenses, a promise to take up immigration reform his first year in office, and his background as the son of an immigrant (his father was Kenyan) and a community organizer in Chicago.

So while the MSM may think this man walks on water, we all know he is just one more in a long line of corrupt Socialists. But he sure can give a good speech huh?

Sigh…..