Before getting all bent out of shape, this is what he meant:

“Not in their political views — not like they’re voting Republican — but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody. Kids raised on a culture of ‘We’re not going to keep score in the game because we don’t want anybody to lose.’ Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can’t say ‘the black kid over there.’ No, it’s ‘the guy with the red shoes.’ You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.”

Obama has made no secret of his affection for the outspoken pope, calling him a "transformative leader" whose influence has transcended the Roman Catholic community. The pope has embraced many of the issues Obama has sought to advance, including global warming, poverty and diplomacy with Iran and Cuba.

Vice President Joe Biden, a Catholic, said the pope's September 23 visit will mark an important moment not only for Catholics but for all Americans. "Pope Francis has breathed new life into what I believe is the central mission of our faith: Catholic social doctrine," Biden said in a statement to The Associated Press. Invoking key elements of Obama's agenda, Biden added that Francis "has become a moral rudder for the world on some of the most important issues of our time, from inequality to climate change."

The pope's brief visit to the White House is part of his highly anticipated trip to the US and Cuba. It's a reunion of sorts for Obama and Francis, who first met when the president visited the Vatican last year.

Despite deep differences on some social issues such as abortion, Obama and the pope are expected to focus on areas of agreement. The White House said economic opportunity, immigration and refugees, and protection of religious minorities were high on the agenda. For Obama, the visit offers a chance to imbue his remaining goals with a sense of moral authority as he approaches the end of his presidency.

In just the past two years, Pope Francis has championed Climate Change with a papal encyclical, worked covertly with Obama behind the scenes to restore relations with Communist Cuba, and was a secret but key player in the current Iranian Nuclear Deal which will guarantee that a nuke will soon be pointed at Israel. Francis is the man with the New World Order plan, and he shows no signs of slowing down. And oh, yes, he has also signed a treaty with Palestine against Israel.

As he travels all over the world, at each stop he is building his political power base, using Vatican influence to grant favors, and seducing gullible American Christians back into the tent of the Harlot herself, Mother Rome. Even Chrislam founder Rick Warren calls Francis “our pope”. On September 23, Pope Francis will make his boldest move yet when he addresses Congress. A feat never been done by any pope in the entire history of the United States. Here is a preview of what you can expect he will talk about:

Forced Immigration - Pope Francis is a Socialist, with Communist overtones, and as such he will chastise America for not allowing more illegal aliens through our borders.

Reversing Capitalism - “Capitalism is not a god. It is not a divinity. It is not a system that is perfect and does not need any modification,” he said during a luncheon meeting. “This system is fostering tremendous inequalities.”

Wealth Redistribution - “The free market economy is not complete. We need a social market economy. This is the big contribution of the Catholic faith to the system — to try to have this social component that will bring more justice to the system,” he said.

Forcing the Climate Change agenda - To deal with climate issues, he has also called for an “Earth Constitution that would transcend the UN Charter” along with the creation of a “Global Council… elected by all the people on Earth” and a “Planetary Court… a transnational legal body open to appeals from everybody, especially with respect to violations of the Earth Constitution.” The two main issues of “protecting the earth” are climate change and global depopulation.

But far more dangerous for American conservatives, this new pope’s message will be regularly delivered by those clerics to America’s power elite: Six of the nine members on the Supreme Court are Catholics, including the chief justice. Three Catholics are in the direct constitutional line of succession if the president dies. Twenty-four of our 100 Senators are Catholic. So are 163 of the 435 members of the House. Add in their Catholic spouses, children, parents and friends, and this new pope is himself a global superpower. His radical, revolutionary “exhortations” will be influencing billions of all faiths worldwide, demanding not pious rhetoric but action to solve world problems.

Pardi, who’s not even Catholic, sent Francis copies of her books after she came under fire from Christian groups. “My books present different types of families without setting any of them up as a model,” Pardi told AFP, praising the pope for showing “respect and dignity” towards her, her wife and their four children. “It was not important for me that it was the pope who said it, I am not a Catholic.” “But it is important to see that we are not up against a wall; a dialogue is possible.”

Vatican officials are now scrambling to downplay the pope’s blessing, especially as Francis was already taking heat for promoting global government and “man-made climate change.”

Sheikh Raed Salah, head of the radical Islamic Movement in Israel, gave an interview to the Hamas paper Palestine, in which he said the entire Palestinian Arab society - both those with and without Israeli citizenship - needs to unite to "help" Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Arab rioters who attack police and Jewish visitors on the Temple Mount on a regular basis symbolize the "honor" of the Muslim nation and the Arab world, according to Salah.

Salah just last month called to conquer the Temple Mount, saying, "we must go out against all these breaches until the occupation is removed." Jordan just this week threatened to deploy soldiers to the Mount following the plan to ban Muslim rioters.

According to former federal prosecutor Paul Butler, the doctrine of jury nullification is “premised on the idea that ordinary citizens, not government officials, should have the final say as to whether a person should be punished.” Imagine that: a world where the citizenry — not the government or its corporate controllers — actually calls the shots and determines what is just. In a world of “rampant overcriminalization,” where the average citizen unknowingly breaks three laws a day, jury nullification acts as “a check on runaway authoritarian criminalization and the increasing network of confusing laws that are passed with neither the approval nor oftentimes even the knowledge of the citizenry.”

