“Democratic State Senators who protested the budget repair bill by leaving the state have been found. The lawmakers are in the Best Western Clock Tower Resort in Rockford Illinois.” [WTMJ]

So, folks have been asking where Americans draw the line on federal budget cuts. We think we’ve found it:

Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) alerted Capitol Police Thursday after a threatening fax arrived at her office attacking her proposal to strip Pentagon sponsorship from NASCAR teams.

It’s very, very nasty. And it’s yours, after the jump.

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Is any guest actually recognizable in this trailer? Except for Fake Thomas Paine?

[via Weigel]

Google Books has every issue of Spy magazine online. We’ll see you next week.

Spy Archive [via Kottke]

Just when America teeters on the verge of admitting Libertarians into polite company, John Stossel steps forward to remind us that they’re all batshit crazy:

Here’s a novel idea: Escape the suffocating chains of intrusive government by starting your own country!

That’s Patri Friedman’s idea. He comes from an impressive line of libertarian thinkers. Milton Friedman, the Nobel-prize-winning free-market economist, was his grandfather. His father is David Friedman, author of the libertarian classic “The Machinery of Freedom.” Milton Friedman advocated severely limited government. David Friedman thinks we need no government at all. And now Patri believes he has an effective solution to bad government: communities on the ocean surface, or seasteading.

To be clear, this isn’t some fanciful Ark, a rhetorical device to express the wistful desires of disenchanted progs to depart for the high seas and indulge in wanton drug-fueled orgies live a life free of people like John Stossel. No, Miltie’s Grandspawn is serious:

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I lived in Madison, Wisconsin for three years.  I went to the U.W. Law School, and participated in my share of standard-issue Madison protests.  The anti-war protests were large, and loud.  There was a walkout just before spring break in 2003 that underwhelmed, but the crowds got big, in a hurry, on the day the bombs started dropping.

As I got some distance from Madison, I looked at the protests cynically.  I came to view them as exercises in toothless, mindless, directionless idealism that sounded cool, but would change absolutely nothing.  (To boot: some of the leaders of the rallies were absolutely batty.)  And that’s because that was, and is, the truth of it.

But what’s happening in Madison now just feels different, somehow.  Yes — it will change nothing.  After November, Republicans have a hammerlock on both chambers.  And Scott Walker is completely deaf to the protests that, if thousands of people were rising up against Obamacare or socialism, would become magically unplugged.  The removal of collective bargaining rights for state employees is a done deal (apart from the inevitable lawsuits).  The math tells me so.  No amount of pickets or sickouts, or even a general strike (which I don’t think Wisconsin labor leaders have the stones to do), will change it.

And yet, for tonight at least, my whole heart is behind these guys.  They can change the world.  The bill will be passed — that ship has sailed.  But they can still change the world, maybe.

Missed this the other day:

And didn’t you love him in Young Frankenstein?