Meet your new NRA president.
Another day, another entry into our roundup of the year in ridiculousness. As previously mentioned, we have decided to do the months in order—as opposed to, say, alphabetically—and we are doggedly sticking to that plan. We have also decided to use the royal
we for no good reason. On to May, which was notable primarily for not being April.
- May saw the beginnings of genuine frustration among House Republicans as to why they could not, you know, pass any damn bills. This resulted in, predictably, nothing, so we probably shouldn't have bothered mentioning it.
- The conservative Heritage Foundation weighed in on the immigration debate with a paper claiming that legalization of undocumented immigrants would cost trillions of dollars—specifically, over a half million dollars per immigrant, a claim even the most stalwart immigration do-nothings could not back with a straight face. It looked like Heritage would get away with being pegged merely as dimwitted, until a report co-author with the group was discovered to have had a history of racially charged claims, such as the assertion that Hispanic immigrants have "substantially lower IQs" than American whites. After the revelation that he had written similar claims for a anti-immigrant white supremacist outlet, he "resigned", leaving the Heritage Foundation to not-explain why conservative "think tanks" continue to have such fascinating hiring policies.
- The NRA got a new president. That's him up there. Yes, of course he is a terrible person, why do you ask?
- Remember the outrage over suspiciously political-seeming conservative "tax exempt" groups being targeted by the IRS and being required to answer questions before being given cherished tax-exempt status? Remember how it was the biggest scandal ever, until some spoilsport let the cat out of the bag and mentioned that non-conservative suspiciously political-seeming groups were being subjected to the same treatment? That didn't stop Republicans like Rand Paul, who decided that since he didn't get the scandal he wanted he was going to just make things up until it sounded scandalous again.
- Michele Bachmann announced she would not be running for reelection. This had nothing to do with any ongoing investigations, thank you for asking.
- And lo, the skies opened up and delivered to us a brand-new conservative crackpot by the name of E.W. Jackson.