I Made it Work

I made your link work, but I'm not exactly sure how I did it, and I'm not sure that I could do it again. Anyway, it says pretty much what you said, that Obama has always believed in a single payer plan,  but he knew that it would never pass, so he proposed Obamacare instead. This is pretty much what Mitt Romney said when he was running for president, although Romney was referring to the  plan that was passed by the State of Massachusetts when he had been its governor. Truth be known, neither Romney nor Obama originated this concept. When Bill Clinton was president, he appointed his wife Hillary to a committee that was supposed to be considering socialized medicine, or public health care if you prefer. People had been talking about this since at least the 1960s, and Hillary and her team were supposed to be figuring out how to make it happen. What they did instead was  propose that people be forced to buy health insurance from private companies. Since the original problem was that health insurance had become too expensive for most people and many employers to afford, the idea was not enthusiastically embraced by Congress or anybody else.

When I asked if single payer had ever been on the table, what I meant was has a single payer bill ever been introduced in Congress. According to your link, when Obama mentioned that he was in favor of single payer, he wasn't president yet. By the time he became president, he apparently changed his mind, nothing wrong with that. I don't know why they made a fuss over the two statements being inconsistent with each other, since they were made years apart under different circumstances. Anyway, if Obama was in favor of single payer when he was a U.S. Senator, why didn't he introduce a bill to that effect? Well, maybe he did and we never heard about it. Lots of bills die in committee and never see the light of day.

Your man Obama seems to believe that, if Congress doesn't do what he wants them to, it's okay for him to do it by himself. That may be true in some circumstances, but I'm sure there are limits. The Constitution isn't real clear about that, so the courts have historically decided where to draw the line. Sometimes government runs under the Catch 22 principle, anything is legal if you can get away with it. I remember learning in school that Teddy Roosevelt once wanted to send the Navy around the world, just to show off. Congress thought it would be a frivolous waste and refused to appropriate any funding for it. Roosevelt, however, had enough money in some kind of slush fund to send the Navy halfway around the world, which he did. Then he asked Congress if they wanted to leave them there or provide the funding to bring them home.

I don't think the neutron bomb was ever actually developed, but I remember them talking about it. To my knowledge, nobody has built a dirty bomb yet, but they might if people keep talking about it long enough. I wonder, if nobody had given them the idea, would the terrorists have thought of it on their own.