We are all aware of the importance the Republicans place on truth, especially if a devil in a blue dress is involved.
A Small Cartel of Conservative Lawyers Rewrites the American Rule
Court Jousters
Of all the Federalist members, perhaps the best known is Solicitor General Olson. An assistant attorney general under Reagan, Olson has popped up at just about every event in D.C. since then, defending convicted spy Jonathan Pollard, representing Starr, advising Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky, and supposedly taking part in the infamous Arkansas Project, which tried to link Clinton to mob dope runs from Central America into Mena, Arkansas. Olson has denied any connection. He is perhaps most famous for this statement: "THERE ARE LOTS OF DIFFERENT SITUATIONS WHERE THE GOVERNMENT HAS LEGITIMATE REASONS TO GIVE OUT FALSE INFORMATION."
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0225/ridgeway.phpAnd we all know that Republicans frown greatly on sex outside marriage.
Trivial Pursuit manufacturer Selchow & Richter removed the question - "How many months pregnant was Nancy Davis when she walked down the aisle with Ronnie Reagan?" from the US Genus Edition game, claiming that "it is distasteful in this country." The answer is two and a half months.
So today's question is:
WHEN, IF EVER, DID TED OLSON ACTUALLY MARRY BARBARA BRACHER?
This page has some info about her but it doesn't say anything about her wedding day.
http://www.financialsense.com/Experts/2001/Olson.htmIt was just ten years ago when Barbara Bracher appeared at the Russell Senate Office Building late one night as we prepared to testify on behalf of Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court. As was typical of Barbara, she didn’t wait to be asked or given an assignment. She just wanted to join the fight.
http://www.iwf.org/pubs/exfemina/December2001a.shtml It's against this backdrop of concern and commitment that we look at the United States Supreme Court as a very, very telling instrument in bringing about a healthy, fair and just criminal justice system. Its decisions on criminal law impact not only on individual litigants, but also they resonate forcefully throughout the Federal court system and the State court system.
Given this key role of the Court, CLO and our members wanted to know more about Judge Thomas and his views and his philosophy. Given that face, WE COMMISSIONED BARBARA BRACHER, (OLSON) a litigation attorney with one of the major D.C. law firms, TO PREPARE A REPORT on the judicial philosophy of Judge Thomas, particularly as it is reflected in his criminal law decisions on the D.C. Circuit Court.
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~govdoc/thomas/0920a11.htmlSo we know that she was still passing herself off as Barbara Bracher in 1991.
Class of 1989
"As the power couples of Washington come and go, the Olsons may have proven themselves in a class by themselves in THE LAST EIGHT YEARS, becoming the most celebrated and acutely dedicated pair of conservatives who, with great conviction, have opposed and harried Clinton Democrats in the main capital arenas: the courts, the Congress, and the media."
http://www.cardozo.net/life/winter2001/class.actions/2001 - 8 = 1993.
OK. Bear with me now.
This article appeared in the Winter 2001 edition which means that it was probably ready for publication in 2000. But that is too confusing for some of us here so lets behave as if it was corrected for the 2001 readers.
Lets do the math.
2001 - 8 = 1993
Therefore, according to this article, Ted and Barbara, THE OLSONS, had been together since 1993.
She noticed Olson at a legal conference in 1989, where she was enthralled by his discussion of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act, known as RICO.
"He had a fabulous voice. Rich, rumbling, sort of makes-your-ribs-vibrate voice," Barbara Olson recalled. "He really made sense out of the RICO statutes. Then I looked up and thought he was kind of cute."
They married in 1996. It is her second marriage, his third.
http://www.sptimes.com/News/121100/Election2000/Couple_at_center_of__.shtmlSo they got married in 1996, and they were married for five years.
Sorry for wasting your time folks.
Herded with other passengers, and at least one of the pilots, into the back of the aircraft before its final plunge, those with cell phones are ordered by the hijackers to call relatives to inform them they are about to die. CNN reporter Barbara Olson used her cell phone to twice call her husband's office at the Justice Department (her husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson, argued President Bush's case before the U.S. Supreme Court during the Florida vote- counting fiasco of the last presidential election). Understandably declining to provide details of the conversations with HIS WIFE OF JUST SEVEN WEEKS, Ted Olson said she described the hijackers as armed with "knife-like" weapons. Barbara Olson's last words to her husband: "What do I tell the pilot to do?"
http://www.istrianet.org/usa/sept11/timeline.htmSEVEN WEEKS?
HIS WIFE OF SEVEN WEEKS?
Boy, my math is REALLY off.
If I keep this up I may just qualify for a job doing Enron's books.
