Jese Ventura’s no fool when it comes to performance. He’s more than a TV personality. Before he was elected the governor of Minnesota in 1999, he was a professional wrestler, and before that, a Navy SEAL-turned-member of an outlaw motorcycle club in San Diego.  He’s appeared in a number of movies and TV shows, and has lectured at Harvard University. When I mention to Ventura that he taught one of the most popular courses at Harvard, he quickly cuts in to correct me: “It was the most popular. My class was the biggest class in Harvard history.”  Read Christopher Karr's interview with Jesse Ventura. 

From New America Media: Each time Uncle Sam ventures abroad, he leaves an unfinished story, and nowhere is it most unfinished than the story of Iraq, where despite flowery speeches regarding freedom and sovereignty by the Obama administration, despite assurances that tyranny has been "cast aside," the tragedy caused by the U.S. invasion, occupation and inevitable abandonment is on an epic proportion.

In the wake of the end of the Iraq war, U.S. ethnic media are taking a sober look at the last nine years of American military intervention in Iraq, and the meaning of the war in each of their communities. The Iraq war will be remembered as "an incomprehensible war whose repercussions will continue for a long time," according an editorial in Los Angeles-based Spanish-language newspaper La Opinion, looking back at the eight-and-a-half years of U.S. military intervention in Iraq that ended last week.

From New America Media: What is certain is that the war in Iraq claimed 4,487 American lives and left 32,226 Americans wounded, according to Pentagon statistics. According to Iraqbodycount.org, the number of Iraqis who died from violence ranges between 103,000 and 114,000. The United States spent nearly $3 trillion fighting it, and with another exorbitant war still waging in Afghanistan, the result is a bankrupt U.S. economy. After all, in 2000, the U.S. economy had a $230 billion surplus. In 2011, U.S. debt is at $15 trillion and growing. That’s $1.3 trillion a year going south.

From New America Media: The Iraq War may well never be over since its objective of regime change continues to dictate U.S. foreign policy and spawn endless conflicts. Nine years after the second intervention against Baghdad, it is abundantly clear that Saddam Hussein’s prophetic boast about “the mother of all wars” was correct, though not as the fallen dictator had intended.