Luke Ford

Last Dec. 20, I was speculating via email that John McCain’s lobbyist scandal about to break in the New York Times was a sexual one.

Here she is, Miss Vicki Iseman:

email

From Matt Drudge:

FLASHBACK: MCCAIN PLEADS WITH NY TIMES TO SPIKE STORY ON FEMALE LOBBYIST...

Here are some key links:

• Topix.net: Vicki Iseman    Last 3 headlines
  • McCain’s ethics challenged by NY Times
  • Will Vicki Iseman ruin McCain’s chances at the White House?
  • Sex and the Senator
• Google News: Vicki Iseman
• The New York Times: For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk (February 20, 2008)
  • The New York Times: "Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity."
• Associated Press: McCain: Reports on Lobbyist a ‘Smear’
  • McCain Campaign: "It is a shame that the New York Times has lowered its standards to engage in a hit and run smear campaign. John McCain has a 24-year record of serving our country with honor and integrity. He has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists, and he will not allow a smear campaign to distract from the issues at stake in this election. Americans are sick and tired of this kind of gutter politics, and there is nothing in this story to suggest that John McCain has ever violated the principles that have guided his career."
• WashingtonPost.com: McCain’s Ties To Lobbyist Worried Aides (February 20, 2008)
  • Washington Post: "Iseman, 40, who joined the Arlington-based firm of Alcalde & Fay as a secretary and rose to partner within a few years, often touted her access to the chairman of the Senate commerce committee as she worked on behalf of clients such as Cablevision, EchoStar and Tribune Broadcasting, according to several other lobbyists who spoke on the condition of anonymity."
• FOXNews.com: Newspaper Revisits Old Rumors In New McCain Profile (February 20, 2008)
• NBC 11: McCain Says ‘Shame’ On New York Times (February 20, 2008)
• National Ledger: Vicki Iseman and John McCain: Sex Scandal or Smear? (February 20, 2008)
• Open Secrets: Vicki Iseman Lobbying Profile
• Huffington Post: Who Is Vicki Iseman? McCain Scandal Figure (February 20, 2008)
• Times Online: John McCain forced to deny romantic link with lobbyist (February 20, 2008)
• USAToday.com: McCain campaign calls Drudge report about lobbyist story a ‘smear’ (December 20, 2007)
• IUP Magazine: A View From The Top (Fall 2002)

From the Huffington Post:

Who is Iseman? A quick search on the Internet turns up some background information, including a picture of her with President Bush.

A website of her alma matter, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated with a degree in elementary education in 1990, documents her fast rise in the world of lobbying.

Iseman, the site notes, secured a job at the firm Alcalde and Fay only a few months after graduation, mostly for secretarial work. Soon thereafter, however, she began moving up the employment ranks. And eight years after she started, she became the youngest partner at Alcalde. Her clients included PAXtv, Religious Voices in Broadcasting, Telemundo, the Hispanic Broadcasting Corporation, and Computer Sciences Corporation.

From her page on the firm’s website — which was pulled from the web shortly after the New York Times story broke — there is this: "[Iseman] has consulted for clients who are interested in government contracting opportunities. She has assisted corporations through the authorization and appropriation process. An active fundraiser, she has organized and participated in many political fundraising events."

Here is a list of all the clients Iseman lobbied on behalf of between 1998 and 2006. Many of them, as the Times noted, were "companies for whom Mr. McCain’s commerce committee was pivotal."

According to campaign finance record, Iseman has never given political donations to McCain. She has given $250 and $300 to Sen. Arlen Specter and former Rep. Ronald Klink, respectively. However, as the Times reported, Iseman’s clients "contributed tens of thousands of dollars to his campaigns."

The NYT reports:

WASHINGTON — Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, in his offices and aboard a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s clients, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.

Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.

It had been just a decade since an official favor for a friend with regulatory problems had nearly ended Mr. McCain’s political career by ensnaring him in the Keating Five scandal. In the years that followed, he reinvented himself as the scourge of special interests, a crusader for stricter ethics and campaign finance rules, a man of honor chastened by a brush with shame.

But the concerns about Mr. McCain’s relationship with Ms. Iseman underscored an enduring paradox of his post-Keating career. Even as he has vowed to hold himself to the highest ethical standards, his confidence in his own integrity has sometimes seemed to blind him to potentially embarrassing conflicts of interest.

Mr. McCain promised, for example, never to fly directly from Washington to Phoenix, his hometown, to avoid the impression of self-interest because he sponsored a law that opened the route nearly a decade ago. But like other lawmakers, he often flew on the corporate jets of business executives seeking his support, including the media moguls Rupert Murdoch, Michael R. Bloomberg and Lowell W. Paxson, Ms. Iseman’s client. (Last year he voted to end the practice.)

