“Attorney General Kamala D. Harris Secures $18 Billion California Commitment for Struggling Homeowners,” the headline blares. But wait: the foreclosure fraud settlement is only a total of $25 billion. Even if you believe HUD Secretary Donovan’s figures about principal reduction credits being worth more in actual principal reduction, you don’t get higher than $40 billion. How did Harris get so much?

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.

Yesterday, we began to get some accountability for foreclosure fraud in the unlikeliest of places: Missouri. This one blindsided us. Koster, a former Republican who switched parties to the Democrats in 2007, has simply not been front and center, and yet here he comes with a criminal indictment of one of the worst document processors in the country. And the indictment goes all the way to the top of the company, to its founder, who faces seven years in prison.

Last week it seemed Eric Schneiderman’s suit against MERS and three banks using MERS represented a carve-out on the final foreclosure fraud settlement. There was speculation that other states might have carve-outs or grandfathered suits, so they would be able to pursue those investigations and prosecutions and still join the settlement. But Bloomberg reports today that some states with active lawsuits would have to settle them as part of the deal.

Just what is a dishonest rape?

Misogyny is never pretty.

The large Mormon vote in the state helped Romney win by such a large margin. According to the entrance polls, Mormons made up about one quarter of the overall vote; and of those, 91 percent supported Romney. Importantly though, Romney still would have won the state even without the Mormon vote. Romney also won the Catholic vote, the Protestant vote, and the “other Christian” vote.

If Romney wins tomorrow he will be 3 for 5 in contests to date. He will pick up even more delegates and have another day where the news cycle is all about the good news for the Romney campaign.

In a recent filing in Nevada, mortgage servicer LPS used the whitewash IG report from Florida — after the Fla. AG dismissed the two attorneys gathering evidence on LPS — to justify the dismissal of their lawsuit in Nevada. LPS lobbyists more recently urged the Florida AG’s office to intervene on their behalf in a criminal case in Michigan. The connections between the Florida AG’s office and LPS just continue to grow.

We may be getting close to a settlement betweent some state AGs and the mortgage bankers on foreclosure and related mortgage practices. Late on Friday I spoke with Simon Johnson, the former chief economist of the IMF and a professor at MIT, who also writes the Baseline Scenario blog with James Kwak. Johnson has been skeptical of the foreclosure fraud settlement.

What hasn’t received enough attention is the extent to which we’ve already been down this road. In 2008, 12 AGs entered into a settlement with Bank of America over Countrywide lending practices. As part of the settlement, BofA agreed to modify as many as 400,000 mortgages, costing $8.4 billion, with a variety of types of mods, including principal reductions and refinancing. In addition, servicer practices were supposed to change and foreclosure operations on the affected homes suspended.