Papa John Kneels For Trump

Papa John's CEO & Trump fan John Schnatter 

Now if you're one of the millions of people tuning in to an NFL game on network television (or radio) today, it's likely you'll see or hear at least one commercial for Papa John's Pizza.

A company that enjoys an exclusive licensing deal that allows it to call itself "the official pizza of the NFL" or some such thing.

As if the NFL are arbiters of good pizza, or branding Papa John's the official pizza of the NFL somehow makes it tastier.

When my sister or mother, friends, or any of the acquaintances at my local tavern decide we want to order a pizza, we usually pull out the menus to decide which place we're in the mood for - and we always choose local spots that we know from experience make a good pie. 

Nothing against a franchise or anything, I enjoy Popeye's, McDonald's or Wendy's every now and then if I'm in the mood.

But pizza is a much more complex and delicate creature, and the quality of a franchise can depend on who owns it, who's managing it and who's actually making the pies when you call up and order.

Honestly, ask yourself: what's the likelihood that a family or group of friends gathered together to watch a Sunday NFL game in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Hamilton, NJ (or any place with good local pizza joints) is going to order pizza from Papa John's?

Nothing against any of the thousands of local Papa John's franchise owners around the country (and overseas) but my guess is not so likely - 80 - 20 depending on where you live and what's around.

Corporate bros? Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones
and Papa John's Pizza CEO John Schnatter

Particularly if those family members or friends are supporters of the right of NFL players to peacefully and non-violently exercise their First Amendment right to free speech by choosing to kneel during the playing of the national anthem before kickoff to bring attention to the disparate use of excessive and deadly force against people of color in the United States by some members of law enforcement. 

As Hannah Withiam observed in an article for the conservative-leaning New York Post, the highly-visible founder and CEO of Papa John's Pizza, John Schnatter, made media headlines last week after he publicly tried to blame the NFL for a weak third-quarter earnings report released on Tuesday.


Some are speculating that it's actually Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones (who happens to own 120 Papa John's Pizza franchises...) who was behind Schnatter's controversial public comments blaming the NFL for "poor leadership" over the issue of players kneeling before games that is behind Papa John's lower-than-expected third-quarter performance.

"NFL leadership has hurt Papa John's shareholders...this should have been nipped in the bud a year and a half ago." Schnatter told analysts during a conference call last Wednesday, referring to  the national anthem protests that started with former San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick in 2016.

While Schnatter seemed quick to pin his company's missed sales performance figures on NFL players calling attention to the way some members of law enforcement treat black Americans, it's not really clear what he meant by "nipping it in the bud" given that Kaepernick has ostensibly been blacklisted from the League.

And despite Schnatter's call for some kind of crackdown, even the NFL owners recognize that banning players from expressing themselves freely would be an unmitigated PR disaster for a league that is already trying to deal with declining ratings in an era when audiences are already unplugging from cable because of the vast array or entertainment options made available through OTT streaming services like Netflix, Amazon, HBO Go, Showtime Anytime and Hulu.

Members of the San Francisco 49'ers kneeling
earlier this season

As a long-time NFL fan and former NFL player, personally I think the drop in ratings is a combination of there simply being more things for people to watch, the explosion of the Internet, and the fact there are now simply too many NFL games on broadcast television.

There was a time in this country when "NFL Sunday" and Monday Night Football used to be must-see television events for millions of Americans.


But the gradual addition of games on Sunday night, and then Thursday night has simply made sitting there for three-plus hours being saturated by commercials less of an "event".

I think a lot of NFL owners and executives are not fully understanding the fact that millions of people who have unplugged from cable, like myself, simply don't want to watch commercials and are willing pay for other content (Netlflix, Amazon etc.) to do so - the NFL hasn't quite gotten that yet.

But to get back to the point, as CBS News MoneyWatch reported on Wednesday, Papa John's reported a 1 % increase in sales in the third quarter, but that increase was lower than expected, and much lower than the 5.5% increase in sales in the franchise reported in the third quarter in 2016.