Here’s Wonkette’s summary:

Did he have a Dirty Sex Affair with some lobbyist broad who looks suspiciously like his current wife? Let’s find out!

 

Under a grainy black-and-white 1970s-looking mafia photograph of McCain as he “conferred with his lawyers before testifying in January 1991 before the Senate Ethics Committee regarding his involvement with Charles Keating and the Lincoln Savings and Loan,” the NYT samples from the rich trove of Corrupt McCain evidence and comes up with this pretty good initial batch of sleaze:

• While Grandpa Straight Talk was running for the presidency in 2000, all his aides were going nuts because he was constantly traveling with a good-looking lobbyist gal who was, at the time, in her early thirties.
• Whether or not McCain and Vicki Iseman were having sexytime on the corporate jets he used to fly around the country, McCain did do the bidding of Iseman’s clients.
• At this point, he had barely cleared his name from the Keating Five Savings & Loan scandal.
• In one of his few acknowledgments that the Arizona senator has ever been to Arizona, McCain made a point of not flying direct from National Airport to Phoenix because he had some part in opening up that commercial air route — but because he always flies in luxury private jets provided by the Corporates, it didn’t much inconvenience him.
• McCain helped launch some campaign-ethics group, but the group ended up doing the exact same corrupt things it was supposedly against, so he quit in shame.
• Corrupt banker/developer Charles Keating was, obviously, an immediate supporter of McCain’s long congressional career. Keating showered dirty money and fancy vacations on McCain, who loves all that shit.
• Then McCain tried to get the government off the back of Keating’s failing corrupt Lincoln Savings and Loan, because McCain really wants to get government off the backs of his corrupt millionaire friends.
• McCain got caught, but somehow clung to his senate seat.
• But McCain can still pretend to “wince” at the memory of getting caught, so who cares if the bailout cost American taxpayers $3.4 billion?
• He also got caught having a big lobbyist fund-raising deluxe luxury fancy party in 2000. So he ran and hid like a little girl.
• Lobbyists control his entire miserable, corrupt life.
• He loves lobbyists, both in the figurative and literal sense, because he was probably screwing that one lobbyist.
• And when the lobbyists need a quick letter to the FCC or whatever to help their clients, John Maverick McCain is always quick to help, the end.

Tim Reid writes for the Times of London:

John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, was last night romantically linked to a 40-year-old female political lobbyist and accused of granting her clients political favours.

Mr McCain, 71, fiercely denied a report in the New York Times which stated that eight years ago, during his first run for the White House, his aides were so concerned about his relationship with Vicki Iseman that they blocked her access to him to "protect the candidate from himself".

Mr McCain and Ms Iseman both denied to the newspaper – which has been sitting on the story for several weeks – that they had ever had a romantic relationship. The story was first alluded to on the Drudge Report website just before the Iowa and New Hampshire nomination contests, but after frantic lobbying by Mr McCain and his aides at the time the New York Times did not publish it then.

It was unclear last night what impact the allegations would have on Mr McCain, who is now on the verge of wrapping up the Republican nomination after staging an extraordinary political comeback. He had been written off in the presidential race six months ago when his campaign collapsed.

Here’s her profile:

Vicki Iseman, Partner, represents corporate and public clients on issues as diverse as government contracting and regulatory reform. Her experience includes representation of clients before Congress, Federal government agencies and local opinion leaders.

She has extensive experience in telecommunications, representing corporations before the House and Senate Commerce Committees. Her work on the landmark 1992 and 1996 communications bills helped secure cable access for broadcast television stations. Her experience in the communications field includes digital television conversion, satellite regulations and telecommunications ownership provisions.

She has been active in grassroots communications campaigns for clients, building community based support for legislative initiatives. Among others, she participated in the "Keep America Moving" campaign that educated community leaders on the allocation of Federal highway trust funds.

In addition, she has consulted for clients who are interested in government contracting opportunities. She has assisted corporations through the authorization and appropriation process. An active fundraiser, she has organized and participated in many political fundraising events.

A native of Pennsylvania, she holds a B.A. degree in Education from Indiana University in Pennsylvania.

By Bruce Dries:

From her office windows, Vicki Iseman ’90 has a great view of Washington, D.C. The Indiana native is one of the youngest people in the lobbying firm of Alcalde and Fay and one of its most senior partners.

