thank you, gene robinson. thank you, bishop gene robinson, who was born gene robinson like mickey mantle was born mickey. >>> coming up, we're going to flip the coin on this one, even to trayvon martin himself. no surprise coming some of the bad guys here. and later, as you surely know by now, the royal family has grown by one. buckingham palace has announced today, four hours late, her royal highness, the duchess of cambridge was safely delivered to a son. 4:24 today. her royal highness and the child are both doing well. that's the quote from the report. we'll have the fanfare and the enduring special relationship between the u.s. and the uk. this is "hardball," the place for politics. [ male announcer ] how do you do a summer clearance the dodge way? first wait till summer. then get the cars ready. now add the dodge part. ♪ ♪ the dodge summer clearance event. right now get 0% financing for up to 72 months and no payments for 90 days on all dodge vehicles. >>> welcome back to "hardball." a race-baiting pot sm

thank you, gene robinson.hank you, bishop gene robinson, who was born gene robinson like mickey mantle was born mickey. >>> coming up, we're going to flip the coin on this one, even to trayvon martin himself. no surprise coming some of the bad guys here. and later, as you surely know by now, the royal family has grown by one. buckingham palace has announced today, four hours late, her royal highness, the duchess of cambridge was safely delivered to a son. her royal highness and the child are both doing well. that's the quote from the report. we'll have the fanfare and the enduring special relationship between the u.s. and the uk. this is "hardball," the place for politics. r ] here's a word you should keep in mind. unbiased. some brokerage firms are. but way too many aren't. why? because selling their funds makes them more money. which makes you wonder -- isn't that a conflict? search "proprietary mutual funds." yikes! then go to e-trade. we've got over 8,000 mutual funds, and not one of them has our name on i

how the book goes brf the man will never have lunch with davis. >> jeff garland's impression of gene robinson. >> what did you learn? >> trayvon martin case opened up wounds you need to heal. >> listening to you and gene talk, so many of us live in a completely different world and have no idea what it's like to be african-american parent with teenager boys sending them out into the night, and the day, to go to school or somewhere. it's unbelievable the conversation you had. what did you learn? >> i learned there's something wonderfully not right about jeff garland. he's not all right. >> it's way too early, it's "morning joe." stick around now because going to "the daily rundown" with luke. >> luke. okay. >> after the verdict, reaction continues to unfold as attorney general eric holder makes his first public comments on the decision ahead of the draft in

there also, gene robinson, seems to be a generational divide. the younger people are, the more they just laugh at him. the older they are, the more they're creeped out by it. poor anthony's in the middle of it. he's trying to use new technology. he's trying to be a social media maven in his personal life, and he doesn't even know what snap chat is. like that video disappears in second. seriously? >> he really ought to get like a technology adviser who's under 25. >> he really should. but, gene, what separates out who survives in these scandals and who doesn't survive in these scandals? >> you know, in terms of the political skills, he is no bill clinton, but in terms of his obsession and compulsion, he kind of is. bill clinton is another that comes to mind who, after having been discovered in bad behavior, continues it compulsively for years and then apologizes again and finally gets some peace. but he comes back. anthony weiner, the weird thing of many weert things, is that this behavior that we're talking about now was after the apology, after

and he said he knew, just like gene robinson said, and just like michael stills said, he just needed to keep his mouth shut and get back in the car. it is -- again, for people that don't understand the realities of it, they just hang out. >> if you don't believe it happens, all you had to do on yesterday was look at another column in "the washington post" by richard cohen who basically said, look, trayvon martin was wearing a hoodie, and we know that's what people who are engaged in crime wear. this wasn't -- >> there was another column saying -- >> i didn't see that. did he really say that? >> yes. >> tens of thousands of people wear hoodies. it's now a fashionable thing to do. >> you know what, i wear hoodies. we've been wearing hoodies -- you do. you put on sweats. you put on hoodies. >> it was sort of an insane column, to be honest with you. >> was it really? >> to be, as you said, on the same one as the sort of passionate, eloquent column that eugene wrote yesterday is startling. >> if shg happeomething happens it's one thing, but to your child. eric holder is a big boy now. the

