Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and MSNBC host Chris Matthews have always had a rocky relationship – Matthews has said that Gingrich “scares me” and said “dogs walk away when they see him.” That was mere prelude to today’s fireworks, however, when Gingrich appeared live on Matthews’ MSNBC program with topics that ranged from the GOP primaries to Romney’s vice presidential search and finally to Gingrich’s love of animals and zoos.Hardball

MSNBC host Chris Matthews slammed the Sunday morning institution Meet the Press on his program on Monday. He said that Newark, N.J. Mayor Cory Booker’s engaged in “sabotage,” disabling a major attack on former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s tenure with the private equity firm Bain Capital. But what is perhaps most shocking is how quickly the attacks on Bain have come apart when one prominent voice too many departs from the preferred line on Bain. With the Bain attacks on life support, the Obama campaign may find itself having to break out its strongest attacks against Romney far earlier than it would have preferred.

It’s only a matter of time before this presidential race turns nasty. And while everyone in the media has their popcorn makers ready for the inevitable ad war, both campaigns have, so far, acted as deterrents for some of the more highly charged rhetoric in the campaign. Mitt Romney publicly shut down the idea that he would capitalize on Reverend Jeremiah Wright to attack President Obama. Chris Matthews predicted on his show today that the likely 2012 winner will the the candidate who goes further in getting negative against their opponent.

Chris Matthews had a successful ratings night on Wednesday during his 5pm time slot on MSNBC, beating Wolf Blitzer‘s The Situation Room in both the demo and total viewers. Matthews scored 111,000 demo viewers to Blitzer’s 64,000 and 720,000 total to his CNN rival’s 430,000. Here are the rest of your Wednesday night ratings: TV [...]

Glenn Beck mocked MSNBC host Chris Matthews for his poor showing on a recent episode of Celebrity Jeopardy, after he mocked former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin saying that she would perform terribly if she made an appearance on that program.

Alex Trebek began his semi-annual “Power Players” edition of Jeopardy! last night, hosting Chris Matthews, Lizzy O’Leary, and the eventual winner, former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. While the episode was as eminently watchable as every Jeopardy! installment, the most entertaining segment of the show was watching Trebek interact with the contestants– and, especially, watching Matthews explain to Trebek his method for covering political news.

During a discussion on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews on Monday, author Mark Halperin and Matthews debated a potential presidential debate on Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s tenure at the private equity firm Bain Capital. Halperin said that the press is going to be “sympathetic” to President Barack Obama‘s narrative on Bain, to which Matthews asked if he thought “reason the press is on Obama’s side against Romney – besides sometimes partisanship obviously –is fact that equity people make sometimes 20 or 30 times a year what newspaper people make?”

On Chris Matthews‘ Show on NBC, a panel including Andrew Sullivan, Newsweek contributor and writer of “The First Gay President,” the news magazine’s latest piece with cover art featuring Obama adorned with a halo. Sullivan described Obama’ words in emotional terms on Sunday, saying that hearing Obama saying “I am his equal” was a transformative moment. “To hear the president who is in some ways a father figure speak to that – the tears came down like with many people in our families,” said Sullivan.

Thursday’s edition of Hardball with Chris Matthews played host to a heated battle between Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) and Family Research Council Tony Perkins over issues related to homosexuality.

Conservative website Newsbusters is outraged, OUTRAGED! that MSNBC’s Chris Matthews compared opponents of marriage equality with proponents of slavery and segregation. When Fox News’ Shep Smith made almost the same comparison, though, the site didn’t deem it headline-worthy, although they did point out that Smith was showing his “true colors,” whatever that means.

What either Newsbusters article failed to even attempt was to explain how the comparison was wrong.

On Wednesday, New York Magazine columnist Jonathan Chait joined MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews to discuss the defeat of long-time Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) in a primary election. Matthews said that Republicans face an uphill battle in the next election, let alone the next Congress, because their party opposes “climate and science,” “revenues” and they are “anti-immigrant” so Democrats will find them difficult to compromise with.

MSNBC Anchor Chris Matthews appeared on Martin Bashir Live on Wednesday to discuss the political impact of President Barack Obama’s expression of support for gay marriage. He said that Obama moved the nation forward in the “long march towards liberalism in this country,” but that there is a gathering “army” of “wolves” that are “probably giggling with delight over how they’re going to use this” against Obama in the election.

