This would be too bad. With the shuttering of many sub-prime lenders, this will leave the seamier side of our financial services industry few ways to separate the working poor from their money.

More than one observer has pointed out (even conservative bloggers are a bit leery) that this payday loan troika seems to have a more than coincidental resemblance to Jan Brewer’s campaign team. Brewer doesn’t think this is a big deal. Here she is in the Republic:

“I don’t see any conflict,” Brewer said when asked about the relationship between her political allies and the payday lenders.

Brewer insists she has given little thought to payday lenders, to the point that she said she doesn’t remember how she voted on last year’s initiative.

She’s given “little thought” to it. Hey, why should this issue be any different than any other one?

Interestingly, John Munger has voiced his reservations about the payday loan industry in the past, and was a board member of the pro-business Southern Arizona Leadership Council when they took a stand against the payday lender backed Proposition 200 last year. Munger could make an argument here that he stands with the voters while Brewer’s lobbyist friends are trying to thwart their will.

Pollsters Say Brewer Isn’t Toast

Gosh.

The article goes on to give the ray of hope that people, according to the polls, don’t know enough about her to form a strong opinion. Yep, always a position that a sitting office holder wants to begin a campaign with.

She filed her paperwork with the Secretary of State this morning, naming as her campaign chair Grant Woods. Yep, our own American Gothic former Attorney General. Some say this is a move to the center, and I’m sure that Brewer’s speech today will be full of rhetoric about keeping social programs and education funded. Given what she was willing to sign before, and what she will likely sign after the next special session…let’s just say that “cosmetic” is the appropriate term.

By the way, for those of you that are wondering what Woods has been up to lately will be happy to find out that he’s been lobbying for the payday lenders. Lovely.

NB: Drawing by Arnulfo Bermudez.

A slightly different but related drama is going on with Dean Martin. Because of his unhappiness, his allies are running a bill through the legislature to allow Martin and other agency heads to hire their own counsel and not be represented by the attorney general’s office. The trouble is, as some observers point out, this could lead to a situation where different teams of lawyers from different parts of state government would be suing each other. This might be some part of a bailout for law firms in Phoenix. Hey, if the legislature can pay Ken Starr all that money…

Here is the most irksome thing: this is still over…wait for it…the Flores case. This case has gone on so long that plaintiff Miriam Flores, who was an elementary school student in Nogales when it was filed, is an undergrad at the University of Arizona. Maybe Tom Horne, Brewer and the legislature want to drag this out long enough to give her a chance to go to law school and try it herself.

NB – One of the other families in the Flores case are Rosa Rzeslawski and her son, Mario…that’s right…Polish-Mexicans.