For months on the Common Man Common Sense show, I’ve been talking about the need to elect true conservatives in the primary elections occurring around the country. The primary elections are of critical importance and are largely ignored by the voting public. What have we accomplished is we elect a new group of progressive leaning Republicans to square off against the progressive Democrats? In that situation, you end up with the same result and it’s the path we continually head down. The climate in America has changed and people seem to be waking up but they have to do more than wake up. The American people have to take action. I have been deeply concerned that voters have not completely learned their lesson and with the results of the California primary rolling in, the Republican voters of California have failed the American people miserably.

Every once in a while I hear something that just really makes me wonder what, if anything, is going on in a typical progressive's head. Hillary Clinton doesn't think the rich in the United States are paying enough in taxes and she pines for a system that would make us look more like Brazil. These are her words:

"The rich are not paying their fair share in any nation that is facing the kind of employment issues (the United States is), whether it's individual, corporate, whatever the taxation forms are," she said.

"Brazil has the highest tax-to-GDP rate in the Western Hemisphere and guess what -- it's growing like crazy. And the rich are getting richer, but they're pulling people out of poverty," she said. "There is a certain formula there that used to work for us until we abandoned it, to our regret in my opinion."

Maybe Hillary isn't up on what's going on in Brazil, so here's a quick lesson for her:

Brazilian police chief shot dead while giving radio interview on drug violence http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/26/brazil-police-chief-shot-int...

Violence is an everyday occurrence for law enforcement officials and the more than 11 million residents in and around the favelas, Rio’s slum areas, which are overrun by heavily armed drug gangs. More than 6,000 people are killed each year, a rate comparable to a war zone. (from http://www.realtruth.org/articles/100510-005-crime.html)

Just do a Google News search on Brazil and you'll find a country out of control and in turmoil. Is THAT really what you want here in the USA Ms. Clinton?

I know there are a lot of people who will disagree with me on this and if you're one of them then I sincerely ask you to explain to me how I'm wrong...

Twitter is being touted as a powerful tool for helping people get information out there. I agree with this if we are talking about a band or a sports team tweeting to the masses as a one-way line of communication. I mean it's great that Taylor Swift wants to keep her fans in the loop on what she's doing and there are 3,265,000 fans that are glued to every word. Do you really think Taylor could keep up with what those 3 million people are tweeting back to her? I don't think so.

So the question becomes just how many people can you have as friends on Twitter (where you follow them and they follow you) and not have it become just noise? My guess is somewhere in the 200-300 range and less if you have a lot of active tweeters. For our show we have set up a Twitter account @commonsenseshow and currently have 788 followers and are following 727. The other day I left the page open as I went to dinner, came back two hours later and there were thousands of new tweets. Sorry, just don't have the time to read that many tweets!

So I asked myself, at any given time how many people are REALLY paying attention to what you say. I asked a question about if people really feel ok with fellow Twitter users using automated systems to send tweets. Out of our 788 followers I go zero response to this.

So I decided to try again, this time asking if people REALLY believe Twitter is a two-way street of communication to reply to me with the word "yes." After 24 hours we received two yes responses. One from Dana (@sparkey999w) and one from Lynn (@jetts424). Thank you for the responses ladies, but I think I've proven the point the other way.

The only way for Twitter to be a two-way street is if everyone follows a very small number of people, and that just isn't going to work. These folks that follow thousands or tens of thousands of people and pretend they can read what's out there is laughable at best. Sure, you can sometimes get their attention with a direct message or @reply but what's the point of that? E-Mail serves a better purpose at that point.

If you want people to follow you and have that number really MEAN something and translate to some kind of result your best bet is to get followers who follow very few people, that's the only way your message is going to stand out. Having a huge list of followers who don't read your message does nothing for you at all except it might make you feel cool because you have a large number of mostly empty, meaningless followers.

I'm sorry, but I see Twitter as an overall #Fail! for two-way communications. Am I wrong?

The relentless government takeover of private industry since the Obama administration took office is more than a little frightening. The fact that a government can destroy private industry with such little effort does not bode well for our future. The government is now involved in the banks, the car companies, and now are heavily involved in health care. What else is left? Well, take student loans off the list. These goons managed to completely take over the student loan industry through the health care bill. What in the hell is a complete takeover of this industry doing in a health care bill? Student loans have absolutely nothing to do with our health care. This should have been stripped from the bill immediately but why not take over more private industry?

