Pulitzer-winning writer Ed Humes calls Jerry Brown California’s most original political figure. Humes does so in his profile of Jerry in the latest California Lawyer Magazine.

And, yeah, Humes is pretty much right. (Well, can you name somebody else who could win that medal instead? Right. Neither can I.)

Here are fragments from the piece to give you the flavor. But just read it.

You’d think no politician would want to be depicted as two-faced, but that cover belonged to Thoughts, the slim volume that Brown himself authored. Janus, the ancient Roman god of gates, doors, and doorways, fits Brown’s image of himself as both a keeper of tradition and an agent of change who is able to transcend the apparent contradiction. “Tell me what’s the contradiction? I don’t see any,” he says. “My job is to be an agent, an actor in history, to create openings … in a calcified political system. To make things happen. To me, that’s being consistent.”

[SNIP]

His résumé includes two terms as governor (starting at age 36), three runs for the White House, one for the U.S. Senate, and two terms as mayor of Oakland before winning the office he now holds.

“He lives to run,” says Republican consultant Kevin Spillane, who in the 2006 attorney general race ran the opposition research against Brown, to no avail. Brown won that election by 18 percentage points. “His history is very clear,” Spillane adds. “He says what he has to say to get elected, then he loses interest and immediately takes aim at the next office.”

Now, as Spillane and so many others predicted, the oldest first-term attorney general in California history is laying the groundwork for yet another possible campaign: It seems he wants to be governor. Again.

At this point, as Hume rightly points out, the 2010 governor’s race is Brown’s to lose.

He won the 2006 election [for Attorney General] with the greatest margin of victory of any opposed candidate for statewide office. And as one measure of how times have changed, Brown now actually goes out of his way to remind people of his old “Governor Moonbeam” nickname, coined by Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko.

“I worked hard for that ‘Moonbeam,’ ” he declared in March at the state Democratic Convention, where he was greeted like a rock star. “I don’t do too much these days except sue people,” he added. “But someday maybe I’ll get around to doing a little more than that. And maybe you’ll help.”

Anyway, there’s lots more right here.

(Official state portrait of then Governor Jerry Brown by Don Barchardy)

So far, the Bush Administration has mostly been giving gobs of money to those who had a significant part in causing our economic tsunami.

However, as of this morning, California Attorney General Jerry Brown may have reversed that fiscal flow and started taking it away.

At the end of June, he sued Countrywide for their predatory lending practices. Countrywide, you may remember, is the nation’s largest mortgage lender (or was before they were bought by B of A) and one of the main purps in the subprime debacle.

Early this morning, the AG’s office announced that they had obtained a big, fat $8.68 billion settlement—all of which is slated to be used as foreclosure relief, with $3.5 billion of that money going specifically to help California borrowers—perhaps as many as 125,000 of them.

“Unlike last week’s congressional bailout,” said Brown in his statement about the settlement, “this loan-modification program provides real relief for borrowers at risk of losing their homes. Tragically, California and the other states have had to step in because federal authorities shamelessly failed to even minimally regulate mortgage lending.”

Shamelessly is exactly the word.

Here are some of the hoped for benefits of the settlement:

In a nutshell, this settlement will enable eligible subprime and pay-option mortgage borrowers to avoid foreclosure by obtaining a modified and affordable loan. The loans covered by the settlement are among the riskiest and highest defaulting loans at the center of America’s foreclosure crisis. Assuming every eligible borrower and investor participates, this loan modification program will provide up to $3.5 billion to California borrowers as follows:

• Suspension of foreclosures for eligible borrowers with subprime and pay-option adjustable rate loans pending determination of borrower ability to afford loan modifications;

• Loan modifications valued at up to $3.4 billion worth of reduced interest payments and, for certain borrowers, reduction of their principal balances;

• Waiver of late fees of up to $33.6 million;

• Waiver of prepayment penalties of up to $25.6 million for borrowers who receive modifications, pay off, or refinance their loans;

• $27.9 million in payments to borrowers who are 120 or more days delinquent or whose homes have already been foreclosed; and

• Approximately $25.2 million in additional payments to borrowers who, in the future, cannot afford monthly payments under the loan modification program and lose their homes to foreclosure.

More specifically, the modification program covers subprime and pay-option adjustable-rate mortgage loans in which the borrower’s first payment was due between January 1, 2004 and December 31, 2007. The program will be available for loans in default that are secured by owner-occupied property and serviced by Countrywide Financial or one of its affiliates. In addition, the borrower’s loan balance must be 75% or more of the current value of the home, and the borrower must be able to afford adjusted monthly payments under the terms of the modification.

Ten other states participated in the settlement, but AG Brown led the negotiations.

“Countrywide’s lending practices turned the American dream into a nightmare for tens of thousands of families,” harrumphed Jerry, “by putting them into loans they couldn’t understand and ultimately couldn’t afford.”

Yep.

But in this case, instead of the tax-payers taking the hit, the bailout bucks are for homeowners, and are being helpfully—if not altogether willingly—provided by those who made big money off of selling, then reselling, those infamous toxic mortgages.

Go Jerry!

(And, yes, this very cheery announcement gives Jerry the kind of bragging rights that he will assuredly use when the 2010 race for the California governorship begins to heat up.)

The LA Times has more.

From time to time here, I’ve taken issue with the DEA’s 100-agent raids on LA County’s medical marijuana clinics, raids that have used big piles of our tax dollars to harass clinic owners and patients, resulted in few arrests, and in most cases, exactly zero charges.

(Earlier stories are here and here and here.)

