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A group of young ballerinas rehearsing for “The Nutcracker” was kicked out of American University’s theatre so MSNBC host Chris Matthews could interview President Obama on Thursday. American University admitted they dumped Ballet Petite’s two final dress rehearsals so they could host MSNBC’s “Hardball College Tour.” Matthews will be presiding over a one-hour conversation with the man he’s likened to President Kennedy’s last brother, President Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ. The ballet company had been scheduled to rehearse on Wednesday and Thursday in preparation for their opening performance on Sunday.

As President Obama wrapped up his conversation with Chris Matthews at American University, he took a swipe at the partisan media for dividing the country and making compromise more difficult. Obama said being the Commander-in-Chief for so long “makes you humbler, as opposed to cockier,” and compared himself to Sisyphus, rolling the boulder up the hill for eternity with little success. He spoke of how enthusiastic young people encourage him and give him confidence, only for the media to take that enthusiasm and use it to divide people. “The American people are good and they are decent, and yes, sometimes

MSNBC host Chris Matthews said President Obama “came amongst us” in an awestruck voice during a post-interview analysis on Hardball Thursday.Panelist David Corn said Obama appeared to remain frustrated with the media culture in Washington, but Matthews countered with Obama’s appearance on his program.“David Corn, you skeptic,” Matthews said. “He came to us today. He came amongst us.”Full exchange: DAVID CORN: I saw a president who remains frustrated with the political media culture that he has to work within, and that he’s really looking to rally people, students here–CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well, if that’s the case –CORN: – and supporters, and people within the...

<p>DAVID CORN: I saw a president who remains frustrated with the political-media culture that he has to work within, and that he's looking to rally people, students here, and supporters, and people within the media.</p> <p>CHRIS MATTHEWS: But David Corn, you skeptic. He came to us today. He came amongst us.</p>

Martin Bashir was fired from MSNBC this week for his ugly scatalogical suggestion about Sarah Palin. But there was Chris Matthews on the same network this morning using a barnyard epithet to attack another Republican. On today's Morning Joe, Matthews called John Boehner's comments on divided government "pissant." That p-word has apparently become a favorite Matthews meme in attacking Republicans. MRC's Tim Graham recently noted that Matthews used it against Rand Paul. View the video here.

Call it a case of interview envy--in the context of an ongoing feud between two MSNBC hosts. There has been bad blood between Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews for years, as here, here and here. On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough took the occasion of Chris Matthews' impending interview of President Obama to mock the way Matthews' on-air schedule has shrunk. In a particularly low blow, Scarborough even compared the Hardball host to Regis Philbin. View the video here.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews will interview President Barack Obama this Thursday, the network announced Tuesday. The interview is part of Matthews' "Hardball College Tour," and will take place at American University in Washington, D.C. According to a news release from MSNBC, Matthews, along with university students, will "discuss a variety of topics with the president including voter suppression, healthcare, the decline of confidence in the government and the overall political dysfunction in Washington."

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Let me go to Brandon first. I guess this is the question that gets to me. If you're out there pinned down and the word gets back to Washington in real time at the National Security Agency or the national security desk, why didn't we try to send somebody from somewhere? What happened? BRANDON WEB: Hi, Chris. I think people need to understand this is a situation where as much as the people on the ground working with the State Department in Libya knew that the threat was there and requested the security, the State Department just wasn't...

According to Chris Matthews, conservatives have gone from wanting to kidnap babies to "killing" them. On October 1, the Hardball anchor insisted that Barack Obama "will not give up his baby" to pro-shutdown conservatives such as Ted Cruz. On Tuesday, still angry over the partial-government closure, the anchor fumed, "Today and in the future, Cruz will be remembered as the one who ignited the fire of government shutdown and general political mayhem." Matthews added, "He'll go down in history as the Mrs. O'Leary's cow of the 2013 disaster." According to the liberal journalist, the "thug" Republican senator from Texas thinks...

Okay, that headline is a little misleading. MSNBC host Chris Matthews never really took a break from calling his opponents racists and paranoids while engaging on a media blitz promoting his book about civility and amity in politics. Matthews is presently touring the media universe and recalling the history which he was privileged to witness and record in his new book, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked. The theory is that politics in the nation’s capital used to end at 6 o’clock when bitter partisan rivals would drop their disagreements and have a friendly scotch together. That era of...

