Larry Lewis might need to eat more crow in Lancaster

The Lancaster, Texas, school superintendent claimed a year ago, after the suburban Dallas school district was discovered to have a big financial shortfall, that it was just a matter of money not being transferred properly, not put in the right place, and not properly documented.

Well, Larry, you may need to retract that statement in the future. Eugene Smith, your chief financial officer at that time, has pled guilty to illegally using a credit card from a couple of jobs back, when he worked for Washington, D.C., schools:

On September 25, 2001, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) received a complaint from Eugene P. Smith, Director, Internal Audit, District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), who reported accounting irregularities pertaining to the New Vistas Public Preparatory Charter School (New Vistas). The charter for New Vistas was revoked on September 6, 2001. Smith, who had the responsibility for closing out New Vistas’ financial accounts, accepted responsibility for all of the charter school bank accounts. A joint investigation conducted by Special Agent Kerthalia W. Peavely, OIG, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, disclosed that Smith, without authority, closed one of the accounts, transferred the funds into a new account, designated himself the sole signatory, and obtained a business check/debit card.

On July 31, 2002, Smith’s DCPS employment was terminated due to a Reduction in
Force; however, he did not relinquish possession of the debit card. Between April 2003
and July 2003, Smith expended $46,742.94 in cash as a result of 114 transactions, using
the debit card from the New Vistas bank account. Smith closed out a second account,
transferred $109,861 into a new account, and again made himself sole signatory.
However, Smith made no withdrawals from this account. The DCPS Office of the
General Counsel has initiated efforts to obtain possession of these funds.

At the least, somebody needs to call the Texas Education Agency, especially since Larry’s old friend, Shirley Neely, is no longer in charge there, and tell it to come back up here and it or the Legislative Budget Bureau start doing some more auditing.

And, although LISD supposedly doesn’t have a lot of credit or debit cards, has the district done a recent audit?

Democrats could learn from Jeremiah Wright

At the National Press Club today, when a reporter asked the stimulating and controversial Rev. Wright about his “America’s chickens are coming home to roost” and “(it) supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans” comments, among others, he made in his sermon the Sunday after 9/11, and asked if he thought that was divisive, he challenged her if she had seen the whole sermon. When she shook her head “no,” he said …

“That nullifies that question.”

Why can’t Democratic politicians get the hang of that?

Nature Conservancy working to create new preserve in Namibia

This is why I like, even with a few dollars, being involved with a program like this. Besides, for this particular story, reading about the challenge of crossing 200 miles of the Namib Desert, mainly on foot, is fascinating.

Plenty of pork in new farm bill

The political payola includes a tax break for race horses for friends of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, timber interest friends of Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, and a refusal to cut or cap subsidy payments to higher-dollar farmers making more than $200,000 a year.

It did cut the ethanol subsidy from 51 to 45 cents per gallon, but in today’s fuel prices, the Senate could have passed a more comprehensive rider eventually phasing out the subsidy.

Kevin Drum becoming neo-Kausian

That’s as in, becoming more like Mickey Kaus all the time, and no, that’s not a compliment. If only it were neo-Kantian instead.

The latest assault on progressive-minded brains? Two posts today on Roger Lowenstein’s New York Times Magazine piece denoting the detailed contributions of Moody’s to the subprime crisis in particular and the credit crunch in general. For my in-depth take on Lowenstein’s article, go here.

Anyway, on to Drum’s offenses. It’s just Sunday, and he’s already written two pieces which will certainly tie for weakest post of the week.

In this first piece, he calls himself a “dissenter,” in the Kausian Puke Badge of Pseudocourage sense, I guess for standing up to alleged progressive orthodoxy. Then he quotes his favorite Kausfiles type economic shill, Brad DeLong, in support of the dissenting view, which he expressed in a rhetorical question at the start, “were they (Moody’s and others) innocent bystanders in a world gone mad”?

But then, he backs away from DeLong, in three paragraphs of turgid, or turd-gid, constipated writing that you can’t say for sure where the hell Kevin even stands.

Then, in a follow-up post, Kevin says, “Call me a rube,” with naïve incredulity that Moody’s has computer software that lets it “game” the ratings for CDOs, SIVs, etc. He finally comes to his Teddy Roosevelt-reminding, backbone of a chocolate éclair conviction that “Maybe the real bubble of the last few years has been a rating agency bubble.”