. >> no presidential seal, gene robinson, you had written about this of course the day before, for posting on friday in the "washington post." and he came out with no secret service, no advanced warning at all. we can certainly attest to that since we were -- i was sitting right here in the chair, then all of a sudden there was the president coming out into the briefing room. but it was clearly something that there had been a lot of pressure for him to say something but something that he really wanted to think through before he spoke out. >> obviously it was, andrea. you know in what i wrote last week -- actually wrote on thursday, i was very skeptical as to whether -- not whether president obama could be eloquent on the subject of race -- i know that he can -- but whether he could cut through, whether he could communicate effectively from the white house on race. when he had tried to do that in the past, it hadn't quite worked out the way he wanted, as after the arrest of professor henry lewis gates, for example, that confrontation with the white police officer. his remarks were sort of t

gene robinson was not spot on, like the cooke monster. >> what did you learn? >> trayvon martin case opened up wounds you need to heal. >> listening to you and gene talk, so many of us live in a completely different world and have no idea what it's like to be african-american parent with teenager boys sending them out into the night, and the day, to go to school or somewhere. it's unbelievable the conversation you had. what did you learn? >> i learned there's something wonderfully not right about jeff garland. he's not all right. >> it's way too early, it's "morning joe." stick around now because going to "the daily rundown" with luke. >> luke. okay. >> after the verdict, reaction continues to unfold as attorney general eric holder makes his first public comments on the decision ahead of the draft in orlando. he's speaking miles from where trayvon martin was killed. back in washington, old school meeting, will senate democrats bust up filibuster. we'll talk to the republican who pushed and the democrat leading the call for a filibuster fix for months. >>> find o

sn>> gene robinson? >> well, yeah. i mean, look, it's -- why has it gotten to this point?used by both sides over the years, but it's been used a lot more by the republicans this time. they've effectively blocked not just judicial nominations but executive nominations by the president in a way that i think would frustrate anybody and frankly should frustrate the american people. you elect a president, the president gets to appoint his people. you don't like them, you kick them out the next election. that's the way it's supposed to work. it's not being allowed to work by the sort of obstructionist strategy. i don't know what else you want harry reid to do but take it to the drink. >> harold, you served up there. when you get beyond the childish behavior of people talking about how sad it is their friends are the worst people who have ever served in the united states congress, this idea of changing the rules for the filibuster, this is a narrow change, talking about the president's appointees, agency level, cabinet level as well s is it dangerous for harry reid to do this bec

both gene robinson and i have written about this, about how black men aren't allowed to be young people't allowed to be adolescents, aren't allowed to make all the growing and learning mistakes that teenagers make. we're not allowed to be that. >> melissa, you've spoken as a mother and you've talked about your girls and you've talked about what young black men -- how constricted they are and how parents grieve and worry and have to train them really to act in a certain way around authority figures. speak to me about that and how really sinister that is in the way we raise our children. >> right. so here is the great challenge i think of parenting for all parents. that su you want to both keep your kids safe and really encourage them to take risks. as not only a parent but a parent of an african-american child whose political consciousness begins with the election of president obama. right? we were living in chicago when president obama was running for senate. in fact the very first words my daughter ever read as sight words was the word obama because it was on all these signs. right? in

. >> gene robinson said, "no caption necessary." >> remember, he's pushing immigration reform, amongld, whites are a minority. and we're going to have a very different conversation in a few years when it's much more multiethnic, latinos, asians and all these other groups, i'd be fascinated to see how the race discussion will look. it's not just two things. >> and i was at the national council yesterday, and the discussion is already changing about the dynamic of the nation. but the important thing is, we are at the beginning of this transformation. and we've got to seize the moment. >> david and i come from cities where this has already happened, miami and los angeles. where it was blacks and whites. it's a complicated conversation. >> let me get a break in here. we will do that. we'll come back with more including a tribute to the pioneering journalist helen thomas who died yesterday at the pioneering journalist helen thomai like a clean kitchen. the i don't do any cleaning. i make dirt. ♪ i'm not big enough or strong enough for this. there should be some way to make it easier. [ do