Gee, seven weeks.
Seven weeks.....
September 12, 2001
SYDNEY, Australia (CNN) -- Control of New York's World Trade Center passed from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey only SEVEN WEEKS ago to Silverstein Properties and the U.S. unit of Australian shopping center group Westfield.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/BUSINESS/asia/09/12/aust.westfield.biz/Press reports pegged the deal at $3.2 billion. In March, Silverstein began negotiating with the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey for the lease when a deal with Vornado Realty Trust fell through, the interactive version of the Wall Street Journal reported.
http://money.cnn.com/2001/04/26/deals/wtc/It was terrible.
Both the WTC and the Olson marriage collapsed on the same day.
GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, HOST, "THE POINT WITH GRETA VAN SUSTEREN": First of all, I was on a flight on a runway to go to New York. It was canceled because they said two planes had run into the building in New York, so they canceled our flight. I got off the plane, I headed back to my car to come back to work.
I was in the rooftop of National Airport's parking lot which is about two blocks from the Pentagon. And I heard something funny -- no, first, my husband said to me, we better get out of here. And I thought is was a little bit strange, my husband was acting a little bit like an alarmist, I turned back to look at him, I heard something funny, I looked over his shoulder, I saw something, I saw something, I am not sure quite what it was, but low level.
Then all of a sudden there was silence, then there was a Kaboom, and then smoke came billowing out and I knew that it was the Pentagon. The Pentagon is about two blocks, of course, form National Airport hidden behind some building. And there was just smoke and debris flying all over coming up in the air -- obviously a very terrible site.
BLITZER: And we are taking a look at some live pictures right now. You can see the fires still continuing at the Pentagon, some 12 hours later. What was your first thought when you heard the Kaboom? Did you have any sense what was really going on?
VAN SUSTEREN: At that point I knew there was a big problem. I knew it was the Pentagon and I knew that something horrible had happened and I could see the magnitude of it. And it was really one of terror because we had no idea was there more coming? Was National Airport next? It was only two blocks away. Cell phones went down. I tried two cell phones and was having difficulty and I finally did get through to CNN.
The traffic was tied up. I heard plenty of sirens and almost no information until I got in the car and did find out what happened. And always, in addition to having to witness this, several hours later I learned that someone I know quite well, Barbara Olson, who has appeared on this network a number of times and whose husband is the solicitor general the of the United States was one of the fatalities on the airplane.
http://commemoratewtc.com/transcripts/tr-20-52.phpAhh Barbara.
She liked her nine inches.
Her skirts, nails and heels were all about that length.
Ooops, is my mathematical illiteracy showing again?
My colleague David Carlson, once a visiting professor at Michigan, spoke of a weekend when Barbara attended a Federalist Society convention at that school and ended up in a late night poker game with such outstanding jurisprudential scholars as Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg.
http://www.cardozo.net/life/spring2002/lost/The men were playing hard; Barbara stripped them of their money.
Barbara Olson, 45, a native of Houston, was buried Saturday in her beloved Door County (WISCONSIN.)
Ted Olson, whose family has roots in Door County going back five generations, told 150 mourners at Bethel Baptist Church in Ellison Bay that their presence was a great comfort to his family.
He said his wife cherished the time spent at their cabin in Ellison Bay during summer vacations.
“It was hard to get her to leave,” he said. His wife, a frequent guest on Larry King’s show on CNN, refused to go to his studios when she was on vacation. So the show came to Door County.
The show’s producers sent satellite TV trucks from Chicago to do her interview.
“There were trucks parked on the road outside our little cabin,” Olson recalled. That happened about 15 times, he said.
http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/news/archive/local_1728588.shtmlThe impact of the Pentagon crash was so great that THE JET VIRTUALLY DISINTEGRATED, said Chief Ed Plaugher of the Arlington County, Va., Fire Department. He was one of the hundreds of firefighters who battled the stubborn flames in the Pentagon's roof that finally were doused around 4 p.m.
<snip>
More than half of the Pentagon's 23,000 employees reported to work Wednesday afternoon. But a general feeling of tension and sadness in their offices gave way to an all-too-familiar burst of fear and panic around noon, when employees in the southern wedge were evacuated for approximately 30 minutes. The emergency evacuation was prompted by rumors that an unidentified plane was headed for the building, Pentagon spokesman Dan Philbin said. It turned out to be a false alarm.
http://www.timesunion.com/aspstories/storyprint.asp?storyID=43357However the federal morticians managed to put our little Frankenpundit
back together again, despite the rumors that there was so little left of the jet that whole entire bodies could not be recovered and identified merely by fingerprinting their fire-proof hands.
