On Wednesday, Sen. Roland Burris, D-Ill., joined Hardball via the phone to discuss FBI wiretaps which reveal him talking with Rod Blagojevich’s brother about the possibility of throwing a fundraiser for the former Illinois governor at the same time he was lobbying for the vacant Senate seat.
Watch the entire interview below:
Firefighter Frank Ricci of New Haven, Connecticut qualified for a promotion after scoring high on an exam but when too few minorities qualified for promotions, the city scrapped the exam and promoted no one. Now Ricci is suing the city of New Haven and his case is pending before the Supreme Court. Ricci and his attorney Karen Torre, discussed the case on Thursday with Chris Matthews.
Watch the entire video below.
On Monday, Chris Matthews paid tribute to former Congressman Jack Kemp who passed away on Saturday. Watch the video below.
by Chris Matthews
The unspoken story of the last hundred days is the one about America itself.
This is a protean country; It changes with conditions. It grows when situations develop. It has a remarkable - I would say exceptional - ability to meet a crisis, one that separates us all from the other countries of the world.
Look at how we do things. We face a crisis. We make a decision. We set a new direction. Look at how definitive we are at this: The Great Depression came along. We dumped a president who couldn't deal with it. We picked one who could. We let him do what he was elected to do: Take action!
We did it again in 1980. Dealt a hand of high inflation, high interest rates -- both in the double digits, with the added humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis, we discarded one president and selected another. We gave that new president pretty much a free hand to make his changes.
We did it again in 2008. Faced with a deepening recession, we picked a new president, again like the two I mentioned before -- Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan -- men who would normally not be at the top of our list. We elected Barack Obama.
The pattern is deep and understandable -- that is, if you understand this country. Faced with a crisis, we made a big decision. We dumped our previous notions of who should be our president - picked the extraordinary candidate and gave the new president the backing he needs to set the new direction.
America is not good at certain things. We are not great at long-range planning. This is not the land of long novels, classical music, or other such disciplines that require long-term commitments and vision. We are terrible, for example, at dealing with the problem of long-term debt or facing the economic projections on such programs as Social Security and Medicare.
What we're great at -- I would argue - is turning on a dime. Faced with a crisis, whether it's Pearl Harbor or 9/11 or a deepening recession, we move! We do it!
We make big changes and don't look back.
The big reality of this period in American history, in fact right now, is that nobody is sitting around, rubbing their hands and saying, "Gee, I wish we still had Bush," or "Gee, why did we pick an African-American president?"
No, the American character is to make the big decision and go with it. See if the new guy can do what he said he could do.
That's the question for the next 100 days and the 100 days after that. America is a great country for a couple of great reasons. One, every group that's ever come here does better than where they came from. Two -- just as this is the country where you can become not just what but who you want to be -- the country is able, especially when things are tough, to make the big move, to accept the need for change, yes, to rise to the occasion.
It got heated when Pat Buchanan and Lawrence O'Donnell discussed the flap over Obama's scheduled commencement address at the University of Notre Dame.
On Thursday's show, we discussed this Salon article that claimed that a secret recording reveals the Army may be pushing its medical staff against diagnosing post-traumatic stress disorder.
Hardball invited a representative of the Army on the show to respond. We got an emailed response:
The Army, dedicated to compassionate, effective mental and physical
health care, strives to accurately diagnose and aggressively treat
Soldiers who experience post traumatic stress disorder.
The Army does not pressure health care providers in their determination
of a diagnosis, nor does it condone such activity. A 2008 Army
investigation in fact concluded that commanders were not influencing
health care providers. The investigation did, however, note that the
requirements for a PTSD diagnosis were too cumbersome, making it
difficult for Soldiers to complete the physical evaluation board
process.
The Army responded, making it easier for psychiatrists to diagnose PTSD
by changing the requirements for boards to assign PTSD as a diagnosis.
Psychiatrists are no longer required to document the specific nature of
the traumatic event, which was sometimes difficult to confirm when the
events happened in the war zone.
- Lt. Col. Christopher C. Garver, U.S. Army
Media Relations Division, Army Public Affairs
(updated with full response, April 10, 2009, 10:30 a.m.)
By Chris Matthews
President Obama held his much anticipated press conference Tuesday and delivered his most pronounced message since taking office. He wants to be a president who does more than muddle through. He wants to be a transformative president on the model of Roosevelt and Reagan. He wants to do big things.
Tuesday's press conference showed he that he's president for celebrity or popularity. He was saying "I'm not going to be Bill Clinton and do school uniforms and family home leave, I'm going to do big stuff. Dick Morris is not advising me. I'm here to do business like the big guys, like Reagan and Roosevelt and maybe Lincoln. I'm going to be an important president or I'm not going to be a good one."
The president stressed the urgency of getting Congress to pass his budget. I found it odd that no one asked the big question: How is he going to do it? Will President Obama will use that special budget procedure that allows him to win his budget through the Congress on just 50 votes plus that of the vice president?
There are only two ways to pass bills: You get them through the budget procedure that allows you to do it with 50 votes or you wait around and try to get 60 which he‘ll never get. Wasn't that a good question that never got asked?
I think President Obama has a very coherent plan: He is going to force the United States Senate to vote up or down on his budget. He's not going to let them walk away and do it piecemeal. He's going to wrap up energy, health care and education into one big casino style vote for Congress to take or leave. It looks to me like he is to insist that they take it up as a reconciliation matter where they only require 50 votes to do it. I think he's going to jam it. I think what we're seeing here day after day is this push.
I think last night's speech was about President Obama saying, "I'm not here just to get by. I'm not just here to get through the business cycle. I'm going to change the American economy to compete in the future."
Hardball's Chris Matthews used St. Patrick's Day to comment on the recent violence in Northern Ireland and how it threatens the peace kept in that part of the country for over a decade.
Watch Matthews' commentary below.
On Wednesday, Former Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleischer talked with Chris Matthews showing his support for George Bush's presidency and legacy.
Watch the complete video below.
By Chris Matthews
Suddenly the man on the radio is the next voice you hear, the Oracle waiting in your car, waiting for noon eastern to tell you what's happening, who the bad guys are, what matters in the fight. Rush Limbaugh says it's about money - about the rich betting punished with higher taxes, the poor benefitting from the Great Society, Wall Street getting unfairly blamed for it all. That's what he's selling: the old time religion of capitalism.
RUSH LIMBAUGH AT CPAC CONFERENCE: So what is so strange about being honest to say that I want Barack Obama to fail if his mission is to restructure and reform this country so that capitalism and individual liberty are not its foundation?
The White House is more than happy to treat Rush as the leader of the opposition, based on the reception his speech got at the Conservative Political Action Conference this weekend. President Obama's press secretary Robert Gibbs commented on this issue Monday afternoon.
ROBERT GIBBS, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: Watching cable clips over the weekend it seemed to me that there were a lot of people in that room who agreed with him.
So is Rush the de facto leader of the Republican Party? It's what Rush wants, what some on the right seem to accept. It's what the Obama people want. Is it what the Republican voters really want?
Watch a Hardball debate between MSNBC's Pat Buchanan and radio host Michael Smerconish about Rush Limbaugh and the Republican Party.
