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.

In case you were wondering whether Nevada’s indictment of a couple Lender Processing Services employees on robo-signing charges would be the end of the fraud prosecutions, with a Lynndie England-like prosecution of the low-level grunts and not the higher-ups, you can wonder no more. Today, Nevada’s Attorney General, Catherine Cortez Masto, filed suit against LPS itself for document fraud.

I actually find it positive that no settlement has been reached, because the driving forces behind the settlement – the Treasury Department, DoJ and HUD – did no meaningful investigation that would dictate the amounts needed for a reasonable settlement. In fact, to the extent that anything has happened on foreclosure fraud over the past year, it has come from the only entities willing to do their jobs and follow the law: a handful of state Attorneys General doing the investigations and handing out the indictments that others won’t. Beau Biden, Eric Schneiderman, Martha Coakley and Kamala Harris, among others, have pointed the way forward for legitimate accountability for banks involved in systematically stealing homes. And Catherine Cortez Masto, the Attorney General of Nevada, needs to be singled out for special praise. Because thanks to the law she helped push in the state, criminalizing wrongful and fraudulent foreclosures, evictions have slowed to a crawl.

According to current polling, January is shaping up to be a tough month for Mitt Romney. There are four contests in January: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida. Romney currently leads only in New Hampshire while Newt Gingrich has a double digit lead in the other three states. But the Republican primary calendar in February looks more favorable for Romney. It could be the month that Romney breaks Gingrich’s January momentum before Super Tuesday, March 6th.

We have a new deadline for the 50, er, 43-state foreclosure fraud settlement. It’s not July Fourth or Labor Day or Halloween, but now Christmas. More holidays have been selected for the target settlement date than have been selected for vignette-laden films directed by Gary Marshall. But this time, Tom Miller means it!

On the day when protesters highlighted the foreclosure crisis, the Attorneys General of California and Nevada opened a joint investigation into mortgage and foreclosure fraud. This west coast tandem of Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto and California’s Kamala Harris provides a counterpoint to the work being done on the east coast by New York’s Eric Schneiderman and Delaware’s Beau Biden.

Tracy Lawrence, a whistleblower who robo-signed tens of thousands of foreclosure documents and then aided the state of Nevada in their eventual indictments over the scheme, turned up dead yesterday. Police have reportedly ruled out homicide.