Barbara received tributes worthy of her demise.
Shortly afterward, a friend of Bracher’s autographed a bomb “in remembrance of Barbara Olson.”
In January, Bracher will move to Virginia to begin four months of training before his deployment on a guided missile destroyer. He will oversee the Advanced Tomahawk Automatic Weapon Control Station, maintaining the computers that operate the missiles and loading in the navigational data.
More simply, Bracher says, “I’m the guy who fires the Tomahawk missiles.”
http://www.theeagle.com/septanniv/090802csmanmourns.htmFallbrook High's flag hung at half-staff in memory of those lost in New York and Washington, D.C. in last week's terrorist attacks. Student Brandon Sanders rallied the crowd, saying the group had come together to pray for our country and for our schools. The 16-year-old is a representative for WARRIORS FOR CHRIST, a Christian Youth club on campus.
<snip>
While some students prayed for the victims of last week's terrorist attacks, other students worked on fund-raising to memorialize those who lost their lives. Junior April Schimke and her mother Gale started a coin drive on Monday called "Pennies for the Pentagon," which is raising money to send flowers to the national military headquarters.
http://www.nctimes.net/news/2001/20010920/102644.htmlDavid Hicks, owner of Conklyn's Flowers, said he was moved by the Fallbrook students' gesture and wanted to help them fulfill their mission, so he knocked about $5,500 off the actual cost of the flowers.
Dan Philbin, a public affairs official with the Office of the Secretary of Defense said the Pentagon has witnessed an outpouring of support from the nation.
http://www.nctimes.net/news/2001/20011005/102152.htmlDan Philbin, a public affairs official with the Office of the Secretary of Defense said the Pentagon has received many gifts and banners from people throughout the nation, but the rose bouquets stood out as the biggest donation workers received, he said. Philbin said he could see the emotions register on workers' faces as he distributed the flowers.
http://www.nctimes.net/news/2001/20011029/53325.htmlDan Philbin.
Dan Philbin.
Now where have I heard that name before?
July 22, 1997
Now here I am in the afternoons and I start getting e-mail from a guy by the name of Dan Philbin. I get this mail regularly, as Dan and I write back and forth. Many listeners write in to me and I write back to them all the time. In one of my notes back to him, I said, "Philbin? By any chance, are you related to Regis Philbin?" He said, "Well, yeah, he's my dad, but I don't want to make a big deal out of that." I said, "I don't want to make a big deal out of it either, but we love your dad and we loved having him come on the show and it would be great if that could happen again." Now, BOOM! Here is Regis Philbin! Hi, Reege!
http://www.harrisonline.com/intvws/Philbin.htmDecember 4, 1997
Philbin: Hi, Paul! How are you doing?
Harris: I'm doing fine. Regis knows a little something about Children's Hospital, because his son Dan, a faithful listener of ours, has had some pretty severe medical problems since childhood. So I appreciate your coming on and talking about this to help me promote The Paul Harris Comedy Concert For Children's Hospital.
http://www.harrisonline.com/intvws/Philbin2.htmPhilbin was sitting at his desk in the Pentagon when the terrorist-flown airliner slammed into the building on Sept. 11, 2001. His first reaction was, "Get the hell out of the building!" Once outside, he decided to see what he could do to help his office deal with the media.
"I PUSHED MYSELF over to the Navy Exchange gas station -- ABOUT A MILE -- where the (Office of the Secretary of Defense) Public Affairs had set up a command post. They were trying to continue the public affairs operation from there until we could get back into the building."
The citation to the award states, "That evening, while the building was still in flames, he returned to the Pentagon to help with the secretary of defense's press conference. He came back on Sept. 12 to perform additional duties. This bravery and dedication were not without cost, as he was hospitalized later for several days."
http://www.dod.mil/news/Dec2002/n12042002_200212045.htmlAnd NONE of the wonderful Penta-heroes lent this man a hand.
Armed with the girls' 189 bouquets, the three "delivery men" loaded them on a large handcart and went from office to office from the basement to the fifth floor randomly passing out roses to military and civilian men and women. Heilsnis is director for public inquiry and analysis in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Philbin is one of his writer-editors and Cooper, one of his clerks.
<snip>
It's the nicest thing that has happened to me in a long time," said Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria "Torie" Clarke, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. "I always get choked up talking about this. As tragic as the events of Sept. 11 were, so many people have done so many amazing things."
