THIS MODERN WORLD

A Travis County grand jury today indicted U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on one count of criminal conspiracy, jeopardizing the Sugar Land Republican’s leadership role as the second most powerful Texan in Washington, D.C.

The charge, a state jail felony punishable by up to two years incarceration, stems from his role with his political committee, Texans for a Republican Majority, a now-defunct organization that already had been indicted on charges of illegally using corporate money during the 2002 legislative elections.

More.

From Time magazine:

Every Neil Young album arrives with a question: which Neil this time? the folkie? The grunge progenitor? The acoustic country guy? Or the avant-gardist whose sonic violence can make instruments — and sometimes fans — cry out for mercy? For his 31st album, Prairie Wind, out Sept. 27, it’s yet another Neil Young: a mortal one. In March, Young was told he had a brain aneurysm, and Prairie Wind poured out of him in the week between diagnosis and his undergoing surgery. Naturally, there are songs about death and loneliness, but the album, one of the most melodic of his career, also deals with religion, family and the good times he remembers growing up on the Canadian steppes.

I haven’t had a chance to pick up the CD yet, but I did have the extraordinary privilege of being introduced to the songs for two nights running in Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium. The shows were filmed by Jonathan Demme for a film that should be out later in the year — in fact, that was the entire reason they were held, and as such, they weren’t open to the public. Fortunately for me, I have a friend with friends in high places, so I made it in — third row, center stage. That picture up above was pretty much the view from my seat. For a lifelong Neil Young fan, it was extraordinary. But I don’t really write about music, and rather than make a clumsy attempt to do so, I’m going to turn it over to my friend Louis:

I saw the show three times — one run-through and two performances. Given that I have the attention span of a gnat, I’m usually not given to attendance at multiple shows, even of favorite artists, but on Friday night at the end of the second performance I was ready to come back again the next night. The Ryman, former home of the Grand Ole Opry, is one of the great music halls in this country, especially, though not only, in regard to ambience, intimacy, and acoustics. Several times Young commented that he felt like he was inside a guitar.

The show unfolded over the course of the evening, Young accompanied by 30 or more musicians on stage at one time or another. They came on, they exited, they returned in a different configuration, switching instruments and positions. Watching Young during the run-through performance is extraordinary, his sense of music broken down to every instrument without losing sight of the sweep of the work. He sees the forest for the trees, noting the smallest detail without losing any sight of the grandest ambition.

This is not going to be Neil Young’s Stop Making Sense. Demme and Young were both working on a grander, less focused tableau where the excitement is visceral if not as immediate, the richer pleasures derived cerebrally from lyric, history, and juxtaposition. Still, it works so beautifully musically that it would hit the groove if there were nothing else to it.

But there is: watching Neil and Pegi Young smile at each other. This is a work about mortality and friendship, about romance and sadness, about everyday love and family, about history, the present and the future, the land and its people, Canada and the United States.

Emmylou Harris joined Young on a number of songs. Ben Keith played steel guitar throughout. Other players included guitarist Grant Boatright, drummer Chad Cromwell, keyboardist Spooner Oldham, bassist Rick Rosas, and fiddler Clinton Gregory. The Fisk University Jubilee Singers, the Nashville String Machine, and a horn trio led by Wayne Jackson of the Memphis Horns also joined the fun at different points. Usually they would join for whole songs, but the choir came out part way into a song to join in, and the string section made an appearance in the middle of a song to play on a section and then left.

The staging was ideal, only a few different backdrops, the lighting superb, and the clothing from Manuel’s — suits that are hip and retro. The performance looked like an early photo process color postcard, a 1940s traveling country & western show as well as an almost too trendy modern cocktail bar.

Prairie Winds is an exquisite journey; I can’t begin to talk about it as a concert. It was something so much bigger, finally reminding me of nothing so much as Brian Wilson’s Smile, the entire concert of a piece. Rather than resurrecting a lost, never-finished album, this was a whole new creation. And not just Prairie Wind; the older songs were equally important in shaping a cohesive whole. Young wrote these songs for the times in which they were composed and the albums on which they appeared. Still, it was like Smile in the way it combined the known and the new, memory and dreams. Songs and even just pieces of songs and/or music from Smile ended up on at least a half dozen other Beach Boy albums. Listening, you knew them as distinct songs. The revelation was in how they fit together. The same was true of Young’s performances, songs like “Old Man,” “Needle and the Damage Done,” and “Comes a Time” perfectly crafted for this mosaic, feeling born to their place rather than shoved in or just played randomly for an encore. The older songs finally seemed at home: All the music together formed a startlingly mature work that, while denying none of life’s tragedies, insisted that the direction is forward.

There’s much more, if you follow the link. And Scott Simon interviews Young here.

Okay, we already knew this part:

His killing was widely reported by the media, including conservative commentators such as Ann Coulter, who called him “an American original — virtuous, pure and masculine like only an American male can be.” His May 3, 2004, memorial in San Jose drew 3,500 people and was nationally televised.

Not until five weeks later, as Tillman’s battalion was returning home, did officials inform the public and the Tillman family that he had been killed by his fellow soldiers.

But as it turns out, Tillman the man was far more interesting and complicated than the one dimensional object of Ann Coulter’s necrophiliac fantasies:

He started keeping a journal at 16 and continued the practice on the battlefield, writing in it regularly. (His journal was lost immediately after his death.) Mary Tillman said a friend of Pat’s even arranged a private meeting with Chomsky, the antiwar author, to take place after his return from Afghanistan — a meeting prevented by his death. She said that although he supported the Afghan war, believing it justified by the Sept. 11 attacks, “Pat was very critical of the whole Iraq war.”

