Colorado's Republican Candidates Still Crazy

Dan Maes, the front runner in the GOP race for the Colorado Gubernatorial nomination is convinced that Denver's publicly run bicycle rental program is a U.N. conspiracy to take over the world. He has already received a stiff fine for campaign finance violations and revealed in his tax returns that his claim that he was a successful businessman is doubtful given that his allegedly profitable income brought his family below the poverty line.

Colorado's attorney regulation authorities are investigating whether Scott McInnis violated professional ethics requirements barring dishonesty generally when he was paid $300,000 for plagiarizing essays on Colorado water policy. McInnis has seen campaign contributions plummet, although he still brought in twice as much as Dan Maes. When he retired from Congress previously, he paid around $34,000 to his wife to serve as his campaign manager after he had already decided that he wasn't running for re-election.

Ken Buck, one of the two GOP candidates for U.S. Senate has firmly stated that he wants to ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest. He also also said that voters should favor him over his opponent Jane Norton, because he "doesn't wear high heels." He also called birthers who have generally supported him "dumbasses" which would be a reasonable position to take if he hadn't later disavowed his comments.

Jane Norton, the other GOP candidates for the U.S. Senate, has a web page ad that bemoans the fact that President Obama has declared that the U.S. is not at war with the Islamic religion. The anti-Islamic point is not an isolated incident. "Norton responded to a question about NASA with ""We need a NASA budget that doesn't cater to making Muslims feel good.""

Third party candidate Tom Tancredo, who is also in the race for Governor, has long been known for is craziness, for example, his "bomb Mecca" comments and more recently for claiming that seeing President Obama is the number one threat to America. A lesser known incident that comes to mind for me is the time when he proposed a new tax that would pretty much only apply to the largest employer in his Congressional district (the company that owns Western Union) until officials there complained.

Doug Lamborn, as noted in a recent post at this blog, the incumbent Republican Congressman from Colorado Springs who is almost certain to be re-elected this year actively opposed a bill to get tough on violent crime on Indian reservations, which received support from every Republican in the U.S. Senate, on budget grounds, despite the fact that the bill didn't call for any new appropriations or budget authority.

I remember meetings in the Democratic party where we worried about the fact that the Republicans had a deep bench and we didn't. Those days are apparently over, as the Republican party just isn't running serious candidates this year.