and change of clothes to change his offender status from prisoner to parolee. >> regardless of how well or bad your life is going, you have to report as required. we are going to come to your home. >> okay. >> and if we believe there's a reason to look around, we're going to ask to look around. you can't have weapons. possession of a firearm is a federal offense. because you're a convicted felon. you should always come to the office, ready to give a urine. >> okay. >> frank will face random drug testing as part of his parole. any positive urine test, frank could be sent right back to usp. >> i smoked marijuana. my distribution was for mushrooms. every time i get out, i end up getting high again. i hope this is different. i'm scared, though. >> frank's 30 years old. that's where offenders are usually on the cuffs. where they'll start aging out, they'll slow down and will start making responsible decisions. you'll hear a lot, i'm too old for this. i'm too tired for this. >> so if you're not hanging out with the bad guys, if you're not using drugs, if you're employed -- >> it shouldn't be a problem. >> exactly.

you're going to move on and this will be the first day of the rest of your life. >> that's how i'm trying to look at it. >> statistics show that if an offender is able to stay in the community for six months, they have a 30% chance of completing parole. that percentage rises to 50% if they are able to stay out a year without re-offending. >> ready to go, baby? >> daddy! >> i don't know if there is anything i could do to make up for it. hopefully i can be a good dad and be an active member of society and not take from people. try to give back some of what i took. hopefully that will be enough. >> prison officials say nearly half of those paroled return to prison within the first year. that's our report. thanks for watching. i'm john seigenthaler

a left turn on the drones. let's play "hardball." good evening. i'm chris matthews in washington. let me start with this. i got interested in politics back in high school. it was basic things. the roles of individuals in this country, how we get treated by the government and what role the united states should play in the world. if i ever forget vietnam, please remind me and do it loud. so when john mccain blasted rand paul the other day for, quotes, stunts that fire up impressionable libertarian kids in their college dorms, i thought back to myself when i was up in one of those college

dorms, holy cross in worcester, by the way, where people are up to 10 inches in snow. debates are great. debates in college dorms are where it all begins. what burns in the country, keeps us hot with ideas, keeps us giving a damn about our ideas. so i may not have the attitude of a rand paul but i worship his right to have it. i would never put down that attitude simply because i think there's a bit of right-wing paranoia touch in that guy. why? perhaps because somewhere there are some people arguing about it and i say thank god for that. cynthia tucker and ron reagan is a radio talk show host. ron, i always trust what you think your heart and brain a

altogeth altogether. they're putting down rand paul because he isn't one of them and because he dared to question the use of military power, in this case against individual citizens. where are you, a man on the left of this one? >> well, on the subject of drones, this is a very interesting thing to watch this divide among the republicans where you say the establishment which is reflexively promilitary is running up against the tea partiers who are ideologically libertarians where some progressive lefties might also. yes, i, too, am troubled with rand paul. i don't know that i find myself in agreement with him often but on a stopping clock occasionally he's right. >> did you watch last night because i said a broken clock is right twice a day.

>> i didn't see that. >> let me go to cynthia. my question is this. rand paul can be pretty wacky, and he's talking about sitting in some cafe on the corner sipping their coffee and all of a sudden a drone comes in because they said the wrong thing politically. i don't thing that's going to happen in this country of ours. is this something we should be debating whether it should happen? >> are you asking me? >> rand paul used a very extreme example to call attention to this issue of targeted killings, and i think the question we should be asking is not whether a drone is going to descend -- bring hellfire on some american sitting having coffee because of something they said but rather what it is that bring answer american citizen or for that

matter a foreign national onto this list. how do you get on the president's targeted killings list? who makes those decisions? what's the rationale? unfortunately this whole policy is so shrouded in secrecy, we don't know the answers to that, and that's what we ought to be talking about. i, too, am glad. i don't trust rand paul, but i'm glad he brought attention to that subject. >> i agree. we have nonamericans, americans and those, do we hit them home or abroad oop. take a look. >> if you're sitting in a cafe and somebody thinks you e-mailed your cousin in the middle east and they think you're conspiring with them, you get -- you should be charged. you should be, you know, imprisoned, if they can make the

charges stick but they shouldn't drop a hellfire missile on your cafe experience. >> well, john mccain mocked him yesterday. let's take a listen. >> if rand paul want s to be taken seriously, he needs to know what he's talking about. >> well, "the new york times" also caught this photo. it's kind of funny of those two senators awkwardly sharing what was a large elevator but too small for them. look at them trying to get away from each other. a eric holder wrote, it has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question. does the president have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an american not engaged combat on american soil.

