Passing ObamaCare was a “mistake,” retiring Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) told New York magazine in the course of a wide-ranging interview. President Barack Obama, apparently believing his own campaign hype — an easy thing to do given the adulation heaped upon him by the mainstream media — thought he had a public mandate to enact an overhaul of the healthcare system.

“I think the Affordable Care Act is the single least popular piece of major domestic legislation in the last 70 years. It was not popular when it passed; it’s less popular now. I think the worst thing that could happen to Barack Obama’s reelection campaign would be if he had to spend four months this fall explaining what ObamaCare 2 would look like.”

Think ObamaCare, with its thousands of pages of rules and regulations governing every aspect of American life, is revolutionary? Think again, says the Los Angeles Times. When it comes to healthcare, writes Noam N. Levey, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney “has embraced a strategy that in crucial ways is more revolutionary — and potentially more disruptive — than the law Obama signed two years ago.”

As part of its ongoing covert war against Iran, the U.S. government has for years been providing training — some of it on American soil — and other material support to a State Department-designated “foreign terrorist organization,” the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), the New Yorker’s Seymour M. Hersh reports.

A Georgia kindergarten student was handcuffed and arrested for throwing a temper tantrum in school on Friday, Macon’s WMAZ-TV reports.

Six-year-old Salecia Johnson, a student at Creekside Elementary School in Milledgeville, allegedly knocked over a shelf, injuring the principal; bit the office door knob; jumped on the paper shredder; and tried to break a glass frame above the shredder.

On February 22, Jessie Sansone of Kitchener, Ontario, thought he was making a routine stop to pick up his children at the end of a school day. Instead, he found himself arrested, strip-searched, and thrown in jail. His wife was also taken into police custody, while his children were spirited away by child welfare agents.

Government programs often begin with limited, easily identifiable purposes, then grow over time to become expensive, wasteful, and even dangerous monstrosities. Such is the case with the federal War on Drugs, which began with little fanfare under a modest 1914 anti-narcotics law and has since grown to enormous proportions, eviscerating the Bill of Rights and entangling the United States in countries all around the globe in a futile effort to eradicate the supplies of highly sought-after commodities.

When it comes to private property, wrote economist Ludwig von Mises, it is a simple “either-or” proposition: “either private ownership of the means of production, or hunger and misery for everyone.” In 1959, Fidel Castro essentially abolished private property in Cuba, and the result has been exactly as Mises predicted: a declining standard of living and shortages of basic necessities such as food, building materials, and housing.

The good news: The President has kept his promises to cut the number of government employees drastically and to reduce regulations so that new small businesses can open up, leading to an almost immediate 50 percent increase in the number of self-employed persons. The bad news: That’s President Raul Castro of communist Cuba, not President Barack Obama of ostensibly capitalist America.

With the passage of ObamaCare, the United States has taken another fateful step down the road to fully socialized medicine, the ultimate goal of the American political class with regard to healthcare. Meanwhile, our neighbor to the north, which reached the end of that road over 40 years ago, is being forced by the laws of economics, which no government can repeal, to head in the opposite direction.