Fresh off the heels of Obama blasting Hillary over the undue influence of lobbyist money comes today's front page article in the Chicago Sun-Times revealing that a company owned by Tony Rezko - the friend and contributor whose joint land deal with Obama has been such a pain in the Senator's presidential side - landed a $50 million government contract to provide security in Iraq.

Given Obama's high profile on both ethics reform and the war, this could have been a real double-whammy campaign killer if it came out that Obama had lobbied on Rezko's behalf to land the contract for the company, Companion Security. However, it turns out he did not:

After the state found a proposed training site, Frawley went to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) last August.

Obama's staff declined to help.

"The Senate staff had two meetings, one conference call, and sporadically e-mailed with representatives of Companion Security about their request for Sen. Obama to write a letter introducing the company to senior officials in the Iraqi government," Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt said. "That is not the kind of action Sen. Obama usually takes for individual companies, and our staff concluded on that basis to decline the requested assistance."

LaBolt said Obama's staff was unaware Companion had any ties to Rezko, who has raised campaign donations for Obama.

Just how plausible is it that Obama's staff wasn't aware of the Rezko connection? And what about the awareness of Senator Obama himself? There's no way of knowing. Here is what we do know: Obama has been friends with Rezko since 1990, and he was close enough with Rezko to do a joint high-six figure land deal with him in January '06. By August, Obama was almost certainly thinking hard about running for president, and Rezko's long-expected indictment on fraud and corruption charges came three months later. So was this a textbook display of good government ethics, a political decision driven by ambition for higher office, or perhaps a bit of both?

In the end, the answers to those questions don't matter, since the final result is that Obama (and his staff) did the right thing by declining to help Rezko's company. Bullet successfully dodged.