the answer to that question is no. dichotomize that. where are you concerned? >> i'm concerned that there's no real transparency, as cynthia pointed out, and no real rules around this. when are we allowed to kill american citizens overseas? are we allowed to use drones anywhere. >> i'm awlaki working overseas. he was hit. we knew where he was when we hit him. where are you on that? >> that's a tough one. there is evidence that this guy was actively involved in planning. if that's the case, what's the difference between sending in a s.e.a.l. team and sending in a drone? but if you aplight domestically, what's the difference between sending in a s.w.a.t. team instead of sending in a drone. i don't want to send guys through the door. >> back to you, cynthia. suppose some kid grows up in

california, he's been watching the israeli news. he decides to join al qaeda. he ends up over in some country like yemen hanging around in a cafe basically trying to make contact with the enemy. is he someone that should be knocked off by drone or any other means? is it wrong to consort with the enemy? >> that's the question. petraeus has proposed when he was still running the war in afghanistan that the obama administration adopt a policy whereby people would be targeted for drones because based on some suspicious activities that looked like they might be terrorists. even if we weren't sure who those people were. that worries me. it bothers me not just we might be killing american citizens. it worries me that we might be killing anybody. if we don't have absolute

certainty that these people represent a legitimate threat to the united states. and it certainly ought to be more than something they said. you know, after we killed al awlaki, a drone also hit his son. well, we're now told that was an accident. well, how did he end up hit by a drone? >> does anybody admit he was a target, cynthia? >> nobody knows. nobody's saying. that's the problem again. it is shrouded in secrecy. united states citizens don't know what is being done in our names, and we should. >> cynthia tucker, ron reagan. coming up, when is president obama going to get some credit snit this is like rodney danger field? when is he going to get credit for the economy coming back? the unemployment rate dropped. it really is amazing and the stock market for the rich is going through the roof.

when is this guy going to get some respect? okay. if it gets to this number, we'll love him. they ought to ask this question. will they ever admit he's doing a good job. her's someone who admitted he was wrong. bill clinton wrote an op-ed which i couldn't believe it when i read it. he said not only did the law provide excuse for d discrimination. i'm already surprised by the jockeying. rand paul is running jeb bush and hillary clinton. this is going to be big time. finally what happens when you're too far right for cpac to invite you? well, you charge them with being under shari'a law. only innn red america, huh? "hardball," the place for

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welcome back to "hardball." this might come as a shock to people linking in a conservative media bubble, the election and re-election of barack obama did not, in fact, crash the american economy. today we found out that the unemployment rate fell to 7.7% for february, the lowest its been in four years as businesses added 236,000 jobs. how do republicans respond to that? with as little enthusiasm as possible. here's the speaker of the house, john boehner, quote, any job creation is positive news, but

the fact is unemployment in america is still way above the levels the obama white house projected when the trillion-dollar stimulus spending bill was enacted, and the federal government's ongoing spendi spending binge has resulted in a debt that exceeds the size. the biggest loss, the ones in red, actually happened when george bush was president. doesn't the president, barack obama, deserve some credit for improving the economy from what he inherited. joy reid and michael crawley. what a name to have after "downton abbey" after all these months. it seems to me that when i look at the stock market breaking all records, when i look at 236,000 new jobs and i keep thinking when are the republicans doing to do what rodney dangerfield asks people to do, show some

respect, don't people say, damnit things have got to be getting better? >> no, i agree with you. they were saying the economy is terrible because their candidate mitt romney was running only on one thing, the economy is bad, i can fix it. the next person up for re-election is you. it's not barack obama. it's you. you would think talking up improvement in the economy and your participation would be a good thing to do, but they another doing it. it's now soweight weighted on te of barack obama. if that hasn't changed enough for republicans to get the memo that maybe it would be good politics for them to maybe start saying the economy is getting better. the other is they agreed to raise taxes in january. that was a painful thing for them to do.

