MICKEY KAUS ON THE E.P.A.’S LATEST POWER GRAB: “When I was a lawyer at the Federal Trade Commission during the Carter Administration, I worked on a document attempting to wedge the power to block factory closings into the agency’s statutory mandate to curb ‘unfair trade practices.’ This reminded me of that.”

Plus this:

There will undoubtedly be a parallel effort to incorporate “social, economic, and other requirements” into the U.S. health care system. Just as the EPA would like to move beyond its dowdy mission to stop pollution, health experts will tell us it’s just too 20th century to just focus on simply curing people who are sick. Anybody can do that. We need to treat the whole social system that creates the risk of disease, etc. It’s a new paradigm! … Will EPA and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) fight it out to see which gets to be the Department of Fixing Everything?

The “public health” people were up to that over a decade ago.