This is Dianne Feinstein's new house in Pacific Heights

[Neecy]

And no, this has nothing to do with John Edwards...



This little cottage cost a cool $16.5 million dollars. Nothing like austerity during wartime!

Granted she and her husband were wealthy before the war, but the WOT has been good to the Blum family.

Richard Blum owns a 75% voting share of Perini, a civil infrastructure company. Since 2003, this company has been awarded contracts totalling over one billion dollars for projects in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Blum owns 111,000 shares of stock in URS Corporation and sits on their board of directors. URS bought EG&G, a war contractor, from the Carlyle Group and since that time URS stock has tripled after EG&G received over $600M in Iraq contracts. Blum cashed in over $2 million on that venture alone and another $100 million bucks for his investment firm.

Should Feinstein have recused herself from voting a further $96B dollars to the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan? Do we have any assurances at all that none of those funds will end up in her checking account? We call Cheney on his Halliburton ties constantly, why does DiFi get a pass?

I'll just add that during the (very brief) "debate" on the IWR I wrote Feinstein - then my senator - begging her to vote no. After her Aye vote I received a condescending, terse reply that repeated the WMD lies and assured me that Dianne Knows Best. It was the most dense response I've ever gotten from an elected official and I've gotten a ton from Sam Brownback so that says a lot.