Baer, who served with Tillman for more than a year in Iraq and Afghanistan, told one anecdote that took place during the March 2003 invasion as the Rangers moved up through southern Iraq.

“I can see it like a movie screen,” Baer said. “We were outside of (a city in southern Iraq) watching as bombs were dropping on the town. We were at an old air base, me, Kevin and Pat, we weren’t in the fight right then. We were talking. And Pat said, ‘You know, this war is so f — illegal.’ And we all said, ‘Yeah.’ That’s who he was. He totally was against Bush.”

Another soldier in the platoon, who asked not to be identified, said Pat urged him to vote for Bush’s Democratic opponent in the 2004 election, Sen. John Kerry.

Senior Chief Petty Officer Stephen White — a Navy SEAL who served with Pat and Kevin for four months in Iraq and was the only military member to speak at Tillman’s memorial — said Pat “wasn’t very fired up about being in Iraq” and instead wanted to go fight al Qaeda in Afghanistan. He said both Pat and Kevin (who has a degree in philosophy) “were amazingly well-read individuals … very firm in some of their beliefs, their political and religious or not so religious beliefs.”

Baer recalled that Tillman encouraged him in his ambitions as an amateur poet. “I would read him my poems, and we would talk about them,” Baer said. “He helped me grow as an individual.”

Tillman subscribed to the Economist magazine, and a fellow soldier said Tillman created a makeshift base library of classic novels so his platoon mates would have literature to read in their down time. He even brought gourmet coffee to brew for his platoon in the field in Afghanistan.

The story of the Atlanta woman who talked the escaped killer into turning himself in by talking about God and the Purpose-Driven Life inspired a lot of pious commentary at the time:

So, before the SWAT team surrounded the apartment complex with guns, Smith had defused the situation with love. In fact, when Nichols left her, untied, with ready access to guns, and when Smith followed Nichols in her own car while he ditched his stolen truck, Smith declined to take the opportunity to free herself. Instead she hoped to convince Nichols to turn himself in without hurting anyone else. “For a country used to getting things done with overwhelming force, it was a humbling lesson in Peacemaking 101,” writes the Monitor.

Well, as it turns out, the story’s a little more complicated:

Ashley Smith, the woman who says she persuaded suspected courthouse gunman Brian Nichols to release her by talking about her faith, discloses in a new book that she gave him methamphetamine during the hostage ordeal.

Smith did not share that detail with authorities at the time. But investigators said she came clean about the drugs when they interviewed her months later. They said they have no plans to charge her with drug possession.

In her book, “Unlikely Angel,” released Tuesday, Smith says Nichols had her bound on her bed with masking tape and an extension cord. She says he asked for marijuana, but she did not have any, and she dug into her illegal stash of crystal meth instead.

Smith, a 27-year-old widowed mother who gained widespread praise for her level-headedness, says the seven-hour hostage ordeal in March led to the realization that she was a drug addict, and she says she has not used drugs since the night before she was taken captive.

“If I did die, I wasn’t going to heaven and say, `Oh, excuse me, God. Let me wipe my nose, because I just did some drugs before I got here,'” Smith told the Augusta Chronicle.

* * *

She writes that she asked Nichols if he wanted to see the danger of drugs and lifted up her tank top several inches to reveal a five-inch scar down the center of her torso _ the aftermath of a car wreck caused by drug-induced psychosis. She says she let go of the steering wheel when she heard a voice saying, “Let go and let God.”

This is really Bob’s turf, but he’s on a tight book deadline so I’ll fill in. For those of you joining us late, the saga of Upsidedownland started when I put up this post, linking to Chris Floyd’s observation that George Bush had assumed responsibility for “all disaster relief efforts” in the State of Louisiana two days before Katrina hit land, which seemed to settle the blame game which was being fought so vigorously. In the interests of completeness — because I am always thinking of you, the reader — I dug up the White House link. And shortly thereafter, several alert readers noticed something very peculiar:

Conspicuous by their absence are Orleans, St. Bernard, St. Tammany, Plaquemines, Jefferson and basically every coastal parish, and the next parishes closest to the coast. So then, let me understand this: Team Bush saw by 26 August that Katrina would be sufficiently dangerous to warrant a preemptive disaster declaration for what looks like about 65-70% of the land area of Lousiana, and he declares it for the _landlocked_ parishes?

Bob photoshopped a handy graphic confirming this, and I sat back and waited for someone to point out the Perfectly Obvious Explanation which we’d all somehow missed.

Except it never really came. And now, in the latest twist in this odd story, Mike Brown is blaming the whole thing on Gov. Blanco:

BUYER: So I’d like to know why did the president’s federal emergency assistance declaration of August 27th not include the parishes of Orleans, Jefferson and Plaquemines?

BROWN: …[I]f a governor does not request a particular county or a particular parish, that’s not included in the request.

BUYER: All right.

Orleans Parish is New Orleans. I was listening to my colleague, Mr. Jefferson’s, questions about when they talked about, you know, they asked for this assistance for three days and then president responded the very next day, not the day that it was made — the request — but the governor of Louisiana actually excluded New Orleans from the president’s federal emergency assistance declaration?

BROWN: Again, Congressman, we looked at the request.The governors make the request by…

BUYER: Let me ask this. Since you went through the exercise in Pam, was that not shocking to you that the governor would excluded New Orleans from the declaration?

BROWN: Yes.

BUYER: When that request came in excluding these three parishes, did you question it?

BROWN: We questioned it. But I made the decision that we were going to go ahead and move assets in regardless because we have the ability to add those parishes…

The one small problem here appears to be the same problem we so often face when dealing with our conservative friends: what Mike Brown said does not seem to be the least little bit true. Here’s the request. As you can see, it specifically mentions “all the southeastern parishes including the New Orleans Metropolitan area.”