Starting this week and running through January, many newspapers will run glowing profiles of the attorneys general elected a year ago. 

How do I know in advance that the profiles will be glowing?   The answer is simple.   After a year, the profiles are always glowing.  These stories will all say that in just one short year, the dozen new attorneys general elected in 2006 have transformed themselves from fast talking, over promising, self indulgent political hacks to thoughtful law enforcement officers.  The profiles will marvel that the liberals are more conservative and the conservatives are more liberal.   All will be praised for their professionalism.  All will speculate about higher offices.

I suppose that I could perpetrate the myth and take some personal credit (I was a part of the faculty that ran the New Attorney General Training carried out by the National Association of Attorneys General) but the older I get the more truthful I become, so I will take a pass.  What is true is that the new attorneys general, like their predecessors, have learned to do their jobs and are doing it well.  The praise that they get this first year should make their hearts grow warm.   They should frame these profiles (I didn’t and now it has faded while sitting in a box in the old chicken barn I use for storage.) and save them for their grandkids.

Above all, however, they should not believe them.

The period between Christmas and New Years is the slowest news time of the year.   For those of us who are nonetheless addicted to reading a newspaper, it is a wonderful time to learn odd things.  For example, although everyone around here goes ice fishing for smelts on the Cathance River in Bowdoinham, on this very slow week ice fishing on the Cathance generated a full scale article in the New York Times.

My advice to attorneys general is to take this week off.  Of course, I did not always follow this advice myself and can therefore distinctly remember receiving calls from desperate reporters begging me to find something for them to cover.  With nothing really going on and with my staff wisely home with their families, I said to myself, “why not educate consumer about their rights when it comes to returning Christmas presents?”  

I dashed off a quick press release: “Consumers of Maine!  When returning items to the store, don’t forget to bring the receipt!”   I confidently issued that hard hitting and fact laden statement and sat waiting expectedly in front of the flag and blue bound law volumes whose primary duty during my decade as attorney general was to serve as a back drop for press briefings.   (I thought Corpus Juris Secundum made me look more professional.)

The press dutifully arrived and I knocked off a number of television interviews and during which I announced with the confidence that can only come from a thirty-four year old attorney general that “this is the busiest week of the year for returns!   Make sure you assert your rights!  And bring your receipts!”   The camera crews then raced to the nearest store confident that they would find hordes of disgruntled Maine consumers lugging unwanted merchandise back for cash or for better fitting snowshoes.

Alas (for me), the stores were empty.   Maine consumers are careful shoppers and our merchants more than fair.  Everyone was quite happy with their presents.   There were no returns.

Like I said, I hope everyone takes the week off lest they look a little silly.  

As the world prepares to descend on Iowa for the upcoming caucuses (I myself am hitting Des Moines on the 30^th), visitors might take note of an issue that appeared in yesterday’s Canadian media outlets.   Because none of the candiates have (yet) addressed the issue, I thought I would do a public service and generate some information. 

It appears that the office of the Iowa AG is investigating Pigeon King International (located in Waterloo, Ontario) out of concern that the company is misleading Iowa farmers about an investment deal that might just prove to be a Ponzi scheme.  The company is marketing farmers to purchase pigeon breeding stock and then promising to purchase the offspring under a ten year contract.  The farmer is expected to invest between $100,000 to $250,000 in order to get empty barns up to the task of pigeon raising.  The company currently has over 7000 breeding pairs, 100,000 pigeons (presumably non-breeding) and its owner dreams of owning a million. The company has ceased its solicitations in Iowa and is cooperating with the AG’s who is apparently skeptical of Pigeon King International’s intentions of opening several large processing plants. 

This story led me to do a little research on pigeons.  I have learned that there are many different kinds of pigeons and that Lee Wing Wah Restaurant in Chicago offers them as a delicacy.   I also learned that squab meat sells for about $10 a pound. (Squabs need to be slaughtered at the tender age of 4 weeks.  If the farmer waits to the fifth week, the meat is too tough to eat – or so it is reported.  I really do not know from personal experience.) Some pigeons are bred for racing and some for endurance (pigeons are able to stay aloft for between 5 and twenty hours).  Pigeons are also responsible for the successful reintroduction of peregrine falcons (evidently, falcons eschew Lee Wing Wah and go straight to the source for their sustenance).  

Finally, because pigeons mate for life, they could be the official bird for the Huckabee and Romney campaigns.