Not only should the punishment fit the crime, but the laws of the land should also reflect the concerns of the citizenry as opposed to the profit-driven priorities of Corporate America. Unfortunately, for thousands of Americans who are serving life sentences for nonviolent crimes as a result of harsh mandatory sentencing laws passed by “tough on crime” politicians, the punishment rarely fits the crime.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, with every ill inflicted upon us by the American police state, from overcriminalization and surveillance to militarized police and private prisons, it’s money that drives the police state. And there is a lot of money to be made from criminalizing nonviolent activities and jailing Americans for nonviolent offenses.

This is where the power of jury nullification is so critical: to reject inane laws and extreme sentences and counteract the edicts of a profit-driven governmental elite that sees nothing wrong with jailing someone for a lifetime for a relatively insignificant crime.

North and South Korea agreed early on Tuesday to end a military standoff that sparked an exchange of artillery fire and had ratcheted up tension on one of the world's most heavily-fortified borders. The two sides also agreed to open a new channel of dialogue to discuss a range of issues with the aim of improving ties, raising hopes for a fresh push to restore talks and exchanges that had been cut off since 2010.

"The joint press release published at the contact provided a crucial landmark occasion of defusing the acute military tension and putting the catastrophic inter-Korean relations on the track of reconciliation and trust," the North's KCNA news agency on Friday quoted Kim as saying in a meeting with military aides.

Kim noted the accord was reached "thanks to the tremendous military muscle with the nuclear deterrent for self-defense built by the great party as a pivot and matchless ranks single-mindedly united around the party," KCNA said. The comments were made at an enlarged meeting of the Central Military Commission of the North's ruling Workers' Party of Korea, the same venue led by Kim last week that warned of military action unless Seoul stops the propaganda broadcasts.

The letter was initially sent to House and Senate leaders from both parties on Tuesday with 190 signatures — among them several individuals who’ve held high-level positions in past administrations, including former Navy Vice Admiral John Poindexter, who served as President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser. Retired Air Force Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney, who held various defense advisory positions during President Bill Clinton’s administration, is also a signatory.

The letter outlines a litany of complaints about the nuclear deal that Congress is slated to vote on whether to support or reject next month. “The agreement as constructed does not ‘cut off every pathway’ for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons,” the letter states. “To the contrary, it actually provides Iran with a legitimate path to doing that simply by abiding by the deal.”

The former military officials also assert that the deal is “unverifiable,” lamenting that the agreement allowed for a “secret side deal” between Iran and International Atomic Energy Agency that will ultimately prevent UN weapons inspectors “from reliably detecting Iranian cheating.”

It was just seven years ago that the DEA left Bolivia — and only three years after that, progress was finally made. The strategy employed by the Bolivian government may be a surprise to many prohibitionists because it did not involve any strong-arm police state tactics. Instead, they worked to find alternative crops for farmers to grow that would actually make them more money.

Antonino de Leo, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s representative in Bolivia, told VICE News. “It’s not only about making money off a crop. In the old fashioned alternative development approach, we substitute one illicit crop for a licit crop. It’s about a more comprehensive approach that includes access to essential services like schools, hospitals, and roads in areas that traditionally have been hard to reach,” Leo added.

The story of this gradual change is one of legal changes (court rulings and legislation), behavior, and popular belief — with each of these influencing the other two in a vicious cycle. You can’t quadruple a prison population in 40 years without instituting a different belief system. You can’t ship black prisoners to be guarded by rural whites employed by for-profit companies, or lock up immigrants indefinitely while they await hearings, and not alter the belief system further. You can’t run several successive election campaigns as contests in meanness and not see changes in policy and behavior.

You can’t give police military weapons and not expect them to adopt military attitudes, or give them military training and expect them not to want military weapons. You can’t give crime 10 times the coverage on the “news” and not expect people to imagine crime is increasing. You can’t start smashing in doors without alienating the police and the people from each other.

Balko quotes former Maryland police officer Neill Franklin on what changing police attitudes will require:

“Number one, you’ve signed on to a dangerous job. That means that you’ve agreed to a certain amount of risk. You don’t get to start stepping on others’ rights to minimize that risk you agreed to take on.

And number two, your first priority is not to protect yourself, it’s to protect those you’ve sworn to protect.” But that would mean not being at war with people.

Jesse Rau, who has worked for Calgary Transit as a driver for about a year, says he’s a Christian and can’t support homosexuality. Rau hopes Calgary Transit and the Amalgamated Transit Union will support drivers who don’t want to drive the rainbow bus. “I’m a Christian so, as a Christian, there are things like homosexuality that I just can’t condone. Unfortunately, we live in a culture where if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, the accusation is that you hate the person.”

Doug Morgan, director of Calgary Transit, says drivers can only refuse to work based on safety issues. Calgary Pride’s director of government affairs, Craig Sklenar, says the bus is a symbol of progress. “It’s a sign of the change in Calgary,” said Sklenar. “There’s still much to do in as much as LGBTQ rights are concerned but we are excited there are such public displays of pride across the city over the next few weeks.”