Running Out Of Room

Ralph "Bucky" Phillips is rapidly running out of running room. The FBI has put Phillips on the 10 most wanted list. While that is not a guarantee that he will be captured, the FBI list has been an astonishingly successful tool in catching criminals for many years.

BUFFALO, N.Y. - A fugitive sought in one of New York's largest manhunts on suspicion of killing a state trooper and wounding two others has been added to the FBI's 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list.

Ralph "Bucky" Phillips, a career thief who broke out of an Erie County jail in April, has already been added to the federal marshals' 15 Most Wanted list and was to be featured on "America's Most Wanted."

Phillips, 44, became the subject of a massive search after allegedly shooting a state trooper near Elmira in June.

Authorities believe Phillips has been helped by numerous people since his escape, but has also broken into unoccupied hunting cabins in New York and Pennsylvania and stolen about 15 cars to remain ahead of police, authorities said.

Phillips may have spent 11 days hiding out in a western Pennsylvania home last month, slipping back into New York at least once to steal 41 guns from a gun shop, authorities said.

Earlier posts with links to wanted posters here, here and here. FBI press release here.

Digging For Protection

Environmentalists are calling on the federal government to place emergency endangered species protection on a three foot long pink worm that smells like a lily and can spit when provoked. While it does sound an awful lot like somebody had a bit too much to drink, the Giant Palouse Earthworm apparently actually does exist. Kind of.

Long thought extinct, the worm was rediscovered in the past year to occupy tiny swatches of the heavily farmed Palouse region along the Washington-Idaho border.

"This worm is the stuff that legends and fairy tales are made of," worm supporter Steve Paulson declared. "What kid wouldn't want to play with a 3 foot-long, lily smelling, soft pink worm that spits?"

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has not yet seen the petition regarding Driloleirus americanus, agency spokesman Tom Buckley said in Spokane.

Normally when the agency gets a request, it will consider whether an emergency listing is needed. Then it will do a 90-day review to determine if the issue warrants additional study, Buckley said.

If it deserves more study, there will be a year long review to decide if endangered species protection is needed, Buckley said.

"When you consider how the Palouse prairie has been utilized, with all the agriculture down there, how anything like that survived the effects of agriculture is beyond me," Buckley said.

The stuff of legends? Or a bad case of the DTs? Anyway, it seems there have suddenly been a real rash of the extremely rare species popping up and being used to force protection on various areas lately. But in this case they actually may have a point. You see, the news report does not tell the full story. The worm in question was "discovered" by a researcher digging in the soil. The worm in question was also cut in half by said researcher's shovel. The worm in question is a very dead worm. No word if it got to spit before it passed away.

I demand the federal government immediately ban researchers from cutting the "stuff of legends" into pieces with their shovels!

About That Culture Of Corruption Thingee

Remember when the Democrats were touting that as the strategy that would propel them to victory in November? I said at the time that they were playing with a dangerous double-edged sword. Told ya so.

Cantwell, a Democrat who is in a tight re-election race, has reported for years that former campaign manager Ron Dotzauer owes her between $15,000 and $50,000 for a personal loan predating her first Senate election in 2000. Dotzauer now runs a lobbying firm.

The loan was still listed as outstanding on the financial disclosure report Cantwell filed in May. The senator's office said Dotzauer continues to advise informally Cantwell's campaign as an unpaid adviser.

Since last fall, Cantwell has helped persuade Senate appropriators to set aside $9.6 million — known as "earmarks" in congressional parlance — for a dam project benefiting two clients of Dotzauer's firm and $2 million more for the biotechnology company Inologic also represented by his firm.

Cantwell's spokesman said Thursday the senator's efforts to secure the money had nothing to do with Dotzauer or his personal loan, and were driven by the fact that the projects benefited her home state.

"She believes a senator from Washington state should fight for the people and companies of the state when it comes to matters before the federal government. That's part of her job," spokesman Michael Meehan said.

Senate ethics rules require lawmakers to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest in taking official acts that benefit people with whom the senators have a personal financial interest.

