If you thought the foreclosure fraud settlement was bad, get this: the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the weakest federal regulator in the financial sphere (I’ve taken to calling them the Office of Bank Advocacy), decided to use the cover of the big settlement to announce their fines in their consent order with big bank servicers.

Charlie Savage has a great piece on the mess that is the DOD’s investigation and trial of those charged with the 2005 massacre of Iraqi civilians in Haditha. Sadly, as Savage points out, the lack of justice in this case is part of a disturbing pattern in the military, where all too often, PR trumps justice.

It’s not new. The Pat Tillman case was the same way, as PR concerns shoved the truth aside. Another example of the ongoing “PR trumps justice” movement in the military is on view at the Sundance film festival with “The Invisible War,” a film that describes itself as “a groundbreaking investigative documentary about one of our country’s most shameful and best kept secrets: the epidemic of rape within our US military.”

Within the military, it seems PR trumps justice, all too often. Our military, and our nation, deserve better.

In retrospect, the banks had a pretty sound strategy with Dodd-Frank: fight it during the legislative process, but not too hard, allowing lawmakers to think they’ve accomplished something. Then, during implementation, bend the regulatory apparatus to your will, gutting the law before having to follow it. That has been extremely successful, especially because Dodd-Frank wasn’t really a law so much as a promise to write a law later.

The latest victim of the finance lobby’s efforts on Dodd-Frank is the Volcker rule.

Basically, the banks successfully got the regulators to define “hedging” so broadly that virtually any proprietary trade could be seen as a hedge.

He won the praise of a few Senate Republicans. But because they are opposed to the entire concept of the agency, they remained in opposition to Cordray’s confirmation. The 44 Republicans who signed a letter vowing to oppose any nominee for CFPB unless the agency is gutted remain opposed.

[Editor's Note: Watch this hearing live]

I love how Cordray is a “controversial” nominee. Why? Because Republicans don’t think there should be a CFPB? How exactly does that make Cordray controversial?

It turns out that the Justice Department is not only concerned with Standard and Poor’s but the entire credit rating agency industry, it appears. The reported investigation into the ratings of mortgage backed securities during the housing bubble is centered on S&P, but not limited to them.

Darrell Issa is really not happy about a New York Times spread about how business interests have affected his job on the House Oversight Committee.

But first of all, the NYT should credit Lee Fang and Think Progress for the work that they’ve done on this. Second, Issa has no real reason to complain about what he has called a hit piece.

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed published today, J. William Leonard, who worked for five years as the director of the Information Security Oversight Information Office when George W. Bush was president, calls on the Obama administration to sanction “those who inappropriately classify information, and it needs to take far greater care in what it decides to label secret.”

Elizabeth Warren hinted at this last week when Richard Cordray was named as the nominee to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but now it’s official – she will leave her position as a counselor to Treasury and Assistant to the President on August 1. And rather than Cordray, the nominee and the current head of enforcement at CFPB, taking over, Raj Date will manage day-to-day operations until there’s a director.

Cordray had a short but impressive run as Ohio Attorney General, taking over for Marc Dann, who resigned after a sexual harassment scandal. Cordray was the very first Attorney General to sue a mortgage servicer over foreclosure fraud and robo-signing, in October 2010. I spoke with Cordray about that lawsuit against GMAC at that time. Unfortunately, he lost his re-election to former Sen. Mike DeWine in 2010, but Warren brought him into CFPB as head of enforcement.