I thought that you'd all want to know these things.

The front page of today’s New York Times is running a headline that reads “Fed Shrugged as Subprime Crisis Spread.”  The article accurately describes how federal regulators either ignored (Alan Greenspan) or actively supported (OCC) the fraud that inevitably arose from federal policies. The story slogs heavily along with nary a mention of all of us who fought to both stop the practices and to warn the public.   There is not a word about those AG’s – Roy Cooper in NC, Tom Miller in IA, Chris Gregoire in WA, Eliot Spitzer in NY to name but four – nor of those non-profits such as the Center for Responsible Lending or my client, the AARP.  The story is a complete failure in letting the world know that the Feds were not only wrong, but that they were willfully wrong in ignoring the many, many entreaties that came their way from the non-greed impaired.

Everyone has a favorite children’s book – “The Story of Ferdinand” comes to mind along with “Blueberries for Sal” (yes, it is true…Sal is a lawyer practicing in Maine…) – but the story that fits today’s NYT piece is clearly “Horton Hears a Who”.   Perhaps the next time the NYT does a piece on federal failures they will come to see that too many of our federal officials are like the Wickersham Brothers and the Sour Kangaroo.  If they learn to listen to the states – not unlike how Whoville finally heard Jo Jo – the smallest Who of all – then perhaps next time we will all be saved from the beelzenut stew.

Ten days ago, Rudy Giuliani bragged on “Meet the Press” that he had “turned around” the U.S. Atty office that he had inherited from his predecessor, John Martin.  Martin has now taken understandable exception to Giuliani’s embellishment - small by political standards – and opines that anyone remotely connected with law enforcement knows the Southern District of New York’s has long been considered the gold standard for federal law enforcement.  The implication from his belated statement, the significance of which resonates from Lower Manhattan to the Riverdale, nonetheless has caused me to reflect on a parallel issue that impacts the world of state attorneys general.

Forty-three attorneys general are elected officials and obviously campaign to “turn around” their respective offices.   Even the unelected attorneys general declare in their inauguration that they will make changes to their offices. Most state observers would agree with Martin when in defending his office from Rudy’s braggadocio he notes that prosecution offices are overwhelmingly made up of career professionals who work for years to make our legal system one of justice and now whim.  And to that characterization, I can only add a hearty “Amen!”

That being said, I certainly did my share of bragging during my ten years as attorney general.  I took the credit for the efforts of the staff with whom I worked.  (Even now, I hesitate to say “who worked for me,” because we all worked to uphold the same laws.)  But was I wrong to hold those press conferences to take credit for the work of others?  I think not. As the Attorney General of Maine, it really was up to me to set the tone and the priorities.  And certainly when things went wrong, as they sometimes did, I was the one who had to look into the cameras and take responsibility.

Because I do not believe that laws should be enforced in secret, I really do not have a problem with a U.S. Attorney or an Attorney General standing up to claim the credit along with accepting the blame of all that transpires within a prosecutorial office.  It just comes with the territory.  

The end result of all this is that when we leave office and pass the honor of being AG to our successors, we just have to grit our teeth when he or she looks into the camera and says that it is time to shake up their new office and “turn it around.”

In 2005, then NY AG Eliot Spitzer and his staff noted that federal housing data indicated that a significantly higher percentage of high-interest mortgage loans are issued to African-American and Hispanic borrowers than to white borrowers.   Noting inaction from the relevant federal agencies (the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA)), Spitzer’s Civil Rights Division sent “letters of inquiry” to a number of national banks and their subsidiaries.

Rather than defending on the merits, the banks scurried to their friendly federal “regulators” and asked them to sue the State of New York to stop the inquiry. They also cobbled together a trade association called “The Clearing House Association” and both sued to enjoin NY and which would stop the banks from having to answer Spitzer’s letters about their potentially racially based lending practices.   Litigation ensued and the US District Court upheld the preemption in its entirety.   Today the Second Cir. upheld the OCC while remanding on the FHA.   The vote was 2-1 with the dissenting justice stating the OCC had usurped the traditional police power of the State of New York.

The banks who received the letters were HSBC (who held the Household paper), Citibank (who recently purchased the remnants of Ameriquest), JPMorgan and Chase and Wells Fargo. 

They didn’t want to sue in their own names because they didn’t want to see their names in the pleadings and because some in those fine institutions are undoubtedly ashamed of themselves. 

And well they should be.