Elizabeth Warren is not wasting any time trying to get answers from Wall Street’s regulators. Warren asked for documents relating to the recent mortgage settlement.

Religiously speaking, the answers given at the VP debate by Paul Ryan and Joe Biden to the question of how their personal faith relates to their work as politicians were striking. The difference between the two candidates — and the parties and platforms they stand for — could not have been starker. Ryan spoke with absolute certainty that he/his party/his church are absolutely correct when it comes to banning abortion, while Biden expressed both his own personal beliefs alongside respect for those who hold other views and the concomitant right to act on their religious views.

But while abortion was the specific example Martha Raddatz used to frame her question, it is hardly the only one. The editors of the Jesuit magazine “America” pose another very good question themselves, that deserves an answer from both Obama and Romney. If no one brings it up at the town hall-style debate next week, I’d love to see Bob Schieffer ask it at the foreign policy debate that follows.

Since last November, when the Jerry Sandusky saga propelled Penn State into the headlines, I’ve wondered about Penn State’s former president, Graham Spanier. After reading the Freeh Report in its nauseating detail, I did more than wonder — I started digging for Spanier’s own words on what it means to be a university president.

What I found does not make for a pretty picture.

House Speaker John Boehner indicated on Sunday that he would take the Administration to court over documents requested in the Oversight Committee investigation into the Fast and Furious scandal.

In an interesting bit of grassroots advocacy, a few shareholders of the country’s two largest private prison companies have worked to bring more accountability to the industry, which is exempt from public records laws in nearly every jurisdiction despite the fact that it performs inherently governmental functions.

The GEO Group, based in Boca Raton, FL, had its annual shareholders’ meeting in Palm Beach a few weeks back. Some demonstrators protested outside, but the true challenge for the company would come from inside that very meeting.

It turns out that JPMorgan Chase had a risk oversight committee on its board of directors. There were individual risk managers at the various offices as well, but this board was designed to provide oversight for the entire operation. Or, if you prefer, it was designed to pretend to show that JPMorgan Chase cared about risk oversight. That’s clear from who they put on the board.

In its second annual report on the safety of nuclear power facilities (PDF) in the United States, the Union of Concerned Scientists have documented 15 troubling lapses–what they call “near misses”–at 13 of the nation’s atomic plants. The study details specific problems that still want for repairs, but much more disturbing, it also outlines systemic flaws in America’s nuclear regulation and oversight regime.

On a conference call with progressive media, White House deputy national security adviser for strategic communication Ben Rhodes stressed that the United States would now commence a “normal” relationship with the Iraqi government, an equal partnership between two sovereign nations. But it’s hard to square that with the reality that the United States will have a massive diplomatic presence in the country, with the largest embassy in the world in Baghdad, two consulates in Ibril and Basra, and as many as 5,000 private military contractors under the direction of the State Department protecting it all.

I could hardly keep up with all the reports on housing that came out over the past 24 hours. So let me try to summarize a couple: • A recently unsealed lawsuit shows that banks cheated military veterans by illegally adding attorney’s fees to their refinancing loans. Illegal fee additions have a rich history, especially [...]

Chasing Madoff’s protagonist, Harry Markopolos doesn’t call himself a hero. He just says he’s a citizen “doing what your supposed to do.”

For Markopolos, that meant spending over a decade trying to get anyone and everyone to listen to his analysis of Bernie Madoff’s funds and to look at the evidence that Madoff was a fraud. Luckily, he had a trio of friends –including financial reporter Michael Ocrant who wrote the first article exposing Madoff years before the scandal broke– helping him investigate. But not even Ocrant’s story, which led to a follow-up article in Barrons was enough to get the SEC to sit up and take notice.