Almost a week after the announcement of a foreclosure fraud settlement, experts are trying to determine what’s in it, given the absence of a term sheet. This chart at analyst SNL’s site shows one problem: it has a total settlement listed at $25 billion, but just California and Florida’s numbers add up to $26.4 billion.

I think I’ve made my position on the foreclosure fraud settlement pretty clear. Nevertheless, there’s a time to stew and a time to figure out how to make this work as well as possible. I think there are some tangible steps that can be taken, if not to improve the deal, then to improve housing policy overall to the benefit of homeowners rather than bank balance sheets.

This settlement arises from multiple abuses found in the servicing of loans and the foreclosure process over the past several years. At the height of the housing bubble, banks sliced and diced mortgages and traded them with little regard for the rules following land recording or securitization to such a sloppy extent that they lost track of the true owner on potentially millions of homes.

To cover up for this massive failure, banks and their servicing units have been found to have routinely forged, back-dated and fabricated documents at county recorder offices and state courts across the country. Furthermore, they employed “robo-signers,” who signed hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of documents and affidavits without any knowledge of the underlying mortgages. In addition, investigations uncovered massive servicing abuses, including illegal fees charged to borrowers, putting borrowers into foreclosure at the same time as they were working out loan modifications, failing to honor previous settlements where promises were made on modifications, and countless other errors that maximized servicer profits and gouged homeowners.

There are also cases of wrongful foreclosures where homeowners have been turned out of their homes without just cause, and servicer-driven foreclosures, where servicers illegally added late fees and applied payments inaccurately, pushing the homeowner into foreclosure. This is but a smattering of the examples of foreclosure fraud and servicer abuse found in a series of interlocking investigations, court depositions, reviews of documents in registers of deeds offices, and homeowner testimonials.

Proposition 8 was built with deliberate lies that Maggie Gallagher, Tony Perkins, Peter Sprigg, and the rest of those pushing it were too fearful to defend in court. But none of these people had the guts to stand up in court, take an oath, and attest to the veracity of the claims they made regarding what allegedly would happen should marriage equality become legal in California, because they knew that the lawyers attacking the law – David Boies and Ted Olson – would call them out and reveal their deception.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found California’s Proposition 8 unconstitutional this morning, relying on arguments used by Supreme Court Justice Kennedy in another case. This furthers a process that will almost certainly end in the Supreme Court, with a precedent-setting ruling on the right of same-sex couples to marry. However, the ruling today is limited to the circumstances of the California initiative.

The Ninth Circuit Court just held, 2-1, that California’s imfamous anti-gay Prop 8 was unconstitutional. “Proposition 8 served no purpose, and had no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California,” the court said.

Cal. AG Kamala Harris wants to do investigations on origination fraud, on borrowers not learning the true terms of their deals until after signing. But the 2008 Countrywide deal extinguished many of those claims, and on others, the statute of limitations has run out. So by calling the settlement term sheet “inadequate,” Harris was playing for a bigger deal, perhaps a way to access longer federal jurisdictions on origination claims, more of a share of the financial benefit, or something.

As reported here at Firedoglake three days ago, Occupy Pittsburgh, which has been occupying land owned by a bank known as BNY Mellon for over a hundred days, is to be evicted by the bank after noon today. The eviction comes after a judge issued a decision siding with the “bank’s claim of immediate and irreparable harm” if the occupation remained on the property. We will cover this live.

Gallup has published its 2012 list of the top ten states with the most liberals in the country. To a strong degree this same list can be used as a stand in for the list of states most likely to support marijuana legalization. And success will likely come in those states that allow voter initiatives on the ballot.

For those who thought that, with the new year, nuclear power had turned a page and put its “annus horribilis” behind it–as if the calendar were somehow the friend America’s aging reactors–let’s take a quick look at January 2012.