Jefferson City - Barack Obama is supposedly something different – an agent of change.  But over the last few months, Americans have been introduced to a few of Obama’s closet friends and trusted advisors, men like Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers and Jim Johnson.  These men are best known respectively for being convicted of fraud and money laundering, being an unrepentant domestic terrorist and receiving highly questionable loans while millions of Americans struggle to pay their mortgages. 

“It is associations like these that have Missourians concerned – these friendships don’t represent the kind of change that the American people are looking for,” said Tina Hervey, communications director of the Missouri Republican Party.  “Equally concerning is Senator Obama’s close relationship with Senator McCaskill who has repeatedly demonstrated a serious lack of judgment with her Bermuda tax shelter, conflicts of interest, shady financial dealings, ethics troubles and even a meth scandal in her former office."

Below are a few of the reasons why Missourians do not trust Senator McCaskill’s judgment:

1. McCaskill and her millionaire developer husband, Joseph Shepard, have a family fortune of between $13 million and $30 million amassed though taxpayer-financed tax credits, hundreds of government subsidized real estate partnerships and an offshore tax shelter in Bermuda – she is out of touch with mainstream Missourians. 
2. Although there is documentation that clearly shows that her family has benefited from more than $10 million in MHDC financing in recent years, McCaskill lied to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2006 when she said her household coffers had not received any benefits from the Missouri Housing Development Commission (MHDC). 
3. McCaskill said she would “fight to improve ethical standards in Washington… follow all ethics rules and disclosure rules of the Senate to the letter, as she’s done throughout her campaign.”  Yet seven months into her term the U.S. Senate Ethics Committee launched a probe into Claire McCaskill’s failure to release complete details about the source of her family’s publicly financed fortune. 
4. In 1998 in a political ad, McCaskill pledged that she would hold bad nursing homes accountable, “. . . as state auditor, I’ll stop the payments of all state funds to any nursing home that allows elderly abuse. They’ll not only face prosecution, they’ll lose millions of dollars in state funding. Because our parents deserve better."  But that all changed when she married Joseph Shepard - Shepard’s nursing homes have been cited for serious violations against senior citizens, the most serious being 26 plaintiffs filing a wrongful death suit against a Shepard senior care facility in St. Louis. During her tenure as State Auditor, McCaskill conducted three audits of the nursing home industry, none of were of her husband’s facilities.
5. Senator McCaskill betrayed Missourians trust when she hung a “for sale” sign on her United States Senate Office.  McCaskill petitioned the FEC to allow her to accept unlimited campaign contributions to retire a campaign debt.  This behavior was so egregious that even the liberal Post-Dispatch described the behavior as “tacky”.