I would like to comment on the Catholic Church vs President Obama.

I believe that there is a solution....give the employees working for catholic instituions the choice of staying with the plan offered by their employers or give those employees that want the contraception paid for thru their employers medical plan the money in their paychecks to purchase their own plan that would offer them contraception. This way the catholic organizations would drop these employees from their medical plan and not be paying for any of their employees contraception and I think it would be a solution for everyone.

Roseann Bivinetto

I thought that the opinion of your guest as well as that of Joe Scarborough that Santorum could beat President Obama because he has a blue collar background and somehow therefore is credible on jobs was the funniest thing I've heard since last saturdays Saturdays Night Lives show. Seriously thanks for the laugh I needed it.

President Obama will simply show that his policies and philosophies are working whereas the Republicans philosophies of lower taxes for the rich and austerity are destroying economies around the world. On the other hand, what all of you old men just don't seem to get is that those citizens who are voting in numbers far greater than old white men who you are speaking for are the youth and the women who quite frankly will vote in droves against a bigoted, regressive, man (or men) who simply aren't familiar with economic history or the overall welfare of this nation.

This contretemps over birth control is complete nonsense. American women, including the vast majority of Catholic women of childbearing age, have been using contraceptive birth control since the mid-1960s. The economics of child rearing make it impossible not to use birth control. After all, Catholics are like most American families, with both husband and wife needing to work outside the family in order to make ends meet. This is most assuredly the case in an American families, frequently Hispanic or Latino, that so often make up the ranks of practicing Catholics. Now that the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, that church-affiliated hospitals and universities are voluntarily providing prescription contraceptives to their employees and students as part of their institutional healthcare plans, the bishops' protestations ring all that much more hollow. If the Catholic hierarchy cannot influence, much less control, the church's institutional affiliates, what possible traction with you expect to have with other religious groups that do not subscribe to the same religious dogma. In point of fact, the church hierarchy and the Republican Party have picked a fight with precisely the wrong people, every woman over the age of 12, single, married, and anywhere in between. This was a battle that church fought and lost nearly half a century ago; why are we seeing it just now. Personally, I think it's because the Republican Party and its Teabagger fellow travelers have nothing else to complain about. Granted, the rule as initially drafted could have been better vetted that it was; were this not an election year, the necessary changes would have been quietly made without any fuss or fanfare. Instead we see the Republican Party's most visible spokesmen (and I do mean men) get up on their hobby horse, rocking back and forth, attacking yet another windmill, much the same as Don Quixote five centuries ago. The futility of it all is totally laughable; but in this case, as in other recent ones, the blowback against the Republican Party is going to be substantial. Nobody particularly cares what some bishop or other is saying in some press conference; and most of them have been well advised to shut up and lay low until this blows over. Not so with the Republican leadership in Congress. They, and the Santorum campaign, are taking this over a cliff with their banners flying. Unlike their antiabortion campaign which has achieved tacit acceptance over a substantial minority of American voters, this new assault on birth control itself is a nonstarter, absolutely. Worse for them than that, this fiasco totally conflates both abortion and birth control into a single theme, that Republicans and their ilk are against women in any capacity other than childbearing, period. This is Comstockery, pure and simple, the likes of which we haven't seen since before World War I. For the Obama Reelection Campaign, this is the gift that keeps on giving!

I was quite shocked to see Chris Matthews turn to E.J. Dionne as a fellow Catholic, pointedly excluding Andrew Sullivan, who has defended his Catholic faith regularly over many years, at much higher cost than Matthews has ever had to endure. Is seems Matthews views him as someone "other" and "not one of us."

Any special reason you just can't accept Andrew as fellow Catholic, Chris?