Two weeks after graduating from IUP with a degree in elementary education, Iseman joined a friend in Washington and was hired as a receptionist. With only a few months’ experience on the job, she said she “walked into my boss’s office [the president of the company] and said, ‘You don’t really know me, but I answer the phones. I’m a college graduate and I’d like you to consider me for a secretarial or an administrative position.’” He agreed to try her out for three months. Within a year she became his special assistant.

Alcalde and Fay represents clients from cruise lines and universities to airports and broadcasters. With no background in politics or telecommunications, Iseman realized she needed to know as much as possible to survive her new job. She spent most of her waking hours learning the business, and it paid off handsomely. Eight years later she became the youngest partner ever in the firm, counting among her clients PAXtv, Religious Voices in Broadcasting, Telemundo, the Hispanic Broadcasting Corporation, and Computer Sciences Corporation. In addition, she has met Melanie Griffith, Britney Spears, Bo Derek, and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Iseman said that the most important aspect of her job is the effect that one person can have on legislation in small communities and educational institutions. “Where my heart lies is in education,” she said. “I believe it is the great equalizer.”

I interviewed him for 40 minutes at his Beverly Hills mansion this afternoon. Video

He won $25,000 from MGM and YouTube for making this PSA promoting tolerance. He then donated the money to the Museum of Tolerance.

You can see all of Eytan’s YouTube videos here.

His dad was a principal of a community Jewish day school in San Antonio. His brother is a black-hatter in Jerusalem.

Eytan and I compared beards. Mine springs from righteousness while his grows from convenience.

Luke: "Eytan, when you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"

Eytan: "Great question. Same thing most kids think about — doctor, lawyer, go run some real estate. Eventually I got into computers and decided to do some sort of tech business."

"My brother got an Apple2E when he was 13. That made me nine years old."

It was 1982. "I started out making programs for video games."

Elbaz sent his first email in 1993.

Luke: "Were you immediately hooked on the online experience?"

Eytan: "No. I think I sent an email and used mosaic to cruise the web and I put it down for a year or two. My older brother told me all the good domain names were being taken, that drew me back to checking them out. I didn’t register any."

Growing up in Texas, Eytan was the captain of the computer science team in high school. "I was one of the debate kids, always doing debate. But I was also in a lot of the academic clubs. Every now and then I’d hang out with the cool kids too."

Elbaz graduated from UCLA with a degree in Computer Science in 1995.

In 1999, "my older brother and his friend and a cousin came up with this idea for Oingo, a meaning-based search engine. We came up with this idea for making search engines better so you’d search based on meaning rather than text. We went down that path for a year when it occurred to us that people didn’t want to search like this, they wanted to search on Google.

"We decided to shift gears and focus more on internet ads and contextualize target using the same technology."

Luke: "Were there contextually targeted ad systems then?"

Eytan: "There really weren’t. We were ahead of the game. We came out with this product called AdSense in 2000 that didn’t get used by anyone for two years. We built the technology up. It made a lot of sense."

Never publicly traded, Oingo was funded by venture capital until Google bought it in April of 2003.

Eytan: "We worked out of this house in the Hollywood Hills until the city kicked us out. We had 21 people working out of the house. We had eight people living there. We rented the house for five months until we got evicted and had to find office space."

Luke: "What was your role in this start-up?"

Eytan: "I wrote the initial business plan and raised the initial money, wrote a lot of the marketing literature and did the business development. Gil and Adam formed the core technology, programming, back-ends, database architecture, managing a team of 12 linguists, a couple of them had PhDs. We hired a poet, an undergrad in linguistics, a law student, we were taking people interested in words and building up a company…"

"We were just trying to come up with products we could sell. Our first product was DomainSense. If the domain you wanted wasn’t available, this tool would give you alternative domain names. I came up with the idea."

"We came up with this product called DomainPark which would monetize parked domain pages. That’s still around. That took off in 2000 and by 2002 it was helping us pay our bills. We were breaking even by the end of 2002."

"We kinda knew we had something [with AdSense] when we won this USA Today.com deal."

Luke: "Were you guys written about?"

Eytan: "We started getting some big headlines four days after our launch in 1999. We got this big MSNBC article and a Time digital article within a week of launching. I think it went to our heads. We really thought we were on to something because we had all these guys writing about you. Ultimately, the idea of meaning-based search was fascinating to the people writing about it but ultimately nobody wanted to use it.

"You’re stuck with this cool idea, this Internet World ‘Best of Show’ award and all these accolades, but you find out after a few months that there’s no real traffic to the site, you have to come up with something else.

"We didn’t figure out what we did until the press had long left us."

