This is Ken Buck, a Princeton-educated native of Ossining, NY, and the Tea Party loonie-tune who allegedly represents me in Colorado Congressional District 4.
Buck repeatedly claims, quite loudly, that the just-expanded IRS is coming after you! Yes, a beefed-up IRS
will come after
major tax cheats, but is this an expanded assault on everyday citizens? LMAO! His ad making this claim shows up on my Facebook feed at least once a day. Do you have some personal tax worries here, Kenny?
(
winred.buckforcolorado.com/...)
Buck is the former Weld County, Colorado DA who refused to prosecute a rape case in 2005, even though the suspect admitted he knew it was rape. (www.coloradoindependent.com/…)
Ken Buck is that same former District Attorney who ordered a raid on a tax service in Greeley, Colorado, claiming undocumented immigrants had stolen Social Security numbers. He had the tax documents of 5,000 people seized. The ACLU sued him, and Buck lost the case. He lost again on appeal to the Colorado Supreme Court; the Court ruled the raid was unconstitutional. Because Buck was the DA, Weld County got stuck with the $150,000 bill for his legal costs. (
www.denverpost.com/...)
Buck is the former Chief of the Criminal Division in Colorado for the US Attorney's Office who was formally reprimanded and ordered to take a class in ethics, because he intervened to halt the felony prosecution of a political donor. This pretty much sank his career with the US Attorney's Office. It doesn’t appear the ethics class has had a positive impact on his behavior. (
www.denverpost.com/...)
Buck is the former chair of the Colorado GOP (2010) who was caught pressuring a local GOP official — a volunteer — to falsify Republican Party assembly results so his favored candidate for a Colorado Senate seat could be in the primary election. (
archive.ph/...)
Opinion: This guy’s behavior is a fetid mass of political corruption and assault-weapon craziness.
Buck’s Democratic opponent on the November ballot is
Isaac McCorkle. (
ike4co.com) Unfortunately, I’ve seen nothing in the media of Mr. MCorkle's campaign to unseat Buck, although I could have easily missed something. I was curious whether McCorkle had received any Democratic support at the national level, so I called his office. I was surprised when he answered the phone himself. He told me that he has gotten some support from the Colorado Democratic Party, but essentially nothing from the DCCC. He points out that the district polls at +13% Republican, so that makes it a very tough race for him.
From our brief conversation and from his website, I learned that McCorkle is running on a platform of:
- economic security — including universal basic income, strengthening and expanding Social Security, increasing the minimum wage, expanding affordable housing, and creating a ”new WPA” to ensure Americans are prepared for jobs of the 21st century;
- health care — Medicare for all, and an end to the 50-year-long war on drugs;
- human rights — particularly the rights of women, LGBTQ+ persons, veterans, and immigrants; also automatic voter registration of US citizens, and putting an end to mass incarceration and the private prisons profiting from the resulting human misery;
- reinvestment in rural communities — including expanded broadband internet; protections for rural hospitals, water infrastructure, and local jobs; stopping fracking, improving educational opportunities, and retaining local control of agriculture.
Ike McCorkle definitely has my vote. I wish I had more than $25 to donate to his campaign.
I do hope Mr. Second-Amendment-Matters-More-Than-Your-Life Ken Buck won't be coming after me now. That photo makes me a bit nervous ...
(Transparency: My starting point for much of the background information on Ken Buck is the Wikipedia article about him: en.wikipedia.org/… I followed and read a fair number of the sources cited there, re-citing here some of those sources I read. So I’ve basically re-packaged a slice of that Wikipedia entry as part of this post. What prompted me to post here in the first place was repeatedly seeing his ad on Facebook claiming the IRS was coming after you.)