Sen. Feinstein's highly unethical behavior

[RighteousBoy]

The wishy-washy senator now claims Bush misled her prior to the invasion of Iraq. I don't think she's being honest with us, though. There may have been other reasons she helped sell Bush's lies. According to the Center for Public Integrity, Feinstein's husband Richard Blum has racked in millions of dollars from Perini, a civil infrastructure construction company, of which the billionaire investor wields a 75 percent voting share.

In April 2003, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers gave $500 million to Perini to provide services for Iraq's Central Command. A month earlier in March 2003, Perini was awarded $25 million to design and construct a facility to support the Afghan National Army near Kabul. And in March 2004, Perini was awarded a hefty contract worth up to $500 million for "electrical power distribution and transmission" in southern Iraq.

Feinstein, who sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee as well as the Select Committee on Intelligence, is reaping the benefits of her husband's investments.

So what's the problem? Would it have been better had he invested in Enron instead? The man made good investments, and now is reaping the benefit from them, I have no problem with someone making money - I see more of a problem with a government that would rather take it away.

The Democratic royal family recently purchased a $16.5 million mansion in the flush Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco.

Good for them, how many people benefited from the home, how many contractors, architects, plumbers, electricians, etc. Myself, I wouldn't spend that kind of money on a home, even if I could easily afford it, but the fact is that they can/did. They, like most us on this board, live in a country that allows us a tremendous oppurtunity to do well - it makes no sense to do without to quench some kind of prosperity/guilt.

It's a disgusting display of war profiteering, and just like Cheney, the leading Democrat should be called out for her offense.

If the government goes out for bids, and chooses a company based on ability, past performance, price, etc., and finds that company X is best suited for the task, why is there a problem? I can see an arguement, if Feinstein was doing some type of shady dealing, but if these were legal contracts, I see no problem. If she is against the war effort, and profits from war funding, it does show a bit of hypocracy - but if these stocks are controlled by her husband, then who knows just how much influence she has over them.

But if this is all about putting your money where your mouth is, then she could always take Cheney's example,(when he sold his halliburton stock), and do the same.

[boutons_]

"senator now claims Bush misled her prior to the invasion of Iraq."

The whole ing world knows know dubya and head lied their stinking asses off to get their war for oil, cherry-picked, forged, and hyped intel and suppressed all intel doubts, and bullied and slimed anybody who dared call them out (eg, Joe Wilson).

Claiming to have been misled is fully justified.

[Nbadan]

For once, the M$M won't touch this story because it's all bullsh1t. Ms. Feinstein couldn't have possibly chaired the MILCON committee for the past six years because Democrats were the Senate minority. She was a ranking minority member most of that time, and the Metroactive is misleading the reader by confusing Ms. Feinstein’s role in the committee.

Metroactive also misleads by stating that Diane Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum "owned" those companies because he didn't.

Even if Ms. Feinstein was chair of the committee during the period, any contract decisions have to be approved by a quorum of the committee and the Senate. Diane Feinstein has been married to Richard Blum for 26 years and disclosed the possibility of a conflict of interest a long time ago. Mr. Blum had those investment holdings long before Diane Feinstein was in the Senate and long before they were married in 1980.

Since she has disclosed the possibility of the conflict of interest the committee itself is the party to decide if Diane Feinstein is steering military contracts through the committee. Since both contractors, UDS and Perini Corp. are longtime government military contractors in all likelyhood someone else, not Ms. Feinstein, made the contractual decisions because the committee and the Senate were well aware of her relationship to Mr. Blum.

Metroactive is a right wing blog in Santa Cruz CA with ties to the Republican National Committee. The primary political function of Metroactive has been to smear Ms. Feinstein and hound her out of the Senate because the Republicans can't come close to defeating her in a statewide election.

If you read the blog you'll see that the Metreoactive's vendetta against Feinstein is laughably groundless and the blog is quite delusional about its own overblown sense of self importance. Metroactive acts as if Diane Feinstein spends her entire day preoccupied with their blogging investigations that 16 wacko Republicans actually read about. I doubt if Ms. Feinstein even knows that Metroactive even exists.

There isn't a conflict of interest because Mr. Blum doesn't and never did own any defense contracting businesses. Richard Blum is investment analyst, founder and senior partner of Blum Capital who once had investment holdings in two different defense contracting firms, Perini Corp. and URS. He divested himself of those holdings in 2005. The Committee and the Senate were both aware of Richard Blum's investment holdings because Diane Feinstein disclosed them to the Senate to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest when she was assigned to work on that committee years ago.

It's perfectly legal and ethical to have a spouse or family member have investment holdings in a company that contracts with the United States government. Mr. Blum had nothing to do with the day to day operations, or contract bidding decisions of Perini Corp or URS because he was not an employee of either company. The ethical violation is not disclosing that relationship and steering contracts to benefit a friend, family member, or your own personal financial interests.

Allow me to point out that George W. Bush's own father is one of the founders of the Carlyle Group who is the largest investor in URS and President Bush routinely signs bills awarding contracts to URS.

Cheney is the former CEO of Halliburton who maintains stock options in Halliburton and was the prime mover behind the decisions to award multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts to Halliburton in Iraq and the post-Katrina construction. As a result Mr. Cheney enriched himself by millions of dollars with those decisions. The extent of Cheney's direct ties to Halliburton are a ethics and legal conflict that Mr. Cheney has never felt significant enough to fully disclose or answer to anyone for. Cheney's ties to Halliburton also raise Mr. Cheney's motivations when he was the primary cheerleader for the Iraq invasion in 2002. Cheney activities on behalf of Halliburton reek with the stench of corruption and greed. If Cheney's case isn't a conflict of interest, then there is no such thing as a conflict of interest.

Nobody in the Republican controlled House and Senate or at the Justice Department felt Mr. Cheney's personal holdings in Halliburton and his no-bid contract awards to Halliburton were worthy of their oversight or investigative attention. War profiteering is in the same class of criminal behavior as treason.

The real reason Diane Feinstein left the MILCON committee in January was her new assignment as chair of Senate Rules Committee. She didn't resign in disgrace but resigned as a mere formality to take on new committee assignments in a newly elected Senate.

The reason why the media didn't " cover it" is all 100 Senators get new committee assignments in a newly election Senate and all of them resign from the committees they no longer serve on. A routine procedural task of the Senate is not newsworthy.

What I find is disturbing is the modus operandi of the right wing blogoshere. Right wing bloggers are well aware of the misleading content of the story but still give the green light for publication. These partisan kamikazes know the story is a great big pile of unmitigated horse crap but they're hoping that some of the bovine manure they're tossing at Diane Feinstein will stick to her. (See John Kerry, Swiftboat Vets for more info)

Metroactive is the party with questionable ethics, not Diane Feinstein. The ethical duty of any journalist is to write a story that is factual and something resembling a fair minded treatment of the subject matter. By that standard Metroactive's news stories would not pass the scrutiny of the editor of high school newspaper.

Apparently the Republicans haven't learned a thing from their route in the 2006 election. They are the same old partisan hacks, cheap liars, swiftboaters, meglomanics, finger pointing incompetents double dealers, bribe takers and low life weasels they've always been. They need to be taken out to the woodshed for another good thrashing in 2008.