Idaho Republican Rep. Raul Labrador confronted MSNBC “Hardball” anchor Chris Matthews over his insistent claims that Republican “terrorists” were threatening a government shutdown to defund Obamacare. Labrador reminded Matthews that his one-time boss, former Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, was partially responsible for a number of government shutdowns while Ronald Reagan was president — and yet Matthews had never referred to O’Neill as a terrorist as he has with Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.

Looks like Chris Matthews isn’t going to get a tingle over Barack Obama’s latest pivot. On last night’s Hardball, Matthews ripped Obama for a lack of leadership and focus, complaining that the President jumps from issue to issue with no particular purpose or plan. Matthews even went so far as to suggest that he misses George W. Bush … a little, anyway (via Jen Rubin on Twitter):

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews is famously known for saying President Barack Obama once sent a “thrill” up his leg, and on Wednesday the TV host continued to pile on the praise in a very animated way. Reacting to Obama’s inspiring address commemorating the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic “Dream” speech, Matthews bizarrely argued that Obama is “everything the white conservative should have designed” as the “perfect African-American president.” “This will sound partisan – to hell with it,” Matthews began. “The speech the president gave today is an example of why there is no credibility to his right-wing critics....

Former Cleveland congressman Dennis Kucinich, who has met repeatedly with Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, was quoted yesterday in a Capitol Hill newspaper as saying that a U.S. military strike on Syria would turn the U.S. military into "al Qaida's air force." ...

"Why do they seem so determined to also make it racial?" So asks Joy-Ann Reid, the managing editor of The Grio, a web magazine owned by NBC News whose mission is to "focus on news and events that have a unique interest and/or pronounced impact within the national African Americans audience." The "they" in question are conservatives and journalists asking, among other things, why President Obama hasn't inserted himself into this case the way he did in the Trayvon Martin tragedy. The irony-impaired Reid was asking that question about a heinous murder in Oklahoma, where, according to police, an Australian...

All you really need to know about MSNBC is that Matthews isn’t the first host on the network to make this claim. This isn’t some special fever dream born of one too many leg tingles. This is, to some degree, network groupthink. And the point, now as before, is to create a special standard for Precious that spares him from the crap that other presidents routinely deal with. It’s a corollary to RodeoClownGate: Bush was delegitimized in vicious and sometimes violent ways (Nazi comparisons, chimp imagery, heavy-breathing about Diebold and the 2004 election, etc), but a guy in an Obama...

So what if he disclosed information that potentially threatened American lives and security interests? Manning's a "frail guy who doesn't look threatening to anyone." So you have to question the length of his sentence. Such was the bizarre logic that Chris Matthews employed as he bemoaned Bradley Mannings' sentence--which could in practice see him freed in less than 10 years. Matthews was also moved by the fact that in military prison, Manning will be surrounded by people "who won't like him." View the video here.

If an immigration amnesty bill passes in this Congress-and there’s a definite chance it will–I know whom I’ll blame: Senator Ted Cruz. This might seem odd, since Cruz opposes amnesty. It’s not. Cruz was the national politician best positioned to stop the bipartisan, MSM-backed push for “legalization first.’ He not only failed to rise to the occasion, he’s recently increased its chance of becoming law. The two-count indictment: 1. He didn’t step up in the Senate: As a charismatic Latino apostate, Sen. Marco Rubio quickly became the leader of the pro-amnesty faction in the Senate. The anti-amnesty faction (composed entirely...

Money line: “This is what I do for a living.” Didn’t he predict a Bush/Clinton race in 2016 just nine months ago? If he believes what he says here about the parties swinging like “pendulums” from moderate nominees to ideologues and then back again, why would he have named Jeb as a strong contender last November? In fact, the roots of the counterargument are in Matthews’s own shpiel here: Most of the time, they head to the center. This is what Republicans did most successfully in 1952 – when, after twenty years of Roosevelt and Harry Truman – they wanted...

MSNBC's Chris Matthews made a bold prediction on Wednesday's Hardball. "The hard-right is going to take over the Republican Party in 2016 and the nomination is going to Rand Paul" (video follows with transcript and commentary):CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO CHRIS MATTHEWS: Let me finish tonight with this. I’ve been offering a prediction of late. Let me nail it down now. I believe the Republican Party is going to go hard-right in 2016. It’s going to run someone from the growing hard-right wing of the Party, something it hasn't done since 1980. And here's the thinking which works equally...