Ethics experts said Cantwell's case illustrates the difficulties lawmakers can get themselves into when they have personal dealings with a lobbyist who has client business before their offices. They said she should have avoided helping the clients or made sure the loan was repaid before she helped.

"It is clear that this financial relationship web between the senator and the lobbyist creates a huge conflict of interest," said Ellen Miller, head of the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation, which is working to highlight how lawmakers use earmarks to reward special interests.

"At the end of the day, there is a private lobbyist who is making a lot of money off her public actions. And it certainly appears, with the loan, to give her a stake in his financial success," she said.

Whoops. The appearance of impropriety is rather obvious here. That's why I said this was a bad idea right from the start. Then again, I've noticed the Dems really toned down that issue lately.

Bombings In India

A series of four bomb blasts tore through the Western India town of Malegaon, with current estimates that 25 people have been killed. One of the blasts was outside a crowded mosque.

Four blasts took place in Malegaon town, 260 km (160 miles) northeast of Mumbai, India's financial hub, the NDTV channel said. One explosion was outside a mosque.

At least 25 people were killed, NDTV said. Police, however, said five people were killed in two blasts.

They said thousands had gathered at the mosque for Friday prayers.

The blasts came days after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that intelligence agencies had warned of more terrorist attacks across the country, possibly on economic and religious targets as well as on nuclear installations.

India has been on a heightened security alert after a series of bombs on commuter trains in Mumbai killed 186 people in July. The attack was blamed on Islamist militant groups with links across the border in Pakistan.

Malegaon has suffered religious violence in the past. In May, police recovered a cache of explosives and automatic rifles from the region based on information they said was provided by arrested Islamist militants.

Will update if I get more detail. Times of India has nothing better than this wire story yet.

Times Joins The Wal-Mart Jihad

This is a particularly egregious hit piece, even for the rapidly lowering standards of the New York Times. It seems that the Walton Family Foundation, run by the heirs of the Wal-Mart founder, has given money to think tanks that support *gasp* free enterprise. Oh. My. God. The worst part is the Times reporters slant and skew the story so much, it is positively pathetic. Example:

At least five research and advocacy groups that have received Walton Family Foundation donations are vocal advocates of the company.

The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, for example, has received more than $100,000 from the foundation in the last three years, a fraction of the more than $24 million it raised in 2004 alone.

Richard Vedder, a visiting scholar at the institute, wrote an opinion article for The Washington Times last month, extolling Wal-Mart’s benefits to the American economy. “There is enormous economic evidence that Wal-Mart has helped poor and middle-class consumers, in fact more than anyone else,” Mr. Vedder wrote in the article, which prominently identified his ties to institute.

Good lord. If they received all the foundation money in one year it would be less than 1/2 of 1%. Out of curiosity, will the Times now instantly condemn George Soros and Theresa Heinz Kerry for the funding they give to leftist think tanks and organizations? This is a hit piece, pure and simple. The obvious point made by the Heritage Foundation applies here:

Several of the research groups noted that their mission is to be an advocate for free market policies and less government intrusion in business. “Those aims are pro-business, so it’s not surprising that companies would be supporters of our work,” said Khristine Brookes, a spokeswoman for the Heritage Foundation.

Last year, for instance, The Baltimore Sun published an op-ed article by Tim Kane, a research fellow at Heritage, in which he criticized Maryland’s efforts to require Wal-Mart to spend more on health care. He objected to the move on the grounds that it was undue government interference in the free market, a traditional concern of Heritage.

But, of course, we can be pretty sure from the way this article slants and what it doesn't talk about, that if the Walton Foundation had given the money to causes on the left, there would be no article.

UPDATE: David Bernstein from The Volkh Conspiracy makes a related point.

The story does have a classic line. After spending almost the entire article raising suspicions of whether the free market groups are being unduly influenced by Walton family money, and discussing whether they should disclose the contributions in their publications, the article offhandedly mentions that labor unions give prodigious funding to anti-Wal-Mart organizations. Is this an "astroturf problem," as the article tries to avoid implying, or at least something that raises at least as many issues as the Walton Family Foundation funding the likes of AEI?