Hey, way to stick your neck out, Kevin.

Why don’t you ask one of your blogged cats, Inkblot or Domino?

New light shed on Raoul Wallenberg mystery

Wallenberg, as World War II buffs know, was the Swedish diplomat who saved as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz. But, after he and his Hungarian driver drove off from Budapest in early 1945 with a Soviet escort, he disappeared from the pages of history.

Did he die in 1947, as has long been believed, or did he live on for years or even decades? Was his rescue mission financed by the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency? If so, was he spying on the Soviets as well as rescuing Hungarian Jews?

Some of those questions are starting to get answers attached to them.

In the 1990s, the CIA acknowledged that the OSS recruited Wallenberg. It would seem he was an operative for the Pond, a supersecret agency unknown to all but President Franklin D. Roosevelt and select War and State Departments insiders.

About the Pond, little is known. But later this year the CIA is to release a stash of Pond-related papers accidentally discovered in a Virginia barn in 2001. These are the papers of John Grombach, who headed the Pond from its creation in 1942. CIA officials say they should be turned over to the National Archives in College Park, Md. …

The Pond relied on contacts in private corporations and hand-picked embassy personnel. It worked closely with the Dutch electronics company N.V. Philips, “which had access to ‘enemy’ territory as well as a far-flung corporation intelligence apparatus in its own right,” said former CIA analyst Mark Stout, who wrote a brief unofficial history of the Pond.

The Swedish government has posted 1,000 pages of Wallenberg documents on government websites, which should also help.

As far as what happened to him inside the USSR, outside research suggests he lived until the 1980s, and not dying in 1947 as the Soviets claimed. He probably was in gulags, psychiatric hospitals and other Soviet custody situations.

n 1991, the Russian government assigned Vyacheslav Nikonov, deputy head of the KGB intelligence service, to spend months searching classified archives about Wallenberg.

“I think I found all the existing documents,” Nikonov e-mailed The Associated Press last month. The Soviets believed Wallenberg had been a spy, he said, but unlike many political detainees he never had a trial.

Nikonov’s conclusion: “Shot in 1947.”

Later in 1991, Russia and Sweden launched a joint investigation that lasted 10 years but failed to reach a joint conclusion.

The 2001 Swedish report said: “There is no fully reliable proof of what happened to Raoul Wallenberg,” and listed 17 unanswered questions.

The Russian report bluntly said, “Wallenberg died, or most likely was killed, on July 17, 1947.” It named Viktor Abakumov, the head of the “Smersh” counterintelligence agency, as responsible for the execution and cover-up. It said the Russians consider the Wallenberg case “resolved.”

Unsatisfied, independent consultants and academics have kept digging, analyzing, reassessing old information and pressing for the Kremlin to release missing files.

That said, Sweden admits it had chances to at least try to regain Wallenberg’s freedom in the two years between his arrest by the Soviets and their claimed date of his execution, but that it had a “passive” attitude.

That then leads to the question: Did Stockholm know the OSS had recruited Wallenberg? Was it forced to take a more passive attitude on trying to win his release?

In the mid-1950s, the Swedes pursued the case more aggressively, the story notes. That prompted a memo from Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in 1957 that Wallenberg had died of heart failure in detention 10 years earlier. Note how that contradicts Nikonov’s claim he was shot.

Here’s why the Soviets feared and mistrusted Wallenberg:

Wallenberg's very name may have been enough to arouse Russian distrust. Throughout the war, his cousins Marcus and Jacob Wallenberg, the czars of a banking and industrial empire, had done business in Germany, producing the ball bearings that kept its army on the move.

The Wallenbergs also were involved in discreet, unsuccessful peace efforts between the Allies and Germany, which Stalin feared would leave him excluded — a foretaste of global realignment that would lead to the Cold War.

There’s plenty of additional fascinating stuff at the link, enough for somebody to start thinking about a great movie. There’s also more testimony from Russians who claim to have seen him alive after 1947, and links to websites with more about Wallenberg and his humanitarian deeds.

I think Wallenberg lived; I think Stalin would not have been stupid enough to execute him. And, how could his name be brought up in post-1947 spy swaps?

Assuming he did live, or even if he was shot in 1947, it’s time for post-Soviet Russia to do the proper things. Repatriate his remains, and open all the archives.

Ditto for the U.S. Beyond Wallenberg, World War II historians would love to learn more about the Pond.