I wanted to take note of this one story from last week, about the fact that the foreclosure fraud settlement is only a three-year agreement, meaning that all the vaunted reforms of the servicing market end up expiring at the end of the time period. But the solution lies with Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s efforts to adopt permanent standards for servicers.

Voters of California will likely have an opportunity to vote to require labeling of some genetically modified foods. The California Right to Know campaign filed over 970,000 signatures to the Secretary of State. Even if a significant percentage of the signatures are found to be invalid, the initiative will likely clear the 504,760 valid signature threshold to make it on the ballot.

There is a good possibility voters in California will get a chance to reform their 1994 “three strikes” law this November. Supporters of the ballot initiative to reform the law claim they turned in signatures well in excess of the 500,000 required by state law to qualify for the ballot.

California has two nuclear power plants. San Onofre, between Los Angeles and San Diego, has been offline for months as everyone tries to find an excuse for the alarmingly rapid wear on new reactor tubing. (Being shut down, however, did not prevent a fire from breaking out this week when a pipe ruptured and released radioactive steam.)

But as of Thursday, Diablo Canyon, the nuclear plant to the north, is also offline–thanks to. . . uh, salp?

The SAFE California Campaign has managed to qualify for the November ballot an initiative that would abolish the death penalty and replace it with life without the possibility of parole. Polling indicates the campaign will have a bit of an up hill fight in convincing voters to abolish the death penalty. A poll by SurveyUSA from last month found that 61% of registered voters in California would vote to keep the death penalty, but initiative backers hope to convince voters the move would save millions in state costs.

Okay, so maybe part of me just wanted to post a video of a long-lost favorite song from my youthful days seeing local bands in L.A. clubs… but, as someone who spent several years living in Los Angeles and then just across the bay from San Francisco, I’ve long wondered if I would live long enough to see high-speed rail make it to the Golden State.

RealtyTrac data shows that judicial foreclosure states, where the integrity of the documents is most acute, experienced a spike in foreclosure filings over these three months. The non-judicial foreclosure states have seen falling filings, perhaps correlated to the falling unemployment rate, perhaps correlated to not much. The full effect of the settlement has yet to be seen.

We saw money pour in from all over the country to help California in its Prop 8 battle, but it wasn’t ever clear that there would be the same level of commitment to help battles in smaller states with a smaller political footprint. But the California Democratic party believes we can win this, and they’re all-in to make this victory happen in 2012.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to accept a case challenging a lower court ruling on the anti-discrimination policy at organizations recognized by California state universities. The groups relied on a “religious freedom” argument to justify discriminating against LGBT students — restricting admittance to Christian members only by a fraternity and sorority at San Diego State University, but the appellate court disagreed.

I’ve met Katie Porter one time. She writes at Credit Slips and, back in 2007, did one of the first clinical studies of mortgage servicer misbehavior and abuse, in that case with respect to bankruptcy. She is one of the pre-eminent legal scholars in this field, and she knows every single trick that the servicers have done over the past decade. There are few other people as equipped to handle the job of the monitor than her, in my estimation. And I hope that she uses this pathway, with the evidence she will compile, to make a broader effort to blow the whistle on a broken and corrupt mortgage servicing industry. And that’s likely.