"I’ve always wanted to make films. I’ve been making home movies since I was in high school. I wanted to go to film school but I got talked into being an engineer…but I always promised myself that if I ever got the opportunity to work on some films, I would do that."

"YouTube was sponsoring a contest to make a video for what you believe and tolerance had long been an important concept to me, one I felt passionately about, so I wrote up this script and invited these children in and we put together this great video that speaks to my ideas about how tolerance is something that really needs to be taught."

Here’s a press release:

Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) November 15, 2007 — Eytan Elbaz, a successful technology entrepreneur and the Director of Shake State Productions, proudly announces his Grand Prize winning entry in the YouTube Lions for Lambs: "What Do You Stand For?" Contest, which includes a $25,000 donation to a non-profit institution of his choice. This video, entitled "Dear Parents," is a stirring collection of statements from children to parents, reminding adults about the power of tolerance and the evils of prejudice. Eytan plans to select the Simon Wiesenthal Center ( www.wiesenthal.com) as the recipient of the video’s cash prize, with proceeds to be allocated among the organization’s various affiliates.

"It is a true honor to enjoy this recognition from YouTube and Metro-Goldwyn Studios Inc. (MGM), a lead sponsor of this contest and the distributor of the critically acclaimed ‘Lions for Lambs’ motion picture, itself a powerful reminder about the importance of thoughtfulness and individual citizenship during a time of international crisis. I hope ‘Dear Parents’ will have a similar impact on public discussion as it concerns religious and racial tolerance," said Eytan Elbaz, Director of Shake State Productions. "The campaign for tolerance must renew itself with each generation, lest we succumb to fear, hatred and the worst forms of bigotry and discrimination My video is a wakeup call from children to parents, a plea for justice and personal liberty during a heightened period of tension both domestically and internationally."

A Commitment to Independent Filmmaking

Eytan’s career in film is a new and equally exciting complement to his distinguished reputation in technology, which includes his work at Advanced Micro Devices and Telos Corporation. He has produced four short films since 2006, which have been accepted to a combined thirty film festivals. "My films incorporate the best of new media with entertaining storylines and inventive writing without excessive costs or expensive promotion. YouTube is a tremendously effective medium for my work, as it enables people to instantly comment about various shorts and publicize my ideas to the broadest audience possible. I encourage people to send me their thoughts about my content," stated Elbaz.

Monday morning at LimmudLA, I catch Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller’s lecture on "A Jewish perspective on the relationship between Judaism and Islam."

The rabbi says it is important to dialogue with other religions but it was very difficult to dialogue with Islam. After two years, he gave up.

"To do real dialogue, you have to be able to talk not only about all the good things in your tradition, but you have to be able to talk about the bad things. Masochism is not my way. If I’m going to reveal some of the negatives [about Jews and Judaism], politically, that’s what they’re most interested in, and the Muslim participants sit there absorbing it all and never letting go of themselves, you’re just human. I became resentful and I left.

"I came back to a meeting and told them why I left. Everybody was upset and resentful. There were some good people there…"

"I want you to be able to recognize fundamentalism…[including] in your own community. Thank God our fundamentalists are not militants, some are."

"Read Commentary this month, the article on moderate Muslims. It puts Daniel Pipes in his place. Please don’t follow Daniel Pipes. If you follow Daniel Pipes, you are down the road of hopelessness."

"If we had listened to Daniel Pipes, most probably there would not have been a 9/11.

"So why didn’t we listen to Daniel Pipes? Because you couldn’t. He made everything so bad that no one could believe him."

"You have to speak a language people can absorb. If you say they are all bad and the only good Muslims are Zionists, no one’s going to believe you. First of all, those Muslims, no one cares about them except Jews. Why do we need Muslims to be Zionists? We need Jews to be Zionists."

"We need strong Muslims who believe in their cause who we can argue with… I’m not hopeful."

"The Muslim critics are mostly in the West. Muslim critics are very scared…that they’re going to die."

"Nietzsche called it a slave morality. We developed our morality in the conditions in which we were oppressed. Therefore, we developed a whole theory about how to deal with those who are vulnerable in society. No empire  developed a theory about how to deal with those who are oppressed."

"My teacher and friend Krister Stendahl taught me…that when they (his Harvard students) study [New Testament] texts in their class which are anti-Jewish… Number one. Contextualize. That passage has to do with the First Century. It has nothing to do with Jews today. Number two. If you can, reinterpret those texts."

"Every religious tradition has baggage."

"It has to be identified and reinterpreted if possible."

"We’re supposed to wipe out the seven nations. That’s not a good verse. The worst thing you can do is justify it."

"One of the reasons for our survival is the interpretative tradition."

