homeland security

"If people think about how they might want to create something that isn't just me me me, that could be revolutionary," says musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson. Anderson has crossed genres, created new instruments, performed in "audio drag" and even created some comics, but she's best known for her experimental violin playing. Laurie joins Laura in studio for a feature-length interview on art, electronics, making music for fish, and why Homeland Security still has one of her instruments. "I'd like my title to be 'explorer,' but on my passport it just says 'artist,'" she says. You may be familiar with Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff Project, the illustrated, animated explainers that break down progressive issues in easy, fun ways. In the same style, she explains the story of Cap & Trade--how it works, who would benefit, who would suffer, and why real solutions to climate change are necessary. And finally, Vermont is nearly all the way to single-payer health care, but Laura warns not to forget the fight the insurance companies will put up. Distributed by Tubemogul.

If four politically-motivated young men with left-wing (or Muslim), rather than right-wing ties, broke into the office of a senior Senate Homeland Security Committee member and gained access to her computer files -- do you think we'd be hearing less about hijinks and more about Guantanamo? The story of the break-in at Senator Landrieu's office gets weirder and weirder by the day. For those who were distracted by the State of the Union last week, federal officials arrested four young men and charged them with plotting to tamper with the telephone system, after they were caught impersonating telephone repairmen in the New Orleans office of Senator Mary Landrieu. The mainstream media account of the story has it that the four were neo-conservative pranksters gone overboard in an attempt to possibly uncover damaging information related to the Democrat and voter registration drive or the healthcare bill, or both. One of the men was a conservative activist who gained fame last year by secretly recording members of the community group ACORN giving him advice on how to set up a brothel. Read the alternative media however, and the story points away from pranks and towards undercover ops. The group not only had ties to conservative campus think tanks, but also to the US intelligence community. Lindsay Beyerstein is alleging that one of the arrestees, Stan Dai, is an Assistant Director at the Intelligence Community Center for Academic Excellence at Trinity University in DC. Curious about the ICCAE? David Price over at Counterpunch happens to be reporting right now that the ICCAE (perfectly pronounced "ICKY") is just one of a handful of programs started on US campuses after 9-11 to "sneak unidentified students with undisclosed links to intelligence agencies into university classrooms." The Trinity program, according to its website, "received a $250,000 renewable grant from the US intelligence Community" upon launching in 2004. "Hijinks to Handcuffs for Landrieu Provocateurs," so ran the New York Times story by Jim Rutenberg and Campbell Roberston January 31. "Silent Coup" is the headline of David Price's piece in Counterpunch. Connecting the two is Raw Story's "Landrieu Phone Plot: Men Arrested have Links to Intelligence Community." Whatever the truth, and however this story pans out, thank god for independent media. Thanks to inquisitive independent media, the dots are out there just crying to be linked up. The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter.com.