Students looking for loans to attend college used to go through the Federal Family Educational Loan Program (FFELP) and obtain low interest loans from banks and credit unions. For example, my student loans have been issued by Citi. The government helped organize the program and kept interest rates reasonable. That level of interaction from the government was acceptable. Now the FFELP program is being completely replaced by the Direct Loan program. The two programs are more or less exactly the same but now the loan money is provided by the federal government and not the private banks. Isn't this country broke?

The main switchboard number is 1-877-SOB-U-SOB. Keep the phone calls coming, make them hear us!

Congressman Jim Oberstar
(202) 225-6211

Congressman Nick Rahall
(202) 225-3452

Congressman Mike Michaud
(202) 225-6306

Congressman Earl Pomeroy
(202) 225-2611

Congressman Harry Teague
(202) 225-2365

Congressman Harry Mitchell
(202) 225-2190

Congressman Chris Carney
(202) 225-3731

Congressman Henry Cuellar
(202) 225-1640

Congressman Kathy Dahlkemper
(202) 225-5406

Congressman Glenn Nye
(202) 225-4215

Congressman Zack Space
(202) 225-6265

Darren and I discuss the news a lot, it's part of our job. One of the things I frequently find myself saying to him is "that's it, we can't get any more insane," and then something else comes along to prove me wrong. I guess that keeps the job interesting but it also is deeply concerning. Where has common sense gone? Why can't our government and related agencies make decisions which make even just a little bit of sense?

I wouldn't believe this story if it wasn't published all over the place from a collection of different news sources. Apparently, a couple of IRS agents took the time to get into the car and drive to a Sacramento car wash (isn't that upping their carbon footprint?) to collect 4 cents. Yes, 4 pennies. Yes, I know it's hard to believe. If the car consumed one gallon of gas, which would be a short trip, that's 75 times the cost of what the IRS agents were hoping to collect.

Glenn Beck talked about this test last week and linked to it from his web site, as such the test crashed hard under the traffic load but it's back now!

It's a simple ten question test, took me about 5 minutes to take it and I suggest you try it out too. My results weren't really surprising, putting me firmly into the libertarian territory.

Here is my result, feel free to post yours in the comments!

Here is Jeff's result, he's just a little less libertarian than I am!

Take the Nolan Test here: http://www.nolanchart.com/survey.php

Here's a story that makes me wonder exactly what's going on in Tampa, Florida these days. It seems a young man, 19 years old, was seen walking around wearing a clown mask. So the police did what the police do and they arrested him. I'm not really sure why, maybe someone can clue me in on the legalities of being a clown in Tampa. I mean we have a TON of them in Washington, DC. Can someone round them up and throw them in the clink please??

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9E2O97G0&show_article=1

President Obama and his leftist cronies have been on a major spending spree since getting into office. The failed stimulus plan, continued bailouts, and other money wasting endeavors have driven our national debt to unheard of levels and the government continues to print money. Nothing works but we keep doing it anyway because this time it will be different. Obama is very fond of saying that this level of spending is unsustainable, yet he keeps doing it anyway. This man is an expert at saying one thing and then doing the exact opposite. The country is on the brink of financial destruction and we just keep stepping on the gas pedal. Eventually, we're going to crash head on into a brick wall and the aftermath will not be pretty.

Obama seems to be living in some kind of alternate reality. The new reports are that he will be issuing a presidential order to establish a deficit panel to look into the ballooning deficit. I couldn't even make this stuff up if I tried. The President of the United States and his majority of Congress are responsible for a majority of this deficit. We can blame the rest on George W. Bush. The solution is to spend more money to put together a deficit panel to tell the President that his actions created the problem. In other words, we're going to spend tax payer money to tell the President about what he just did.

Take a minute and put yourself in the shoes of President Obama. A year ago you entered into office with a nearly unprecedented level of support from the people and things were looking up. On the surface, it seemed like you could do anything you wanted to with this type of support. Fast forward just one year later. Cap and Trade hasn't happened and most likely won't. Health care reform turned into a field of political landmines that has destroyed your party and will most likely result in a crushing defeat for your Democrat peers in November. You failed to secure the Olympic Games for Chicago. You spent well over 700 billion dollars trying to save the economy only to watch unemployment spiral completely out of control. Feeling like a failure yet?

The victory of Scott Brown in Massachusetts was just another in a long string of failures that have happened since the day President Obama took office. Say what you want, the man has spent all of his political capital and has absolutely nothing to show for it. We are only one year into the term and you could make a case for this being the most miserably failed presidency in the history of the United States. Now Obama is having to do some soul searching for direction. How does he handle this house of cards that's quickly falling apart? With the State of the Union address happening tomorrow it seems like little will change. Obama will continue to fumble around pushing his agenda like the one mouse in the experiment not smart enough to find the food lever.