So I think John Schnatter was expressing disappointment over his company's performance, and also venting the same frustration felt by large cable providers and a number of business owners who spend millions to advertise their company's products and services during NFL broadcasts, or associate their brands with the League's.

But in the case of Schnatter's public comments last week, my sense is that because he and Jerry Jones have a shared interest in the stock price and sales performance of Papa John's Pizza, as well as the popularity of the NFL, Jones may well have privately encouraged Schnatter to use the lackluster third-quarter earnings report and sales forecast to take a swipe at Commissioner Roger Goodell.

Jerry Jones and Roger Goodell talking during a
break between NFL owners meetings

Last Sunday, ESPN reported that Jones was allegedly the ringleader of 17 NFL owners who are pushing to block Commissioner Roger Goodell's pending contract extension, largely over displeasure over the way the NFL's front office has handled the national anthem protests

As ESPN quoted one unnamed NFL owner as saying of Goodell's contract extension, "If not for Jerry this deal would be done."

So this issue is about much more than the quality of the pizza Papa John's bakes and delivers, and how they're faring against their competition - which is questionable.

In the wake of Schnatter's comments last week, a number of spokesman for other restaurant franchises that depend on NFL games for significant portions of their revenue have pushed back against his claims that the national anthem protests are to blame for poor earnings - Buffalo Wild Wings said publicly that sagging NFL audience ratings were not expected to affect their sales targets.

In a conference call last week, Greg Creed, the CEO of YUM Foods which owns KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, said, "We're not seeing any impact of any of that on our business." 

Last Wednesday the Twitter account for frozen pizza brand DiGiorno responded to Schnatter's comments by spoofing Papa John's Pizza tagline "Better ingredients. Better Pizza" by tweeting, "Better pizza. Better sales." 

Ouch.

Some have speculated that Schnatter's conservative political views are to blame for his opposition to the national anthem protests given that he is an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump.

To be clear, the same First Amendment to the Constitution that gives NFL players the right to silently kneel during the playing of the national anthem gives John Schnatter the right to express an opinion for, or against their actions - or support the political candidate he wants to.

John Schnatter in one of the many Papa John's
ads in which he personally appears

But the fact is that Schnatter himself made the decision to build the brand of his business around himself and his own image, so his decision to weigh into the ongoing debate about NFL players kneeling during the national anthem is inextricably tied to people's perception of the Papa John's Pizza brand.

Many people, including many of his own shareholders, were not pleased with his comments - as Forbes reported last Wednesday, the value of Papa John's shares dropped by 11%.

That was just within 24 hours of his comments, and since Schnatter owns about 25% of the company, his personal net worth dropped by $70 million in less than a day.

There's no question that John Schnatter is a successful American CEO who built his business from the ground up.

He was making pizzas at age 16 when he was working two jobs, and famously built Papa John's Pizza after purchasing an old bar and installing an oven in the space where a closet used to be.

He's a hands-on guy known to show up at one of his franchises without warning and give employees and managers an earful if things are not up to his standards - by all accounts he's also generous with his money to friends, strangers and charities.

VP Mike Pence with Schnatter 

But he made a serious error in tying the brand he owns with his own personal conservative political views, because a lot of Papa John's Pizza customers, franchise owners and employees do not agree with his support of Trump.

He has a right to support Trump, but only about 30% of the U.S. population supports the most unpopular president in modern history - and clearly the business strategy of Papa John's Pizza is not to target a mere 30% of American consumers.

In 2012, Schnatter threatened to reduce his employees hours in response to the Affordable Care Act.

So he's got a history of linking his personal conservative views to his business whether intended or not - which, as he's learning, is not necessarily a good thing.

As Mediaite.com reported on Monday, neo-Nazi website the DailyStormer quickly threw their racist hat into the ring and embraced Papa John's Pizza as the "official pizza of the alt-right".

