Dick Cheneys Fear Ad - Huck PAC Some of the far-fetched plots on TV spy shows may be more realistic than we knew… Last night on CBS’ “Sixty Minutes,” former Vice President Dick Cheney revealed that he was concerned the he might become the first public official literally to die from a hacker attack. He said he had the wireless feature on his implanted defibrillator disabled because his cardiologist was worried that someone could get near him on a rope line and send a wireless signal that would shut it down and give him a heart attack. If that crazy scenario sounds familiar, it’s because that was last season’s plotline on the Showtime series, “Homeland.” Cheney said he watched it, knowing that he was one of the few viewers who realized just how accurate it was. Unfortunately, that’s not the end of the concerns. It’s only the beginning. As more people receive advanced prosthetics with wireless components, turning us into cyber supermen, VIPs might have to take precautions against a whole new kind of bacteria. Obamacare Website Disaster Tomorrow marks three weeks since the Obamacare exchange website, Healthcare.gov, went online. Over the weekend, it was taken down for fixes again. The Spanish language version still isn’t online at all, and officials won’t comment on when it might be. The Obama Administration finally released some numbers on how many people managed to navigate it before crashing. They claim about 476,000 health insurance applications have been filed so far. But nearly half of those were filed through state exchanges, not the national one. And they still declined to say how many of those applicants actually signed up for insurance, after seeing the prices. Considering they need 7 million uninsured to sign up in the next six months to keep the program afloat financially, things aren’t looking good. In fact, National Review Online’s Yuval Levin reports that he’s been speaking off the record to several highly-placed insurance executives and top bureaucrats at the CMS, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Levin says he can best describe the mood of the health care bureaucrats as “a kind of restrained panic.” As for the insurance executive, they’re much less restrained. They are very openly worried. They’re concerned that if the websites don’t start working a lot better very quickly, or if people sign up, see their insurance bills and get sticker shock, then by late fall, the Obama administration might be looking at what they call several “unthinkable options.” Those might include restarting the whole exchange system from scratch, or asking Congress to delay the program a year. House Republicans might not be inclined to go along with that, considering Obama just finished implying they were terrorists who wanted to shut down the government because they thought Obamacare should be delayed a year. The House is already ticked off that they were repeatedly assured by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius not to worry, the websites were ready to launch. A House investigating committee invited her to come in this week and explain. The Secretary politely declined, claiming she was too busy, although she had space on her agenda to attend a gala in Boston the night before. Let’s hope that whoever planned the gala in Boston is more organized than the creators of the Obamacare exchange, or else she might be waiting three weeks for a crab puff. New Jersey Special Election Results Democrats urged voters to send the Tea Party a message at the polls, repudiating them for sparking the government shutdown. But if the message arrived, it seems that very few people read it. John Fund at National Review analyzed last week’s New Jersey senate special election. Democrat, Cory Booker won a 10-point victory over Republican Steve Lonegon, an outspoken conservative embraced by the Tea Party. But just last year, New Jersey voters picked Obama over Romney by 18 points, and liberal incumbent Senator Robert Menendez over a moderate Republican challenger by 19 points. Despite all the anti-Tea Party smoke-and-fire from DC, Lonegon actually did better than last year’s Republican candidates. It just shows once again that the big media voices and federal politicians inside the DC Beltway bubble have an inflated opinion of their own importance to the rest of America. As Tip O’Neill said over 40 years ago, all politics are local. Too bad more government isn’t. Condolences My condolences today to the family of Florida Rep. Bill Young, who died Friday at 82. That was two weeks after he entered the hospital, and one week after he announced he wouldn’t run for reelection next year. Bill Young was the longest-serving Republican in the US House. He was first elected in 1970, before the world even knew what disco was. Even when he had to use a cane or wheelchair, his mind stayed sharp, and he remained one of the most powerful members of the Appropriations Committee and one of Congress’ strongest advocates for veterans and the military across a House career that lasted 43 years. And if he had been physically able to run again next, I have no doubt it would have lasted even longer. ---------- Thanks for your continued interest in my efforts. I hope you enjoyed these commentaries. I will send along some more very soon. Sincerely, signature Mike Huckabee
Posted on: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 15:36:02 +0000