In his new ad, Coors takes aim at wasteful federal spending, and he singles out a $50 million indoor rain forest in Iowa. Then he pauses a beat. "Yeah, Iowa," he says with the wry timing he once used in peddling his beer. Thing is, that Iowa rain forest was a project of Sen. Charles Grassley, a Republican who chairs the powerful Finance Committee.

U.S. Senate rivals Pete Coors and Ken Salazar refocused their campaigns with new ads Tuesday, getting away from a nasty back-and- forth over an anti-Salazar attack ad sponsored by an outside group.

In his new ad, Republican Coors intones his "I'm not a lawyer" mantra.

Democrat Salazar - who is a lawyer - tells the voters that as the state's attorney general, he's the kind who puts bad guys in jail. His new ad mentions murderers, rapists and terrorists, and highlights Salazar's endorsement Tuesday by Colorado firefighters and police officers. It ends with a signature line from Salazar's other ads: "Experience money just can't buy."

Money, of course, is a defining characteristic of his opponent, brewery scion Coors.

Consistently in his campaign, Coors has said his experience running the world's largest single-site brewery qualifies him to manage - and cut - the billions of dollars that slosh through the Senate approval process.

In his new ad, Coors takes aim at wasteful federal spending, and he singles out a $50 million indoor rain forest in Iowa.

Then he pauses a beat. "Yeah, Iowa," he says with the wry timing he once used in peddling his beer.

Thing is, that Iowa rain forest was a project of Sen. Charles Grassley, a Republican who chairs the powerful Finance Committee.

"That's got to be done on the assumption - and it may be a cracked assumption - that the voters are extraordinarily uninformed on the particulars of congressional action," said Colorado State University political science professor John Straayer.

Just before last week's Republican National Convention, the Salazar campaign was forced to run a response to an ad by a Virginia group. Americans for Job Security attacked Salazar on the state's handling of a mining disaster that took place before Salazar ran the Department of Natural Resources.

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