The acclaimed historian died today at 94. We remember him here.

Progressives in the House want more face time with Obama. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

Not looking good for wannabe-Madoff Sir Allen Stanford. His #2, James Davis, just flipped and is having a heart to heart with the FBI.

From the BBC:

Police are to investigate whether an MI5 officer was complicit in the torture of ex-Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed. …

Ethiopian-born Mr Mohamed says he was tortured while in US custody in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan, with the complicity of MI5.’

He says that in Morocco in 2002, he was mistreated by local officers who asked him questions supplied by British intelligence.

Mr Mohamed returned to the UK in February 2009 after seven years in custody – four of which were spent in the US camp at Guantanamo Bay.

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner said the investigation would focus on an MI5 officer known as Witness B, who travelled to Karachi in 2002 to question Mr Mohamed.

It is alleged that Witness B told Mr Mohamed that his only way out of Pakistani custody was to co-operate fully, and that the officer knew to where Mr Mohamed would be subsequently rendered.

Our correspondent added that a police investigation would be “deeply uncomfortable” for many in MI5.

It’s useful on occasion to remind ourselves what the GOP is still saying publicly and proudly about climate change. Here’s Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, speaking yesterday:

The London branch of AIG was so concerned about the demands to return the bonuses that a compliance officer asked British law enforcement whether it amounted to extortion:

After the meeting, a compliance officer for the Banque AIG unit in London went so far as to ask UK authorities from the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) to probe whether demands to return the payments could be considered extortion, according to emails obtained by Reuters.

But AIG spokesman Mark Herr said in a statement on Wednesday that the concern by compliance officer David Haig “on the legality of the repayments or potential repayments was not shared by the company.” Herr said that SOCA “has granted consent for the repayments to go forward.” A SOCA spokesperson said earlier in the day that the agency could not confirm or deny if the matter was under investigation.

However, such a probe likely would be a departure for the agency, given that its mission is to investigate serious organized crime matters.

SOCA should definitely look at AIG, but for entirely different reasons.

Late Update: Moe Tkacik has more at TPMmuckraker.

The House GOP set today for the rollout of its own budget proposal. You know, instead of just being the “Party of No” they’d actually show the public which hard decisions they would make. Well, not so much. Elana Schor just attended their press conference and let’s just say it was a glossy, but detail-free, rollout.

We’ve been in the midst of the reporting on the AIG bonus story and related high-octane blow-ups over compensation and the behavior of key players in the finance sector. And we’ve seen a non-trivial number of complaints that we’re sensationalizing this or that story or engaging in ‘cheap’ populism. Beside the reporting innards of the story, though, what interests me about this meta-story is the way it shows the implicit social contract under deep strain and some people operating totally outside of it without realizing it at all.

In ordinary times, most people seem more or less content with people in finance making vast sums of money. But when the companies that provide these salaries come to the government with hat in hand or when they’re credibly charged (in the loose, not the legal sense) with creating vast harm to the whole economy, the whole calculus changes. And fast. In fact, there was a poll yesterday that showed, not surprisingly, that people overwhelmingly oppose regulation of executive pay levels for independent companies but overwhelming support it for those companies that take federal aid.

On the one hand, I can understand the argument of Jake DeSantis, the AIG executive who says he agreed to stay and work for a year in exchange for a big bonus, was repeatedly assured he’d get it, and then was muscled into giving it up after a big popular outcry. ‘A deal’s a deal’ is always a strong argument.

On the other hand, when the public is funding the project, you’re just inherently out on a limb when you say: “Okay, I put in my year of work. Where’s my $1.5 million?”

When the companies have come to the taxpayer hat in hand, begging for money, at that point you’re into the average citizen’s moral space, in which it becomes her or his business whether you really deserve that much money — something that people just don’t think is their business as long as you’re talking about private corporations making or not making money in whatever way they’re able.

For what it’s worth, that’s the way I think too. As much as I think some exec paychecks are obscene and point to real imbalances in our economy, I’m really leery of limits on pay levels in private companies. To the extent that executives are paid too much, it seems like a broader issue of poor corporate governance, since shareholders shouldn’t be willing to pay executives obscenely more than they’re worth. But that’s sort of the point: shareholders, in practice, exert little real control over this sort of thing. (And I suspect, though I don’t know enough about this stuff to know, that that’s the case because in the post-1980 stock market, investors are much less concerned about the functioning of the companies — in a direct sense — than their ability to drive stock valuations.) But, yeah, when a company would be out of business without taxpayer help? Then we’re in your business. Do you really need $15 million as opposed to $2? Is your mortgage that high? Do you have that many kids in school.

I’ll leave to the side for a moment whether restrictions on pay at one taxpayer backed company will just leave it ripe for the plucking by other companies still operating without federal aid. And this is one reason why I think we might be better off with some sort of rapid restructuring that more quickly got these institutions cleaned up and reprivatized as quickly as possible. Because the whole situation gets awfully messy really fast, which is why it’s vastly better to keep these two spheres separate.

But I’d just like to conclude by saying that as much as we rightly look dimly on cheap populist outrage, we show no higher level of moral or intellectual sophistication by reflexively treating all public anger as undirected, contentless, stirred up agitation by unnamed dopes who haven’t taken the time to understand the complexities. There are real and wholly legitimate — just not always openly articulated — social bargains that explain why it is that the overwhelming number of people are content with the fact that some people make $45,000 a year and other people make $45,000,000 a year. It’s not just a given. And when parts of that bargain get upset, things can change very fast.

Security traders groups sends typo-riddled letter to Congress saying it’s a bad idea to take away their bonuses.