Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the Pope’s visit to the White House today where 15,000 invited guests crowded into the south lawn to hear the Pope urge Americans to build a truly tolerant and inclusive society and to tackle the issue of global warming before it is too late. Sister Simone Campbell, a religious leader, attorney and poet who is the Executive Director of Network and the author of “A Nun on the Bus: How All of Us Can Create Hope, Change, and Community” joins us. She was at the White House today and we get an appraisal of how the Pope’s remarks on climate change, immigration, inequality and religious freedom were greeted as the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics did not shy away from bringing up contentious political issues that are roiling the presidential primary debates and will no doubt come up in the Pope’s address to a joint session of Congress on Thursday.

Part 2

Then we look further into the issues of religious liberty which the Pope will be taking on in Philadelphia where he is meeting with conservative bishops to “celebrate and support the institutions of marriage and the family”. Following the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision we will explore whether there is too much, as opposed to too little religious freedom in the United States, an issue that is made painfully clear in the devastating new Showtime movie “Prophet’s Prey” that opens in Hollywood of Friday and nationwide in early October. The writer/director of this new documentary feature Amy Berg joins us in studio along with best-selling author Jon Krakauer, who is a producer and appears in “Prophet’s Prey” and is the author of “Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith”. We will discuss how a cult of polygamous Mormons engaged in systematic slavery, child labor and the sexual abuse of minors, still flourishes today under the leadership of its self-declared prophet Warren Jetts who is serving a life sentence for sexual assault on a 12 year-old girl and a 15 year-old he impregnated, in a Texas prison from where he directs his “church’s” multi-million dollar activities.   

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the agreement reached today in Moscow between Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin aimed at avoiding military clashes between Israel and Russia as Putin increases the deployment of weaponry and boots on the ground in Syria to support the besieged Assad regime. William Pomeranz, the Deputy Director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C. joins us to discuss Israel’s concerns about transfers of the latest Russian weapons to Hezbollah and whether Putin will send Russian troops into battle against ISIS in Syria ahead of his address to the U.N. on September 28.

Part 2

Then we go to London to discuss explosive allegations in a new biography about the U.K.’s Prime Minister David Cameron written by the Conservative Party power broker Lord Ashcroft who accuses the Prime Minister of engaging in a sex act with a dead pig when Cameron was a student at Oxford University. Nico Hines, the London Editor of The Daily Beast joins us to discuss his article at The Daily Beast “David Cameron Accused of Sex Act With a Dead Pig” and whether this damning biography being serialized in the Daily Mail that revealed David Cameron’s alleged porcine proclivities, will hurt his party that rules parliament with a slim majority.

Part 3

Then finally we go to Iowa for an update on the primary campaigns from a rally for Jeb Bush and speak with David Redlawsk a polling expert and a Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University and a Fellow at the Harkin Institute at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. We discuss the latest polls released since the second Republican presidential debate last Wednesday that show Governor Scott Walker at less than 1%, forcing him to drop out of the race, but have Trump still in the lead although there are indications that Carly Fiorina is making an advancement from her earlier negligible polling.