. >> gene robinson, one of the things that happens after tragedy like this, we say in the country weant to have a "controversy" about x. now it's a conversation about race. i'm not sure we actually ever have a constructive national conversation because both sides run to their battle stations and it becomes a battle rather than a conversation. in an ideal world, what would you like to hear that conversation sound like today? >> well, ideally it would sound like the president's remarks. it would not sound like sean hannity's marks. we would take off from where president obama took us on friday and go into depth. but willie, in the real world, this is the conversation. this is the national conversation about race. this is why we have it. we don't all kind of gather at public libraries on a given day and work through an agenda. something happens and we react to it and people overreact and react too strongly and e we fight about it for awhile and we argue and it seems like we're not getting anywhere. sometimes we actually are. sometimes we make progress. and if you look back at our histor

. >> and gene robinson, i think we're going to see this battle moving forward with the republican party versus the realists and then rand paul even further along that scale, like his father, real noninterventionist at almost all costs, but fascinating that this battle has begun and, of course, yes, we're looking at 2016 but this is about a bigger fight inside the republican party, whether it's the republican party of the 1990s or whether it's the republican party of george w. bush and dick cheney and the neocons. >> i think you're absolutely right, joe. i think this is a huge fight inside the republican party. we're going to see more of it. it's not just a fight for republicans. it's similar to what we see on the democratic side, in fact, on the kind of far left and kind of far right, there is common cause. there is common ground on a more noninterventionist foreign policy and in the middle, there's a consensus, i think, to basically continue the kind of interventionist foreign policy we've had. i think we're going to see this sort of bipartisan split on a bunch of issues. we're going t

hey, we have gene robinson, obviously. you wrote a column about what's going on in egypt. let's get to that in a second. but i know that you shared a lot of the reservations i had about afghanistan four years ago when you hear the president saying we may take all the troops out by next year, like me, that's good news, but also a tinge of tragedy it's taken four years to realize that karzai is not a good partner. >> yeah. i thought this was pretty clear a while ago that karzai was, you know, i think the term of art for it is a flake who was -- i mean, and his government is corrupt and we're giving them satchels full of cia cash to keep the right people paid off and yet he's still not cooperating with u.s. interests in the country. it was time to go a while ago. certainly time to go now. it is tragic it took this long to get to the point where we knew we were going to get to. >> all along. that's a great tragedy. we knew, mika, we were going to get here. when people came on our show and i go back to richard holbrooke and oth

you know it's really, gene robinson, a picture that makes my heart swell with pride.ou look at what those kids on the hill are doing every day. >> i know. >> the people's business. i get -- >> it -- >> it's like 1965 and lbj. one piece of legislation after another. spitting it out. it's like an assembly line. >> everywhere i go -- >> people are like rotator cuff -- >> americans are walking around with their chest pumped out. so proud of their congress. >> obama running out of pens to sign. >> hey, seriously -- somebody -- >> anyway with us on set, senior political editor and white house correspondent for the "the huffington post," sam stein. also pulitzer-prize winning columnist and associate editor of the "washington post" and msnbc political analyst eugene robinson. columnist for "bloomberg view" al hunt and economic policy reporter for "the new york times"p annie lowry who specializes in tweeting out pictures of -- >> a meat rock. a living rock you break it open and meat inside. it's really horrifying. >> it is cut open and it's -- it's gross and intestines all ove

with us on set news columnist gene green felds and in washington, associate editor of the "washington post" and msnbc political analyst eugene robinsonminutes to get through all of your titles. >> okay. go. >> let's hit it hard because let's talk about immigration. new stuff on this, eugene. tlushgts the immigration -- throughout the immigration push marco rubio has been a lightning rod. as the bill enters the house he and other republicans are getting cover from right leaning groups from new ads led by haley barber and the american action network. take a peek. >> our current immigration system is a disaster. what we have now is de facto amnesty. there is a better way. billions of new border security funding, it toughest enforcement measures in history. no food stamps, no welfare, no obama care. >> lindsey graham and immigration, what's he fighting for? 20,000 new border patrol agents, double the size of the security fence, electronic verification so employers can't hire illegal workers. that's what lindsey graham is doing. >> gene, you have a piece in the post about immigration, saying in part, we're quoting the senate did the sensi