To their credit, Papa John's quickly released a statement condemning racism and bigotry in all forms and made clear that they "do not want these individuals or groups to buy our pizza." - but the damage is already done and frankly Schnatter should have thought about the broader repercussions of putting his company brand into the awkward position of criticizing those who are speaking out against unjustified police brutality.

In an op-ed in the September 27th issue of The Hollywood Reporter, writer and former NBA All-Star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar expressed the hope that athletes, entertainers and other high-profile Americans may be represent the most effective way to push back against the divisiveness, bigotry and repressive ideology of the Trump White House - and the advisers, cabinet members and politicians who seek to make his repugnant views and regressive policies a political reality.

As Abdul-Jabbar observed, "What makes this uprising of moral indignation and political zeal so significant is that those speaking out do so with the full realization that they have something to lose. Players risk their entire futures, jobs as well as endorsement deals. Clearly, they are motivated by something more important that profits: patriotism."

The cumulative effect of "Papa John" Schnatter having criticized NFL players for peacefully and silently protesting the glaring disparity with which some members of law enforcement use excessive physical force, or deadly force, against people of color, as far as the views of the vast majority of Americans are concerned, is that he failed to stand up for what is intrinsically, right.

He ostensibly kneeled for Trump.

Because of that, regardless of his right to express his personal political views, when a lot of people open that drawer to pull out the pizza menus, they're not going to be choosing Papa John's.

For reasons that have nothing to do with the taste and quality of the Pizza.

One Knee Equals the 1st Amendment

Coach Orlando Gooden kneeling during the playing
of the national anthem with his 8-year-old players

The image (pictured left), somewhat blurry and taken from a distance with a cell phone camera, seemed innocent enough.

A football coach kneeling on a field with a group of young players - a slice of Americana that is the stuff of Norman Rockwell paintings.

But in a reflection of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, these third graders were kneeling during the playing of the national anthem before their game last Sunday.

Under normal circumstances such a thing might have escaped the notice of the media spotlight.

But last week when the story broke, Donald Trump was enmeshed in yet another disastrous week defined by the chaos sewn by his own fragile ego, narcissism, ignorance of world affairs, lack of political experience and unprincipled reactionary bluster.

His belligerent and often incoherent 42-minute speech in front world leaders gathered at the United Nations last Tuesday marked a new low-point for American diplomacy and global leadership.

He drew audible gasps from gathered attendees when he threatened to "totally destroy North Korea", and in defiance of the advice of his own senior advisers, derisively referred to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un as "rocket man" before awkwardly trying to define his isolationist "America First" foreign policy by rambling on about individual nation's right to "sovereignty"  - even as he belittled other nations for their choice to pursue nuclear weapons programs or a socialist form of government.

In the aftermath, various outraged diplomats from other nations dismissed Trump as "unhinged", a "dotard" (senile person) and a "Goliath" among other choice names - so clearly the criticism was making The Donald feel defensive.

Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner

A defensiveness compounded by news reports last week that special counsel Bob Mueller is not only investigating Trump wanna-be consigliere Jared Kushner's financial dealings with Russia, the controversial son-in-law's role in putting together the murky campaign internet operation that targeted Trump supporters (and may have provided data to Russian agencies) is also a target of the probe.


Instead of trying to clarify, moderate or walk back his comments at the UN, Trump, evidently electrified by the media attention, decided to dial it up even further by doing what he always seems to do - he tried to change the media narrative.

When things aren't quite going Trump's way (as they usually aren't), his default MO is to launch a Twitter attack on something, or someone that his shrinking base of conservative supporters can obsess over and rally around.

Like the way he keeps ranting about Hillary's emails ten months after the election despite newly released documents provided to Newsweek via a Freedom of Information Act request showing that at least six top current and former Trump advisers (including Stephen Bannon, Reince Priebus and Jared Kushner) all used personal email accounts to conduct official White House business.

