Chris Dodd, our incoming Senate banking chair, announced a zero tolerance policy for predatory lending just days before throwing his hat in the presidential ring.

Let's hope the timing is more than coincidence. Perhaps it suggests that '08 candidates will take our national debt problems seriously and at least strike out the biggest injustices. (Let's also hope that Dodd's friends in the financial sector -- new ones wooing the banking chair and old ones from insurance-capital Connecticut -- don't talk him out of his pledges.)