On Thursday, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews brought retiring Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) on his program to discuss a recently released book by Brookings Institution fellow Thomas Mann and American Enterprise Institute Scholar Norman Ornstein in which they find that the Republican party is responsible for dysfunction and gridlock between Congress and the executive branch. Frank lamented the present state of the Republican party, which just received a heavy influx of freshmen swept into Congress in the wave election of 2010, and offered advice to moderate Republicans: “If you’re a mainstream Republican, you want the current crowd of extremists to lose.”

“If you needed evidence parts of the Republican Party are hostile to gays,” Chris Matthews said on Wednesday, look no further than Richard Grenell, the openly gay Mitt Romney spokesman who resigned on Tuesday following backlash.

On Wednesday, MSNBC’s host of Hardball, Chris Matthews, delved into why he believes the prospect of Mitt Romney as president is something to “fear,” because he believes the former Massachusetts governor is not all that interested in politics or the issues that motivate political commentators. Matthews says that he doubts that if Romney were not running for President that he would be consuming political debate by “watching this network at night.” Furthermore, Matthews says that Romney is a “useful tool” for Republican opinion leaders like Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist or Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol.

This week marks the one-year anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden after a successful raid on his Pakistani compound by SEAL Team 6. Chris Matthews marked the anniversary by bringing up Time‘s new feature on how the decision went down. It reveals that only half a dozen other people besides President Obama knew about the plan, and despite warnings from the others, Obama chose the risky path in sending in the SEALs. Matthews and the panel discussed just how risky it was and how lucky Obama was that the mission was a success.

Recall how early in Barack Obama’s presidency, it was anathema to hear a joke at the president’s expense? For most, those days are long past – time and events have a way of diluting any president’s stature and opening them up for ridicule. This trend has not yet reached opinion leaders like ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel or the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza who, within 24-hours of one another, observed that Obama maintains a monopoly on cool.

Last week, Chris Matthews asked a question of the American electorate that triggered Bill O’Reilly‘s censors for media bias, particular with regards to President Obama: whether the fact that he is the first black president would make some voters reluctant to vote him out of office. As with all Mondays, he turned tonight to Bernie Goldberg for analysis, who actually gave Matthews credit for bringing up a “not bad” question, but argued it was indicative of an “obsession” with race on the American left that was pervasive of all politics on their side.

On MSNBC, Chris Matthews opened Hardball on Monday with a discussion of the heavy-handed reframing of President Obama’s campaign against former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney by reelection team officials. The Chicago team is moving from describing Romney as a substanceless, serial office seeker with no values to a secret conservative who has skillfully hid his brand of arch conservatism from voters during the campaign, but is prepared to unleash this terror on an unsuspecting people right after he is inaugurated. No, really. But what is still more laughable in this, well I guess you could call it a strategy, is the Democratic party’s reliance on the same tactic they’ve used on their opposition over the last three years; namely, call them “extreme” and hope it works.

During a heated exchange on Monday night’s Hardball, host Chris Matthews asked how presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney could appeal to “flat earthers” and “birthers” in the conservative base, tossing in “the Grand Wizard crowd over there,” to the dismay of former RNC Chairman Michael Steele. Later in the segment, Matthews said he “didn’t mean to say Grand Wizard,” but called on Romney to denounce “all the birtherrism, all the attempts to make Barack Obama some kind of foreigner.”

On his show today, Chris Matthews looked at the all-important white voter bloc and how important it may be for President Obama to secure, or at least win a respectable percentage of, white voters. He brought up a poll showing almost twice as many white voters would be pessimistic following an Obama victory as they would a Mitt Romney victory. Matthews and the panel seemed to agree that Obama probably would not get a majority of white voters, but he would still have to work for their support.

Some of the biggest players in the media participated as contestants in one of the most popular game shows over the weekend. Alex Trebek and his magic board of questions arrived in Washington D.C. for a very special edition of Jeopardy that will be airing the week of May 14. The show asked reporters who were present to not write stories about how each round turned out, so the results will not be spoiled before the episodes air.

With the Summit of the Americas underway, President Obama was among three presidents of the Americas today to participate in a panel on energy and the economy, among other things, along with Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos, and Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff. Moderating this panel is America’s own Chris Matthews, whose idiosyncrasies, if somewhat confusing to a portion of Americans, was completely baffling for the Latin American presidents.

It has been a fateful year for the cable news network MSNBC. It seems every month, another host – or even the network itself – is forced to apologize for reporting a factual error or overstepping the bounds of responsible commentary.

On Tuesday, Chris Matthews hosted a debate between former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Wall Street Journal economic columnist Steve Moore on the value of the debate over entitlement reform and the political good will that President Obama is hoping to tap in the electorate advocating for higher taxes on the wealthy.