Jesse Ventura, Navy Seal, Surfer, Governor and Author

September 18, 2008 - 7:19am — Michael D. Ostrolenk

While I was in Arizona this month (September, 2008 ) to give a talk on medical legislative policy issues at the AAPS annual conference  I got the chance to spend some time with Jesse Ventura.  Thanks to my two friends, Karen Winfield and Sen. Karen Johnson (R-AZ), I got invited to one of the talks that Jesse was giving while in AZ to promote his new book 

Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! by Jesse Ventura and Dick Russell (Hardcover - April 1, 2008)  
Jesse spoke about his life, which is quite interesting, as well as his thoughts on the Patriot Act, 911 and the war against Iraq.  He is a character and a life style designer.  He is risk taker and uses his life to push up against various boundaries and uses death to basically scare the life into himself.  He leans libertarian on most issues which I can appreciate and is a skeptic and rightly so when it comes to the government.

I ended up providing security with an off duty police officer  for one talk he gave at a very nice community type center and just hung out at a second talk he gave at a local book store.  Thanks to Karen W. , I also got to spend time with with JBS folks after the community center talk talking about all sorts of issues from foreign policy, to civil liberties to medical issues.  One of the issues we focused in on was Fusion Centers.    Thanks to my friend Mike German, former FBI Counter-Terrorism Under Cover Agent, author of

"Thinking Like a Terrorist: Insights of a Former FBI Undercover Agent by Mike German (Paperback - Jan 7, 2008)"

and now with the ACLU, we have a great review of the  Fusion Centers.   

There were rumors floating around while I was in AZ that Sen. Johnson was considering a run for Govenor.  I wont say what she told me but these type of rumors can be good and we can only hope that if in fact Sen. Johnson does run, that the citizens of Arizona are smart enough to vote her in. New Hampshire was supposed to become the Free State but maybe Arizona could beat her to it.