Last week Trump's juvenile pissing contest with Kim Jong-un only seemed to earn him more criticism from mainstream Democrats and Republicans alike and increase the risk of a military confrontation - so he turned his focus to the NFL.

Now it's common knowledge that Trump watches a lot of TV, and despite his office granting him access to classified information from the CIA, FBI, NSA, the Pentagon and other government sources, remarkably he still relies on the conservative bias filtered through Fox News as his primary source of information on the world.

So there's little question that he was watching Fox & Friends on Wednesday morning the day after his unhinged UN speech last week when the target of their Fox-ian outrage was a group of African-American 3rd graders and their football coach.

Members of the Cahokia Quarterback Club in 2016

Many Americans were absorbing the news that after eight months, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had finally released detailed information on 3,000 online ads paid for by a Russian agency that skewered Hillary Clinton, promoted bogus fake news stories about her and were decidedly pro-Trump.

But where were the chirpy hosts of Fox & Friends directing their focus?


On a group of young American kids expressing their 1st Amendment rights on one of the most important human rights and justice issues in modern American history.

Now if you take a few minutes to listen to the tone of the indignant moral outrage of Fox News "contributor" Rachel Campos-Duffy, one might think that the small group of 3rd graders had burned an American flag and then pissed on it.

But the members of Cahokia Quarterback Club (8-years old and younger) from Cahokia, Illinois began their own little protest after asking their head coach Orlando Gooden, a former college football player at the University of Missouri who graduated from Cahokia High School, questions about the widespread protests in St. Louis after Circuit Court Judge Timothy Wilson found former St. Louis PD officer Jason Stockley not guilty for the 2011 shooting death of 24-year-old Anthony Lamar Smith.

The kids were aware of who Stockley was, which in itself is a sad statement of America in the 21st century.

As Gooden told St. Louis Fox affiliate KTVI, (watch the automatic video volume if you click that link, it's loud) he asked the kids if they understood what the protests were about and one of them answered, "Because black people are being killed and nobody's going to jail."

Coach Orlando Gooden and Latia Cole-Gooden 

The coach decided to speak with them about other high profile killings of African-Americans at the hands of police that have taken place across the country, and why former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem before NFL games last year as a form of silent, non-violent protest.

The kids asked if they could do it as well, and with the unanimous support of the kid's parents, Gooden told them could kneel during the national anthem at Little Devil's Field in Belleville.

When news of their actions went viral, that's when Fox & Friends seized on it as an example of the pending collapse of society - and brought Rachel Campos-Duffy on to vent her outrage.

I found it interesting how quick Fox News was to sort of hold her up as the "outraged conservative mother", defending American values and her children by vilifying a group of 8-year-old kids trying to understand why members of law enforcement are never held legally responsible for shooting and killing African-American boys and men.

As if she was somehow victimized by a group of 8-year-old boys kneeling on a grass football field while the national anthem played.

During her appearance on Fox & Friends she called their peaceful non-violent protest "shameless."

The Arizona-born Campos-Duffy first gained notoriety as a member of MTV's The Real World, where her outspoken conservative views and advocacy of the Republican Party at times caused friction with other housemates on the show.

These days she's a busy WASPish Latina mother who works as the national spokesperson for the Koch brothers-funded LIBRE Initiative, an organization which seeks to promote "free market policies within the Latino community" (whatever THAT means).

And she's married to her former Real World cast-mate Sean Duffy.

Rachel Campos-Duffy and her loopy Republican
Congressman husband Sean Duffy 

A budding right-wing nut-job Republican Congressman who represents Wisconsin's 7th District and by all accounts his doing his fellow Wisconsin Republican Congressman Paul Ryan proud.

As Jonathan Allen reported in Roll Call back in February, Duffy drew criticism after a CNN interview in which he "applauded 'the good things that came from' a white supremacist murdering nine black worshippers at a church in Charleston, SC in 2015." 


