Free Passes Harder to Come By

As someone who swings toward the conservative side for the most part, I sometimes get sucked into the paranoia that conventional media is harder on the right than the left. It's not news that nealy all of professional media and journalism is loaded with lefties, but I don't accept that the resultant product always leans that way. It's not so much a left or rigth spin that corrodes the nation, it's a working/lazy balance that does the most harm.

So while this is not good news, at least it shows that some reporters are still on the job even with more and more of 'their people' in power.

While setting MILCON agendas for many years, (Sen. Dianne) Feinstein, 73, supervised her own staff of military construction experts as they carefully examined the details of each proposal. She lobbied Pentagon officials in public hearings to support defense projects that she favored, some of which already were or subsequently became URS or Perini contracts. From 2001 to 2005, URS earned $792 million from military construction and environmental cleanup projects approved by MILCON; Perini earned $759 million from such MILCON projects.

In her annual Public Financial Disclosure Reports, Feinstein records a sizeable family income from large investments in Perini, which is based in Framingham, Mass., and in URS, headquartered in San Francisco. But she has not publicly acknowledged the conflict of interest between her job as a congressional appropriator and her husband's longtime control of Perini and URS—and that omission has called her ethical standards into question, say the experts.