"Stendahl says contextualize, you have to give it some history. History is important. History neutralizes the sense that it is divine ordinance. You have to live on two levels. That you believe it is God’s word and that it has history. Once you historicize something, it gives it a sense of life. It lived in the world. You give it some context. It is not eternal."

"Second, reinterpret. Third, if you can’t reinterpret, sometimes you have to make a judgment and say that it is immoral. That is very difficult."

"There is a pre-history of the Koran. The problem is that people who do research about the pre-history of the Koran can get killed because it is God’s word. When you proclaim that something is God’s word, it is a good thing to be moderate. It’s dangerous.

"That’s the story I was going to tell before. When we had a dialogue between Jews and Muslims, and they asked us all to come with a story from our Tradition. I was a wise guy. I chose the story where the [Talmudic] rabbis rejected God’s miracles. The Christians loved it. The Muslims were sitting at the edge. I told myself, good thing this is on Hilgard Avenue. If this were the Middle East…"

The rabbi draws his finger under his neck.

"People who do historical studies on the Koran are taking their lives into their hands. This guy wrote a Ph.D. at the University of Cairo on the literary analysis of the Koran and they rejected his Ph.D. and they made sure that his professor could not teach again."

"They have a very bad problem. We can’t work it out for them. We suffer for their problem. When I debate with Muslims, I talk about this. What right do I have to be critical of Islam? I say, I’m suffering for the things they’re teaching. I’m going to talk about it. It’s no longer theoretical."

The rabbi reads an excerpt from the Koran calling Jews apes and swine.

"When you call people apes and swines, that’s a causus belli."

"The garbage in the Koran was there all the time. It was there in Spain when Jews and Muslims got along well. In good times, no one paid attention to this. In bad times, it all came to the surface.

"There was no motivation within Islam [to deal with these garbage texts]…because Islam was dominant throughout its history. The theory of Islam is that Allah is with us. There is no mechanism in Islam for dealing with bad times. In 1967, Islam was in turmoil [because Israel won the Six Day War]. History is not history in Islam. It’s theology. It’s the unfolding of God in the world and the Muslims are supposed to be on top, particularly in their world. And the Jews come along and defeat them.

"We are the cause of the rise of Muslim fundamentalism. If you read the literature, the Muslims say that 1967 was a sign that the Westernization of Islam was a cause of the decline of Islam and we have to cleanse Islam to return to an Islam that never existed."

"The need for equality [between Muslims and non-Muslims in Muslim lands] doesn’t exist anywhere in Islamic writers."

A woman educated at Aish Ha Torah says: "I’m a little confused about Islamic history being the unfolding of God. I learned that history was the unfolding of God in Judaism and that everything that was happening now was part of the End of days scenario. Isn’t that the same thing?"

Rabbi: "Be careful with that. I don’t know anything about the End of days."

Woman: "I hear one thing from one group and another thing from another group. How do I know which group is right?"

Rabbi: "What we have to focus on is making this world better. You want the End of Days? Make this world better and you’ll have the End of Days."

"When you get into magic, you’ll have the Muslims say we are the unfolding of God in the world and Jews will say we are the unfolding of God in the world, and you’ll have a party and people will kill each other. That’s what people do when they want an unfolding of the End of Days… People are going to die for the One Truth."

"[According to the Koran:] Jews have Torah and mitzvot because God is punishing them."

"Not everything [the Torah] says the pagans did do we have evidence for. When you’re trying to say I’m right and the other guy is wrong, you’re going to try to make the other guy look bad."

"Why do they hate the rabbis? Because we choose to correct God’s word. We have the arrogance. Jews are arrogant. That’s a standard accusation in Islamic literature."

"All the sources for the Rambam’s Guide For The Perplexed are Muslim. There’s not a single Jewish philosopher that he can quote that undergirds his philosophical thinking."

"The Rambam says I’m not always going to give you the name [of my source] because you’ll get excited."

"For the most part, the glories we attribute to the Golden Age was a construct of scholars of the 19th Century as a polemic against Christianity."

"What’s so attractive about Islam? The prayer line and the haj. There’s a humility in Islam. If you’re a practicing Muslim, there you are on the floor with everybody. Same with the haj. The opportunity to be part of the oneness of being and you sense some transcendence."

"You have a tradition that prides itself on self-criticism and another tradition that tries to cover up. One people is called Yisrael, meaning struggle with God. One people is called Ishmael, which means obediance, submission."

"Muslims are individually humble and collectively arrogant. Jews are individually arrogant and collectively humble."

The rabbi gives me permission to put his speech online.