He also voted for a bill that would allow college ROTC programs to fly the Confederate flag and tried to blame liberals for the fact that Jared Loughner, a right-wing wack job prone to conservative anti-government hysteria and kooky right-wing conspiracy theories, shot Democratic Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in the head.

During a town hall meeting in 2011 after Republican Tea Party poster boy Scott Walker was swept into office on a wave of anti-Obama hatred and proceeded to propose draconian cuts to the Wisconsin state budget, when a construction worker complained that his wife's salary would be slashed, Duffy complained about he and his wife and six kids having to survive on his Congressional salary of $174,000 a year.

So it's no accident that Rachel Campos-Duffy would be called on to offer social commentary on the 8-year-old members of the Cahokia Quarterback Club deciding to kneel during the national anthem.

Fox-Ready: Links to the Koch brothers? Check!

It's ironic that she gained her fame on a TV reality show called "The Real World", like her husband she's totally detached from the harsh realities faced by average Americans, and thrives off the energy of viewing everything through a distorted lens of "conservative values".

Campos-Duffy is tailor made for Fox because she's used to living in a distorted bubble - the same kind of parallel reality that Fox News pumps into Donald Trump's head every day.

In a recent issue of The Hollywood Reporter, writer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar offered an interesting take on the distorted reality that Fox News propagates by immersing himself in watching it for three days straight as an experiment - he wrote:

"Fox gives Trump misinformation that makes him think his world is real: that he won the popular vote, that people don't think he's a racist, misogynist xenophobe. It's been reported that twice a day Trump is given a folder of only good news about himself, which some in the White House refer to as 'the propaganda document'. When those folders aren't enough, he can tune in to Fox."

As the unified rejection of Trump's recent criticism of the NFL and its players showed over the weekend, he's as out of touch as Fox News on the issue of men and boys making the decision to kneel as a form of silent, peaceful protest against injustice in America.

Leave it to Fox to call 8-year-olds "shameless" for exercising their 1st Amendment rights and Trump calling hundreds of NFL players "sons of bitches" for doing the same thing.

As many observers have noted, the simply doesn't grasp the basic fundamentals of the democracy he lives in - unfortunately that's not covered in his daily 'propaganda document'.

Uncle Ben's Old-Fashioned Revisionist History

Dr. Carson addresses HUD employees 

Remember back in November when Dr. Ben Carson declined a cabinet position in the Trump administration saying: "Having me as a federal bureaucrat would be like a fish out of water quite frankly."?

Don't say he didn't warn anyone.

Carson's outrageous comments on Monday in front of hundreds of gathered employees of the Department of Housing and Urban Development truly reflect the Republican Party's embrace of "alternative facts."

From the perspective of a student of history who knows a little something about the African Slave Trade and the institution of slavery in America, I believe it was ludicrous of Carson to compare European immigrants who voluntarily left their homelands and arrived at Ellis Island in the 19th and early 20th century, with African slaves who were first brought to the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia in 1619.

Now it's one thing for this pontificating former neurosurgeon to wax philosophic and merge distorted fact with his own peculiar interpretation of Christian theology in the sing-song sermon-like way he did during the 2016 presidential campaign.

But his medical gifts and status as a darling of the Christian right don't necessarily make him qualified to head up a massive federal agency like Housing and Urban Development - a complex organization with over 8,000 employees and an annual budget of $49.3 billion tasked with (according to its mission statement) creating "strong, sustainable, inclusive communities and quality affordable homes for all."

Does brain surgery qualify him as an affordable housing policy expert?

No, but like the equally-unqualified secretary of education Betsy DeVos, he's now the head of a major federal agency anyway.

How Africans "immigrated" to America

Carson's suggestion, widely panned by both citizens and academics on social media, was absurd.

African slaves, who were forcibly kidnapped from their homeland, shipped thousands of miles across the Atlantic while chained in the hulls of ships in traumatic deplorable conditions, before being sold into a state of slavery to live out their lives in a state of perpetual human bondage for financial profit, were not "immigrants".



