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In case you missed it, a very nasty—and excessively surreal—general election campaign began to take shape in a serious way Tuesday night. On one side likely will be a Clinton, and Steve M. here reminds us what that can mean out in the boonies, and on the other side will be a vulgar talking yam. Absent the intervention of a merciful god, the leader of the Democratic side in this rockfight will be a woman who believes in protecting the business of legalized extortion and of legal loan sharks.

According to a memo obtained by the Huffington Post, Wasserman Schultz is trying to rally congressional Democrats around a bill that would delay the CFPB's new rules for two years and nullify those rules in any state that adopts its own payday-lending law, like the DNC chair's own home state of Florida. The key thing about such state laws is that they're likely to be much kinder to the profits of payday lenders than what the CFPB is crafting. In Florida, the average interest rate on a payday loan is still 304 percent, according to Pew Charitable Trusts. What's more, 76 percent of all payday loans in the state are turned loans—loans taken out to pay back another loan—according to Americans for Financial Reform. Thus, Florida's law has left the highly profitable vicious cycle of payday borrowing intact.

It is time for her to go. More important, it's time for Hillary Rodham Clinton to insist that she go.

In addition to putting the Congress behind some of the worst predatory bastards in America, this move also gives the lie to anything HRC says about her dedication to reigning in financial crimes. Moreover, this puts the DNC squarely on the other side of the issue from both Bernie Sanders and Senator Professor Warren and, therefore, on the other side of the issue from about 90 percent of some voters she is going to need desperately in the fall. (The payday loan industry always has been something that jumps on SPW's last nerve. This latest move by DWS completely undermines the work of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, which already is under siege from a number of different directions and will be one of the prime targets of any Republican president also armed with a Republican Congress. And can I imagine He, Trump talking shameless ragtime about payday lenders as part of his absurd kabuki financial populism? You bet I can.

This is nothing new for DWS, who's been looking out for these creeps for quite some time because they nest in thousands of seedy strip malls up and down Florida. But to have her presiding over a presidential campaign that has as its driving force the financial crimes that tanked the economy, crimes that reach all the way from Goldman Sachs down to Sunrise Gotcher Money Here on Route 4 in Lakeland, is bad politics on all angles.

Elsewhere in liberal stupidity, it appears that a few people back in the Commonwealth (God save it!) are displeased with SPW's neutrality in that state's primary.

Elizabeth Warren, newborn DINO.

Some people. I mean, I can't even…

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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