Cook Co., Illinois, Sheriff Tom Dart says he's opened criminal investigations of "robo-signing" foreclosure documents.

UTSA professor Mansour El-Kikhia returns to his native Libya after decades to advise Gadhafi rebels based in Benghazi.

CLICK HERE to read the story by In The Arena associate producer Leinz Vales.

An exiled Libyan dissident recently returned to the rebel stronghold of Benghazi after 30 years to fight on the opposition side.

Mansour El-Kikhia, a Texas college professor, called his return a "new adventure."

"It's a fantasy land. "Alice in Wonderland," "Waiting for Godot," it's unbelievable." El-Kikhia told "In The Arena" host Eliot Spitzer. "This has taught me to look at life in a different way."

El-Kikhia is an adviser to the rebel opposition against Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

FULL POST

Republicans say they won't vote to raise the debt ceiling unless they get "serious" budget reforms from the White House.  Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) comments on the debate.  FULL POST

Eliot Spitzer and CNN Sr. Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin look at discrepancies by possible GOP pres. candidate Donald Trump in a deposition for a libel case.   FULL POST

In our "They Got Away With It" segment, journalist Matt Taibbi reveals how the Fed bailout benefited people who were already rich, including Wall Street wives (CLICK HERE to read his Rolling Stone article, "The Real Housewives of Wall Street").  FULL POST

The Number of the Day is $210 billion.

If the country is to recover from the recession—in part caused by some very bad decisions at very big banks—it means the banks need to lend more money to businesses and individuals, who can then invest it and create jobs.

The banks say that’s what they’ve been doing. FORTUNE’s Colin Barr reports that Bank of American claims it provided $144 billion in credit in the first quarter. Wells Fargo lent $151 billion. JPMorgan Chase? A whopping $450 billion.

Big numbers. But as the chart above shows–comparing 1Q2011 with 1Q2010–in the first quarter of 2011, loan amounts from those three banks—plus loans from Citi–dropped 7% from a year earlier.

A decline of $210 billion—our number of the day–even as deposits rose 5 percent.

"We got to where we are today by making good loans and making sound credit decisions," Wells Fargo's chief financial officer, Tim Sloan, said in an interview with the magazine on Wednesday.

Fair point. Nobody is encouraging bad loans. We are just observing that until lending picks up, it is harder to see a deeper recovery taking hold. FULL POST

ONLY ON THE BLOG: Answering today’s five OFF-SET questions is Rajan Menon, professor of political science at City College of New York/City University of New York.

Menon was a Fellow at the New America Foundation and an Academic Fellow and Senior Advisor at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, where he played a key role in developing the Corporation's Russia Initiative. Dr. Menon was also a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and as Director for Eurasia Policy Studies at the Seattle-based National Bureau for Asian Research. He is author of the book, “The End of Alliances.” Prof. Menon is currently working on his next book, “Hubris: The Anatomy of Military Disasters.”

Britain announced this week it is sending senior military advisors to advise the rebels fighting Moammar Gadhafi’s regime. A British military spokesman, Maj. Gen. John Lorimer, quoted in The Wall Street Journal, said, “This is not mission creep.”

Why do you think NATO countries are having such a hard time defining their role in Libya? (It seems pretty clear that the rebels can’t topple Gadhafi themselves and if he were to step down or be forced out, it’s unlikely they will be able to rebuild Libya without Western help.)

The British (and the French) are now in a tough spot.  Their air campaign has utterly failed to achieve the stated goal of protecting civilians. So they're now casting about for something else to do. But of course they want it to be something that limits risks to their forces and that can be justified through a tortured reading of Security Council Resolution 1973, which says nothing about changing Libya's government.

The problem with the step they've now taken is that the Libyan opposition lacks unity and military effectiveness.  Even under the best of circumstances a handful of advisers from Britain (and France and Italy, who say they join the effort) will hardly change that reality in any reasonable amount of time. FULL POST

TOPPLING GADHAFI TAKING LONGER THAN EXPECTED – The U.S. and its allies are being drawn more deeply into an intervention they had expected would quickly topple Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, Bloomberg/Businessweek reports. The U.S. announced yesterday it will provide $25 million in aid to Libya’s disorganized and poorly equipped rebels, while Italy, France and the U.K. dispatched military advisers.

Meanwhile, as of Thursday, rebels now control the Libya-Tunisia Dheiba border crossing, according to Mohammed Ali Abdallah, the Deputy Secretary General of The National Front for the Salvation of Libya. FULL POST