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Oct2001/n10182001_200110181.htmlBATHROOM HUMOR: A Norwich, Conn., company that put Osama bin Laden's face on toilet paper is sending 200 rolls to the Pentagon. Defense Department spokesman Dan Philbin is delighted. "I'll make sure the secretary of defense's office gets some and I'll give some to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff," he said. The message on the toilet paper: Wipe out terrorism.
http://www.sptimes.com/2002/03/17/Business/Loose_change.shtmlSweet cheeks would have loved that.
Almost as much as former Hill & Knowlton manager Torrie enjoyed getting her "randomly passed out" bouquet of roses celebrating her PR work in precipitating Gulf War II.
But I digress.
According to many reports, Barbara Bracher (somebody) Olson was a teacher or maybe even a professional ballet dancer who worked with the Houston and the San Fanscisco and the Harkness ballet companies.
None of these organisations seems to have any record of her and no record of her blackboard days has surfaced either.
At least not where I have been looking.
There are also claims that she was previously married before the Pretty Woman hooked up with Ted.
Who, or what she was married to, for how long, and with what result, remain mysteries.
At least to me.
The whole thing remainds me of the Biography of Tommy Franks.
Both of them start out in Houston and no-one seems to be able to remember seeing these people the early years.
But Tommy's biography is much cooler than Barbara ever was.
And he is still alive.
Overseas, too, Franks has the confidence of heads of state, some of whom count him as a friend. King Abdullah II of Jordan gave Franks a Harley-Davidson after discovering their shared interest in motorcycles; Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf calls him often; Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak received Franks on short notice in Cairo when bad weather forced him to change his route home from Qatar.
Like the president, Tommy Ray Franks grew up in Midland, Texas, attending the same high school as first lady Laura Bush, who was a year behind him. Franks’ principal at Robert E. Lee High School, Leslie Hinds, remembers him as utterly ordinary, one of those people who don’t "start blossoming" until adulthood.
Tommy Ray loved fast cars, Elvis and hunting, says Foster, who looked up to his nine-years-older cousin.
After two years of what Franks describes as "abysmal" grades at the University of Texas at Austin, he joined the Army and was soon an artillery lieutenant bound for Vietnam, where his injuries earned him three Purple Hearts.
Even halfway around the world, Franks always was tethered to his family. Foster recalls the family opening presents at precisely 8 a.m. on Christmas so Franks would know just what was happening back home.
http://www.poconorecord.com/report/iraqwar/000087.htmHmmmm.
Barbara Bracher only attended the University of St Thomas in Houston, which is a good Catholic school.
5. Necessity is the mother of chutzpah.
Successful women don't play it safe—especially when they see a risky choice as their only choice.
When attorney and conservative commentator Barbara Olson decided to go to law school, she knew what her father's reaction would be. He believed that people went to graduate school because they didn't want to work.
Olson graduated in 1978 with a teaching degree from the University of St. Thomas in her hometown of Houston, then tried to figure out the fastest way to make $50,000 to put herself through law school.
http://www.washingtonian.com/people/powerfulwomen/intro.htmlMost sources seem to agree that she was born in 1955.
According to my calculations, that would make her twenty three when she graduated from the University of St. Thomas.
Within months of graduation, 22-YEAR-OLD Olson moved to Los Angeles to get into the movie business. She called every actor—starting with the A's—who had a production company. She was vague about her background, talking up her one experience working on a TV show during college.
http://www.washingtonian.com/people/powerfulwomen/intro.htmlOK. So I can't add. Or maybe it a month thing.
Whatever.
But I am certain that 22 + 6 = 28
which is how old she would have been when she entered law school but maybe she was sucessful in lying about her age way back then.
Anyhow, here is a bio of Stacy Keach Sr.
http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hc&id=1800140050&cf=biog&intl=usHe is the father of the middle aged guy you see running around as Mike Hammer.
Stacy Sr just died. He was 88.
His bio tells you when he got married, to whom and for how long and how many kids they had and their name.
I wish I could find one for Barbara that did the same thing.
Barbara was a Texan, from a family whose ancestors came to this country from Germany. She went to the all-American University of Texas and also a Catholic college, St. Thomas in Houston. She became a professional ballet dancer in San Francisco and New York because of the beauty of dance, the rigor of its discipline, and because you have to be extraordinarily tough and ambitious to do it. And Barbara was extraordinarily tough and ambitious.
<snip>
She went to Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University in New York, not necessarily the obvious choice for a blond Catholic girl from Texas. She was even told that she would never fit in, and that she would be miserable. But the people who told her that really did not know Barbara. She thrived at Cardozo as she had thrived at St. Thomas and in the ballet and in Hollywood. She loved the people, the classes, the professors, and she was a huge success, popping up for one reason or another with embarrassing frequency on the cover of Jewish Weekly.
