I took a trip in 2004, a year after the war started in Iraq. I played music on the streets of Baghdad for Iraqi civilians. I'd also play for U.S. soldiers at night when they were off duty in the bars. Then I would talk to people, and I would film them and ask them about their life and the conflict.

I don't know if it's so grand that I can change the entire world, but I know that I can help one person. So that's the goal.

I went to Iraq because I wanted to see what one year of occupation had done to Iraqi society, and I went to the West Bank and Gaza Strip because I wanted to see what three generations of occupation had done to Palestinian society. I found a lot more hopelessness and despair in Palestine.

My greatest sense of accomplishment has come from having two amazing sons, but it's also a paradox in that the times when I felt like the biggest failure have been times when I felt like, as a parent, I wasn't making the right decisions or succeeding in the way that I should.

When you hear a lot of stories about Africa, and you get to a place like Kenya and other countries like that, where they think the same way we do, I was happy to find that the Schedule of Rights that I drew for the Kenyan Government was working very well.

Four years is a long time in politics.

In 1996, Bill Clinton declared the era of big government over in the State of the Union address.

The world's wealthiest failed state,' as it has come to be known, Belgium endured 589 days without a functioning elected government between June 2010 and December 2011 and remains a dysfunctional, linguistically divided waxworks of one federal and five regional-cultural parliaments.