I thought that, given all the pervasive bank crimes over the last several years, we wouldn’t have a time when the roof appeared to cave in on the financial industry. But I’m getting that feeling today. All of the criminality and venality and greed seems to be coming to a head.

The flames of the Libor scandal have been creeping up under the feet of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Evidence showed that the New York Fed found out about the rate-rigging from Barclays and other banks in 2007, when Geithner was still the bank President. This appeared to display regulatory impotence in the face of massive fraud. Geithner had to respond. And he did with a classic version of CYA.

One of the more confusing positions for Democrats in the end-of-the-year “fiscal slope” negotiations concerns where they stand on the defense trigger. Obviously, with Republicans desperate to close these cuts, at least for the first year, Democrats have an opportunity to leverage that into a better deal. However, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has undermined that by asserting that great damage would be done to national security if so much as one dime under the Administration’s budget gets cut.

Now, Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin is working on an alternative solution, where the defense budget gets lowered in this fiscal year, to cushion the blow for the trigger cuts down the road.

Not every politician is great on every issue, granted. But with Carl Levin of late, there’s been quite a swing. On the one hand, his Permanent Subcommittee for Investigations delivered Goldman Sachs on a silver platter to the Justice Department (it’s currently sitting in a conference room, untouched). He has jumped on JPMorgan Chase’s massive trading loss to argue for a tightening of the Volcker rule he co-authored. On the other hand, he sees no need to change an indefinite detention law that has been ruled unconstitutional by a federal district court judge.

Volcker rule co-authors Jeff Merkley and Carl Levin think that the JPMorgan Chase “Fail Whale” trade offers an opportunity to get the regulatory apparatus back on point with their vision of the rule, one that they say should be stronger in barring the types of risky trading from occurring at commercial banks.

In St Louis, thousands of students and parents are scrambling to find alternatives after a much heralded charter school system produced terrible test scores and ran out of money. It’s a pattern we’re starting to see in many places, with many for-profit charter schools closing for reasons of mismanagement or financial reasons.

The SEC is the Three Stooges of regulation.

The Senate plan for the JOBS Act today, a financial deregulation bill that would weaken investor protections with no economic benefit, was for three cloture votes – an amendment to add investor protections to the bill, an amendment to attach a reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank to the bill, and, if those failed, a cloture vote on the bill itself.

It appears a few Democrats have finally gotten around to reading the JOBS Act, the financial industry deregulation bill that would bring back penny-stock scams and remove investor protections. Multiple Democrats in the Senate have proposed changes to the legislation, which breezed through the House with ample Democratic support.

Every year the Defense Authorization includes some big controversy. This time it’s provision measure that would mandate indefinite detentions of terrorist suspects in military custody and open the door for those indefinite detentions to extend to US citizens. Mark Udall is trying to strip out that provision.