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One candidate talks fondly about castrating hogs in her youth and suggests that could be a useful skill in Washington.

Another fires semi-automatic weapons at a 2-foot-high stack of paper representing the Affordable Care Act before feeding it through a wood chipper.

There's this strange story about my family that doesn't often come up in casual conversation. We don't talk about it much. I had to prod them when I donned my headphones and stuck a microphone in their faces to do this story. But as soon as we share, people shout "Why didn't you tell me about that before?"

Here it is: my great, great, great uncle introduced baseball to Japan.

No one in my family knew for generations, and in 2000 a fleet of Japanese people came to our farm in rural Maine and surprised us with an invitation to visit their country to promote the legacy of Horace Wilson: a man my family had more or less forgotten.

We had to enlist our oldest relative just to identify him in the portrait from around 1860 that hangs in our house (and is at the top of this story). We weren't sure which brother he was. Mustache, no mustache? Furrowed brow or contemplative gaze?

Here's what the Japanese told us about our uncle: after he left the farm and fought in the Civil War, Horace traveled to Japan in 1871 for reasons we've never uncovered. He then taught at what would become Tokyo University.

As the story goes, he taught his students a game at recess involving bases and a bat and, with that, brought baseball to the country. While Horace wrote home to Maine every now and then, he never once mentioned baseball, or even Japan.

Instead he spent his time urging his younger brother to keep up his correspondence:

"Your very pleasing letter came when I had not heard from home for a month. It made me smile right out loud."

President Obama's Vatican meeting with Pope Francis wasn't without a dose of irony.

The U.S. president, once the world leader whose vow of "hope" and "change" excited millions, seemed eclipsed Thursday in that department by the pope.

The pope certainly is polling better than Obama among Americans. A recent St. Leo University poll placed the pope's approval rating at 85 percent among Catholics and 65 percent among all Americans. By contrast, Obama's approval rating was 47 percent in the same poll.

Another irony: while the pope's approval ratings are higher than Obama's, Americans, including many Catholics, agree more with Obama on certain social issues than with the pope.

For instance, on reproductive rights, more Americans are closer to Obama's stance than the pope's. Sixty three percent of Americans say they would not like to see the court completely overturn the Roe v. Wade decision, according to Pew Research polling. More than a third of U.S. Catholics, 36 percent, say abortion should be legal in most cases, according to an Oct. 2013 Quinnipiac University poll; another 16 percent say abortion should be legal in all cases.

When it comes to same-sex marriage, Quinnipiac reports 60 percent of U.S. Catholics support it — a higher level than the general population.

To some extent, the pope benefits from his relative newness, and from the appearance of being a fresh break from his recent predecessors. His eschewing of papal lavishness and call for the Catholic Church to focus more on social justice have excited millions around the world.

By contrast, the realities of being a U.S. president in the 21st century, of being ultimately responsible for drone attacks and controversial NSA surveillance practices, have left even many of Obama's strongest supporters disappointed that the president hasn't changed the world as much as they had hoped.

As Michael Anthony Novak, a theology professor at St. Leo University told It's All Politics, it's more the rule than the exception that a president and pope wouldn't have much ideological overlap.

"Popes and presidents don't perfectly line up," Novak told me. "Whenever they get together, it's a fairly rare thing that their interests would perfectly align."

The kind of alignment between President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II at their first meeting, when they seemed to be of one mind on directly confronting communism, is rare, Novak said.

The U.S. president heads a superpower with vast economic and military might. The pope meanwhile heads the world's smallest country, Vatican City, but as leader of his church he has great moral power even beyond its adherents.

"Obama sounded out the Vatican last year about the idea of intervention in Syria," because the pope's support and moral authority might help the president make his case for action, Novak said.

"Did the Vatican think this fit the concept of just-war theory and so forth? And in that case, Francis seemed to be strongly against the idea of the West intervening in a strong military way," he said.

It was another area in which the president and the pope differed.

One area where the one-time Chicago community organizer and the former Buenos Aires parish priest align, however, is in the need to address economic inequality.

But while they both recognize the problem, the pope is certainly to the left of the president in his critique of capitalism. Still, their concern for social justice represents an opportunity for the two men to work together.

Novak notes that Obama met with the pope for a longer time than the Vatican usually allots for such meetings, even with other heads of state: "I don't know what it says yet but it says something."

Still, he says, the Vatican knows Obama is closer to the end of his presidency than its start.

It has the makings of a great mystery: Artwork stolen from a prominent museum, plus the FBI, a beautiful woman and an intrepid reporter. But this isn't fiction, it's a strange, true tale of how a painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir has now safely returned home to Baltimore.

At first it was known as the Renoir found at a Baltimore flea market — a woman took the painting to an auction house where they concluded that it was, indeed, On the Shore of the Seine — a Renoir that had been purchased in Paris in 1925 by American art collectors Herbert and Saidie May. In a press release, the auction house said it could sell for up to $100,000.

The flea market story intrigued Washington Post reporter Ian Shapira. He knew that Saidie May was a major donor to the Baltimore Museum of Art, but when he called the BMA, they told him they had no record of the painting. Shapira went to the museum to look through May's papers anyway, just days before the auction opened.

"I found some documents showing that the museum had actually owned this painting and then the museum discovered documents on its own showing that the staff back in the 1950s had actually reported the painting stolen," Shapira says.

It was stolen — possibly in the middle of the night — in November, 1951. Once the Baltimore Museum of Art confirmed the Renoir belonged to them, they immediately contacted the auction house. The auction house contacted the FBI, and the FBI seized the painting.

Read Ian Shapira's Stories

Flea-market Renoir allegedly was stolen from Baltimore museum; auction canceled