Suggesting otherwise reflects a simplistic understanding of the complex history of the institution of slavery.

Such asinine statements also reflect the Republican Party's abject willingness to place extremist conservative ideology over relevant professional experience, knowledge, training and competency.

Carson's personal beliefs are his own business.

But his decision to share those kinds of personal views in front of an audience of hundreds of HUD professionals and policy experts in a public forum where he was essentially introducing himself as the agency head was unprofessional - and remarkably inappropriate.

Yesterday's statement was not the first time that Uncle Ben, as some in the African-American community have taken to calling him, has demonstrated a questionable grasp of history and a bizarre willingness to try and factually retrofit the institution of slavery to fit conservative principles that exist far outside the mainstream of the American center.

How can a guy who separated conjoined twins
at the brain be so ignorant about history?

Why would a gifted neurosurgeon with a background in biology, medicine, chemistry and neuroscience willingly allow himself to be used as a flagrant conservative tool?

Carson criticizing the Affordable Care Act as "the worst thing since slavery", as he famously did back in October of 2015, epitomized baseless partisan pandering - and can you imagine the reaction if Jeff Sessions or Ted Cruz had said such a thing?


It's as if Carson's being African-American functions less as an example of the diversity within the Republican Party than it does as a kind of political-racial "Get Out Of Jail Free Card" that enables the GOP to use him as a conduit to deliver messages that are intentionally demeaning to the black American community as a whole.

Or, as in the case of his misinformed comments on slavery, meant to undermine the significance of the role that institutionalized slavery has played in the economic and political marginalization of large segments of the black population.

In an essay published in the January 27th issue of the Hollywood Reporter about the duty and importance of African-American celebrities to use their influence to insure that the concerns and needs of the millions of voiceless poor and working-class black Americans who have, are and will be comprehensively ignored by the Trump administration, former NBA great-turned writer Kareem Abdul Jabbar noted of Caron's delusional right-wing agenda:

"More insidious is Carson's war on Planned Parenthood based on his inaccurate belief that clinics were placed in black neighborhoods to control the black population."

The 7'2" former LA Laker and master of the Sky Hook was far less sparing in his view of the role Trump envisions for Carson in the new administration given his own admission that "has no government experience." 

Trump's "Black shills"? Manigault and Carson  

Jabbar suggested that Trump uses both Carson and Omarosa Manigault as "black shills to distract us from the paternalistic policies dismantling civil liberties for people of color, women, the LGBT community, Muslims and immigrants."        

Outspoken actor Samuel L. Jackson didn't hold back on his reaction to Carson's statement on African slaves being "immigrants" either.

In a widely-circulated Twitter message Jackson said: "OK!! Ben Carson...I cant! Immigrants? In the bottom of SLAVE SHIPS?!! MUTHAFUKKA PLEASE!!! #dickheadedtom"

And that's just a slice of the contempt people expressed for Carson's HUD speech on social media.

Given Trump's desperate attempts to distract attention from almost every single person in his sphere of influence having proven ties to Russia, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the White House intentionally gave that "slaves are immigrants" line to Carson and asked him to use it in his HUD speech - there's just something distinctively Bannon-ish about it.

If there's been a more shaky rollout of a presidential cabinet in the 241-year history of the United States than that of the current Republican administration I really don't know what it is.

With Trump now Tweeting outright quackery so outrageous that even his own staff refuse to comment on or defend it, perhaps Uncle Ben's helping of good old-fashioned revisionist history was meant to deflect the unwelcome attention to his boss' blatant lies.

If only for a moment.

Christie's Fed Ex Immigration Solution & Ted Cruz's Foot

Ex-crack-addict & Christie "super fan" Angel Cordero  [Getty]

With New Jersey Governor Chris Christie polling somewhere around 2 to 4% in the GOP presidential polls, it's not really all that surprising that he'd try to take a "bold" policy stance on immigration to try and kick start his languishing campaign.