Medical marijuana is legal in this state and, unless there is blatant wrong-doing (meaning guys using the clinics as fronts to make big bucks in bulk trafficking), the Feds need to butt out and use their time—not to mention our valuable tax dollars—to shut down some crystal meth dealers instead. (In the past, I’ve offered to point out a few meth-dealing locations, but DEA spokesperson Sarah Pullen, the LA person who has the job of deal with us snarky press types, declined to take me up on it.)

Which brings me to today’s story. Today the California Attorney General’s Office announced that on Friday, the state’s drug enforcers, the Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement or BNE—along with a multi-agency task force—raided a single marijuana clinic in Northridge called Today’s Healthcare and caught the owner and his colleague red handed (or green handed, in this case) buying and selling $18 grand worth of weed, with a like amount stashed in one of the men’s vehicles, and another $6.6 million worth of plants found when warrants were served on the guys’ houses.

According to Brown’s office, in order to make Friday’s bust, 11 agents were involved —as opposed to the DEA’s 100-agent cluster…uh…thingy.

The raids and the arrests were the result of an six-month investigation by the same multi-agency task force.

(Interesting random fact: Established in 1927, BNE is the oldest narcotic enforcement bureau in the United States.)

“This criminal enterprise bears no resemblance to the purposes of Proposition 215, which authorized the use of medical marijuana for seriously sick patients,” said AG Jerry Brown in today’s announcement. “Today’s Healthcare is a large-scale, for-profit, commercial business. This deceptively named drug ring is reaping huge profits and flaunting the state’s laws that allow qualified patients to use marijuana for medicinal purposes.”

In other words, unlike the Feds, California’s BNE and the AG’s office did it right. They went after the blatant drug dealers while respecting state law and the will of the California voters.

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UPDATE: Monday afternoon, Brown’s office also announced a set of “guidelines” for law enforcement and patients regarding med marijuana.

Oddly, this is the first time that any state agency has issued such guidelines, and both cops and advocates said they welcomed the legal clarification.

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Note: the photo of the BNE guys is a snapshot I snatched from the InterMountain News of another BNE raid, but not Friday’s drug raid.

FYI: Read this LA Times article about the global warming-related, anti-urban sprawl bill making its way through the California legislature, and compare it to last month’s WLA interview with state Attorney General Jerry Brown.

Take that, Joel Kotkin.

Like a top that now spins ever faster, going nowhere, powered mostly by its own unstoppable momentum, California’s prison overcrowding drama continues and continues. Last Thursday there was a new development when a federal judge ordered Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and two of his main aides to answer questions under oath as part of a lawsuit that, in November, could result in a panel of three judges forcing the state to cap the number of inmates in its prisons.

(As of today, California’s 33 adult prisons, which were designed for about 100,000 inmates, hold 159,000—-give or take a thousand or five.)

The overcrowding affects everything, say the inmate plaintiffs and their lawyers. It affects the badly broken prison health care system, and certainly the safety and the mental health of the prisoners—more than 130,000 of which are paroled back into California’s communities every year.

It also helps spread communicable diseases like Hepatitis C,—which, in some of California’s prisons, may infect nearly 50 percent of the facility’s population.

All that said, should the Governor be required to testify about the issue? Speaking personally, I rather liked the idea, since I believe that someone ought to be answering questions as to why, after nearly five years of promises made about prison reform, the Governor has managed to reform pretty much exactly zero.

But on Friday, California Attorney General Jerry Brown officially opposed the judge’s order requiring Arnold and staffers to be deposed. What is more, the AG phrased his objection in fairly strong terms.

Curious, about his thinking—and knowing that, whatever the topic, no conversation with Jerry is ever dull—I asked to chat about the matter with the Attorney General. Here’s how the conversation went:

WitnessLA: On Friday you opposed the ruling that would require the Governor and several of his senior staff to be deposed in the trial upcoming in November about prison overcrowding. What was your reasoning?

Edmund G. Brown Jr: Well, first of all, I’m the Governor’s lawyer.

WLA: I understand, but I got the feeling that you also believe it’s a bad idea.

EGB: There’s no reason why the Governor should be questioned about the day-to-day running of the prisons. That isn’t his job. He doesn’t make the individual decisions about whether to move this group of prisoners to that facility. These depositions are a stunt. It’s a public circus that’s has more to do with a lot of lawyers making millions and millions of dollars with these lawsuits.

WLA: On the other hand, we have prison overcrowding that’s completely out of control.

EGB: But bringing a bunch of lawsuits isn’t the way to solve anything. Look, the courts are a blunt instrument.

WLA: Nothing else seems to have worked….

EGB: And many of these lawsuits aren’t working so well either. There are dozens of consent decrees already in place. It began with Ronald Reagan….

WLA: Yes, we have our own pleasant consent decree in Los Angeles with the LAPD. It began as a good idea. But we now have a federal judge who appears to actively hate our police department.

EGB: We had one in Oakland with the police department.

Now the California prison system has become a repository for lawyer activists who submit unending lawsuits. And when you have the judiciary trying to solve every problem, it goes against the basic principle of the balance of powers. It’s not at all what the authors of the Federalist Papers had in mind. The separation of powers, among the judiciary, the legislature, and the executive is fundamental to our form of government.

WLA: But to play devil’s advocate, we do have disastrously overcrowded prisons, and that problem isn’t going to get fixed by the head of the CDCR. [California Department of Corrects and Rehabilitation.] It’s far more in the hands of the Governor and the legislature. To my layperson’s eyes there are two remedies: One is sentencing reform and the Governor has failed to do anything to push that forward. And the second is letting prisoners out early. There was talk of the Governor releasing 22,000 short term nonviolent prisoners to relieve the overcrowding, yet that never came about. Why isn’t it valid to depose the Governor to ask him about those issues?

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