Mother Jones: California Senate Primary: Welcome to Crazytown

A birther, a LaRouchie, a tea party rabbi, and a Christian fundamentalist walk into a bar.

Actually, no—this is a list of Republicans competing in next Tuesday's Senate primary in California. Thanks to big changes to how the Golden State conducts its primaries, 23 long-shot candidates—a Libertarian, an American Independence Party member, two Peace and Freedom Party members, five Democrats, and 14 Republicans, including the four mentioned above—are battling for a chance at a high-profile face-off with Democratic incumbent Dianne Feinstein in November. And the Republicans are so weak in the state that their side of the contest has become something of a political clown show.

"This is what happens when a party doesn't have serious chance of winning," says John Pitney, a professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California. "You get some candidates who are intelligent and well motivated, and then you get a whole bunch of wackos who resemble the bar scene from Star War Unless Feinstein is revealed to have a secret life as a cat burglar, it doesn't really matter who ends up being the Republican nominee, because he or she is not going to end up a US senator."

One of the most recognizable GOP candidates is Orly Taitz, a dentist and former real estate agent who entered the national conversation in 2009 as a leader of the birther movement. In 2010, Taitz mounted an unsuccessful bid to become the GOP nominee for California secretary of state—she was defeated by a 3-1 margin by Damon Dunn, a former professional football player. She is now upbeat about her prospect for unseating Feinstein, citing her supposed search-engine-mentum.

Taitz's platform includes offering tax credits to companies that eschew outsourcing, kicking off a trade war with China, and starting an ambitious desalination program (similar to those found in Israel and India) to solve water shortages.

And she has not given up birtherism, declaring that the long-form birth certificate Obama released is a fraud. She promises that she'll take the issue all the way to Washington, provided she topples Feinstein and Obama beats Romney.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/california-republican-senate-race-clusterfudge-orly-taitz

It will be funny if republicans don't even have a candidate for senate in the November election.