As evidenced by Donald Trump's current poll numbers, racist immigrant-bashing is like an irresistible mixture of catnip and crack for many of the Republican and Libertarian-leaning early primary voters - and Christie is posturing to show them he's got what they need.

From all accounts, Angel Cordero (pictured above), the Hispanic community activist and recovering crack addict from Camden, NJ who's enthusiastic adulation of Christie borders on creepy and earned him Youtube-sensation-status for his over-the-top reaction to Christie's presidential announcement, is definitely feeling it; that's Cordero in the dark suit, blue shirt and glasses pumping his fist in the video.

As reporter Matt Katz points out on a recent episode of The Christie Tracker podcast on WNYC.org,  Christie's innovative immigration solution doesn't involve a wall or insulting Mexicans and other immigrants with degrading racial slurs, it's Fed Ex!

Yes, Fed Ex, the package delivery service.

In a speech at a town hall gathering in New Hampshire last Saturday Christie reasoned that if his daughter can call home and ask her parents to Fed Ex something she forgot to take to her dorm room at the University of Notre Dame, then why not have Fed Ex founder Fred Smith just come to Washington and teach the 20,000+ employees of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Department of Homeland Security how to track people the way Fed Ex tracks packages?

Makes sense, right?

Christie didn't exactly specify how that would work. Would his plan involve tattooing bar codes onto the skin of foreigners who come to this country to study, work or visit? Or force them to have chips inserted under the skin like many animal shelters now do for dogs and cats?

Holocaust survivor Meyer Hack shows his tattoo

Regardless, it sounds suspiciously like the Nazi's tattooing number codes on the arms of the people they herded into concentration camps starting in 1933 (pictured left).

Was Christie just being tongue-in-cheek to score points on immigration with a conservative New Hampshire audience?

Or is he really presenting that kind of massive and inhumane government surveillance as a legitimate policy proposal?

If so then he's come an awful long way from just under two years ago when his immigrant-friendly assurances to the people of NJ that he would support a program of general amnesty helped him get reelected to the Governor's office in a landslide.

But that was then and showing any kind of compassion for immigrants is like blasphemy for today's Republican Party, so instead of amnesty it's Fed Ex.

Christie isn't the only Republican candidate making an ass of himself in New Hampshire.

As Travis Gettys reported on RawStory.com earlier today, Senator Ted Cruz's attempt to blame President Obama for another trigger-happy gun-nut shooting a police officer backfired when the testy Texan's desire to push the new Republican 'War on Cops' narrative got ahead of actual facts.

After a campaign event in Milford, New Hampshire yesterday, Cruz assailed the President's "silence"on the slaying of Harris County Sheriff's Deputy Darren Goforth on Friday night near Houston.

But not only did Obama personally call Goforth's widow on Monday to personally express his condolences over the senseless death of her husband, he also issued a statement condemning the attack; stating in part:

“Targeting police officers is completely unacceptable — an affront to civilized society,” Obama said. “We’ve got to be able to put ourselves in the shoes of the wife who won’t rest until the police officer she married walks through the door at the end of his shift.”

Of course that hasn't stopped the peddlers of hysteria and falsehood on Fox News from accusing the President of starting a "War on Police" and accusing the Black Lives Matter movement of being a "Hate Group".

Which is classic Fox, no mention of how the lax gun laws in Texas allowed the violent killer who shot Sheriff's Deputy Goforth multiple times to have a gun in the first place.

And what the Hell did those maniacally conservative Texas state legislators think would happen when they passed absurd open-carry laws?

Just another sad example of the absurdity of today's conservative mindset; why hold the NRA and their lobbyists accountable for weakening the nation's gun laws when you can invent a pretend 'War on Cops' and blame President Obama instead? 

Leave it to Republicans to talk about anything but what's actually happening.