>> for the top 1%. >> barely. exactly. we always raised taxes on everybody. >> nobody argues about that unfortunately. >> exactly. but they don't want to admit that in a slightly higher tax market jobs are being created. >> let me go to michael. there are a couple of shots taken at the president. it's like etch a sketch again. one-sixth of 1%. high interest rates. the they're so low, you can borough if you've got the collateral. i think his tonians are doing already and other countries but it's not generally the rule that that's working right now. >> no. europe provides -- with all due respect to his toestonia, i kno

some of the things said about ben bernanke as he was anothee r engineering the policy and sarah palin, completely wrong. but there is kind of a partisan dynamic that's baked in here. i think back with some amusement to the clinton years when clinton passed his economic program in 1993. republicans predicted the economy would just completely collapse. it was going to be economic armageddon. and as you recall they had this economic boom and they said that was bought of the dot-com explosion and productivity changes. so, you know, you kind of can't whip in this partisan situation and i think republicans are too committed to the idea that the economy can't be good. >> it is, but the old line -- you're younger than me. the old line -- joy, you may not

have heard this one either. if you want to live like a republican, vote like a democrat. it's not true that people have a better life. marsha back bulackburn was aske tom russert. >> the economy is up, unemployment went down 7.7%. do you think president obama deserved some credit? >> i have to tell you talking to so many owners in tennessee they were pleased to see we stuck to the point of letting the sequester take place and beginning to cut across the board, make some cuts in this discretionary spending. >> that doesn't have anything to do with luke's very pressing question. it with us good question. what do you make of today's news. the answer was i don't have

anything to say about the news. i guess the question is this. does this affect the fact that things are looking brighter? i've got to tell you, we've been rounding 8% for the past 18 months. it hasn't gotten greater. we're still around 8% in the history books and the question i have to ask is bernanke says he's going to stop pumping money into the economy when we get to 6%. please let us know what number will make you quiet down and say this guy may have it. >> you're absolutely right. the irony of marsha blackburn's comments is the sequester is happening at the moment. the unemployment is backward looking. it has nothing to do with the jobs numbers that were reported. you're absolutely right. look. the problem is for republicans is that the history of the american economy is when you

withdraw government spending as fdr did, he tried austerity and we got a double-dip recession. hoover tried it. when the private sec to is always withdrawing it, it's lower gdp. that's simple math. no one has ever explained to me how cutting jobs in and of itself does it. if it's not the private sector, hello, it's got to be the government. >> thank you michael crowley, with that great last namt. marry crowley. i like her. what do you do if you're too far for the cp, the cpac crowd. you accuse them of being in cahoots with the muslim brotherhood. that's ahead. "hardball," the place for politics. y while thermocontrol wicks moisture away.

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back to "hardball," and now to the "side show." what if the papacy had to draw. they have what's called the first papal political ad. >> leonardo san degrees says he's infallible, but just last week he picked bradley cooper in his oscar pool. bradley cooper, leonardo sandly, wrong about bradley cooper, wrong for the vatican. >> well, just one reason to stick with the conclave as it is. next, "politics and straws." no, this has nothing to do with a straw poll. they're dissatisfied with a state court decision that requires more money to be put toward education. their response? reduce the size of the supreme court from nine judges to five. how is it decided who gets

knocked off the bench? from the bill, quote, on june 30, 2013, all existing judges of the state supreme court shall meet in public to cast lots by drawing straws. effective july 1, 2013, the positions of the four judges casting losing lots by drawing the shortest straws shawl be terminated. they recently ruled against a republican plan that would have made it more difficult to impose tax increases. finally this week in conspiracy. pamela gauer is on the list not invited to cpac this year. is it because someone on the list might lead to endesirables? not if you ask pamela herself. she says it's too late for kre pack, they've already fallen victim to shari'a.

>> i've always held events there even though i wasn't warmly welcomed because of the influence of what can only be described as muslim brotherhood facilitators or operatives. i think at this point people need to know just how deeply we have been until freighted. i mean, looks. what are they doing at cpac? essentially, janet, they're enforcing shari'a. under the shari'a, the blasphemy laws, you cannot say, you cannot offend, you cannot criticize, and you cannot insult islam. and so these effectively what they're doing. 're enfor they're enforcing the shari'a. by the way, state lawmakers in florida are keeping tabs on shari'a infiltration too. two republicans in that state have reintroduced legislation that would ban courts from

considering foreign law from making legal decisions. it didn't pass. but they're giving it another try. that's "hard ball" for now. coming up next, "your business" with j.j. ramberg. while thermocontrol wicks moisture away. keep moving. stayfree. in the middle of the night it can be frustrating. it's hard to turn off and go back to sleep. intermezzo is the first and only prescription sleep aid approved for use as needed in the middle of the night when you can't get back to sleep. it's an effective sleep medicine you don't take before bedtime. take it in bed only when you need it and have at least four hours left for sleep. do not take intermezzo if you have had an allergic reaction to drugs containing zolpidem, such as ambien. allergic reactions such as shortness of breath or swelling of your tongue or throat may occur and may be fatal. intermezzo should not be taken