See below a video compendium of Barack Obama consistently expressing a belief that significant legislation, including healthcare reform, should not be passed with a “fifty-plus-one” strategy.

I wonder how much longer clear instances of hypocrisy like this– repeated, video-captured self-contradiction– will continue to surprise us. It seems to happen all the time– tactics that you previously condemned as overreaching and dangerous become perfectly palatable once your team wins the majority.

UPDATE: Gateway Pundit has more.

That line is moving faster than mine. Segregation!

The whole “everything is racist” thing was beginning to lose some steam. Then, today, Senator Tom Harkin gave us all a wonderful gift– the evocation of segregation to decry the variable treatment of different health risks by insurance companies!

I didn’t have any idea how bad the problem was until I started thinking through a typical day…

• McDonald’s wouldn’t serve me an Egg McMuffin at 10:45 this morning because I arrived too late for their breakfast menu. Segregation!
• AT&T customer service made me wait longer than the people who had called in before me. Segregation!
• General Electric would not negotiate with me for the purchase of an aircraft engine, citing the fact that I don’t in any way intend to use it, nor am I wearing pants. Segregation!

One more thing. Don’t bother accusing me of trivializing segregation. Tom Harkin already did that much more effectively than our feckless snark ever could.

You may recall the “Track Meet” video that MoveOn.org produced back in October advocating the public option and starring Heather Graham.

Well, it’s been a few months now with little progress and “Roller Girl” has just about had it with those of you who aren’t on board with the public option.

Thanks for the link, Sharp Elbows!

A mere three days before President Obama’s supposedly bipartisan health-care summit, the White House yesterday released a new blueprint that Democrats say they will ram through Congress with or without Republican support. So after election defeats in Virginia, New Jersey and even Massachusetts, and amid overwhelming public opposition, Democrats have decided to give the voters what they don’t want anyway.

The monstrous mountain of toxic pustules sprouting from greasy boils metastasizing from malign carbuncles that passed the Senate on Christmas Eve is not the last word in “health” “care,” but the first. It ensures that this is all we’ll be talking about, now and forever.

…

Think of the way almost every Big Government project bursts its bodice and winds up bigger and more bloated than its creators allegedly foresaw. In this instance, the stays come pre-loosened, and studded with loopholes. Because the Democrat operators — the Nancy Pelosis and Barney Franks — know that what matters is to get something, anything across the river, and then burn the bridge behind you.

Needless to say, if you think monopoly bargaining is the problem in health care, our cost problem is going to get worse, not better. Think of the one area where we see the most customer complaints: quasi-public utilities like the cable and phone companies. They also have a rather ponderous rate of innovation, and no particular interest in controlling their costs. That’s not an accident; it’s a feature of a regulatory structure that starts from provider costs and works up to what extra percentage they will be allowed to charge essentially captive consumers.

From Megan McArdle, via Instapundit.

The only logical way to maintain the integrity of a vast, complex program designed to control a trillion-dollar industry is to dispense with the “representative” part of our government model. Those who seriously believe the State must control health care, which is tied into the bulk of our economy and technological development, should stop fooling around with half-measures of tyranny. If health care is truly a “human right” that must be provided “at any cost,” then take a cold, hard look at the tortured gestation of the rough beast slouching from Harry Reid’s office to be born… and understand that liberty, democracy, and representation must be sacrificed, as part of that cost.

The good Doctor is evoking Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (a short poem, so I present it in entirety):

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?