Barbara created a Federalist Society chapter at Cardozo because she believed in the Society's principles - and it only served to goad her on that almost no one at Cardozo shared her political views.
In her third year of law school, she somehow managed to finesse herself into an internship with the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice in Washington. And, as a very brassy and gusty intern, she managed to be the only employee of the government of the United States willing, feisty and fearless enough to personally serve the papers on the PLO mission to the United Nations in New York announcing that it was being expelled from this country -- because they were terrorists. How Barbara loved to tell that story to her friends at Cardozo!
http://www.fed-soc.org/BKOlsonMemorialLecture/bkolsonlecture-111601.htmOy!
Popping up for one reason or another with embarrassing frequency on the cover of Jewish Weekly?
Some shiksa.
Out of respect for her, here are a few snippets of the work of one man whose work she arranged to have published.
That profiling is wicked per se is an idea that seems to have originated in connection with police work, when black civil-rights spokesmen began to allege that officers were relying on race as the sole criterion for suspecting someone of criminal activity. Profiling, in other words, equaled racism by definition. Yet, as Heather Mac Donald has demonstrated in Are Cops Racist?, the idea rests on a false assumption—namely, that crime rates are constant across every racial and ethnic component of our society. Thus, if blacks, who make up 11 percent of the population, are subject to 20 percent of all police stops on a particular highway, racial bias must be at fault.
But the truth is that (to stick to this particular example) blacks do speed more than whites, a fact that in itself justifies a heightened awareness of skin color as one of several criteria in police work. Of course, there is no excuse for blatant racism; but, as Mac Donald meticulously documents in case after case around the country, there is by and large no evidence that police have relied excessively on ethnic or racial profiling in conducting their normal investigations.
<snip>
Ironically, it is the very randomness of the new security checks that has generated so much skepticism about their efficacy. Old ladies, children, Catholic priests—all have been subject to searches of San Quentin-like thoroughness despite being beyond rational suspicion.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/bork.htmlFather Geoghan would argree heartily with that last bit.
If he could.
But he might just be getting FLAMED right about now.
The same way Barbara is going to be FLAMED if she didn't get papal consent to dissolve her first marriage.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
(Unless you can screw the enemy.)
So that means that she went to Hollywood when she was twenty-five and she was thirty-four when she left law school.
(But then again, you already know how accurate my math skills are.)
When did Barbara Bracher get married for the first time?
And who the heck did she marry anyway?
And when did she get divorced?
Or did she ever get divorced?
Is that what slowed down the marriage to Ted?
Did they have pre-nups?
Who the heck is Barbara Olson?
The only thing that I have been able to positively establish about her early years is that she holds a Bachelors of Arts from St. Thomas.
She majored in drama.
AND HOW!
Drama is considered to be one of the performance arts.
Therefore, Barbara Olson was once an art student.
Yes, we know that there are cetain parties who hold art students in high disdain.
http://www.antiwar.com/israelfiles2.htmlhttp://www.counterpunch.org/nimmo08252003.htmlAnd yes, we are very well aware that Ted Olson has represented the interests of governments other than the one to which he claims to pledge allegiance.
But please recall that Olson LOST that case.
http://dir.salon.com/news/col/cona/2001/02/13/rich/index.htmlJonathan Jay Pollard remains in jail to this very day.
Meanwhile, Ted Olson is slated to become a Justice of the Supreme Court once a member of the current crop either retires or takes a flight on a small plane.
There are many here who very much doubt that Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon on the morning of September 11 at 9:30 AM.
http://americanhistory.si.edu/september11/collection/record.asp?ID=19
Or was it 9:37 or was it 9:38 or was 9:43 or was it 9;45?
Oh heck.
Whatever.
The point is this: if anyone ever comes up to you and tells you that Barbara Olson did not die a hero, you just call up Salem Alghamdi and he will set that person straight.
He should know.
After all, he hijacked Flight 77.
http://geocities.com/justicepeacedemocracy/Spotlight.htmlRumsfeld: Well, we know there were large numbers, many dozens, in the aircraft that flew at full power, steering directly into the -- between, I think, the first and second floor of the -- opposite the helipad. You've seen it. THERE CANNOT BE ANY SURVIVORS; IT WOULD JUST BE B BEYOND COMPREHENSION.
There are a number of people that they've not identified by name, but identified as being dead, and there are a number of causalities. But the FBI has secured the site. And the -- information takes time to come. People have been lifted out and taken away in ambulances. And the numbers will be calculated, and it will not be a few.
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Sep2001/t09112001_t0911sd.html