This issue: June 4, 2012 (Vol. 17, No. 36)

On, Wisconsin!

BY STEPHEN F. HAYES

"This is what democracy looks like.” That was the boast of protesters occupying the Wisconsin state capitol 16 months ago as they blocked Republican lawmakers from entering the legislature and celebrated Democratic state senators who had fled the state to avoid a vote on Governor Scott Walker’s budget reforms. So in some respects it’s fitting that a process launched in the intellectual incoherence of those early days will end with an election to recall an official whose offense is doing as governor the things he promised as a candidate he’d do. This is not, of course, what democracy looks like​—​at least not what it ought to look like.

The Wisconsin recall is a farce​—​a childish, union-sponsored tantrum that will cost the state’s taxpayers an estimated $18 million. Perhaps the greatest irony is that Democrats rarely discuss its ostensible cause: collective bargaining. Tom ...

Small Potatoes

Obama’s overblown tax breaks for business.

BY FRED BARNES

In his State of the Union speech in 2011, President Obama referred to “small business” five times and alluded to it seven more. Progress in America is measured, he said, “by the prospects of a small business owner who dreams of turning a good idea into a thriving enterprise.” In this year’s address, the mentions were down to three.

But Obama hasn’t abandoned the subject. He routinely boasts of having gotten 17 small business tax cuts enacted. And last week being National Small Business Week, the president said he has come up with an array of fresh tax cuts for struggling small business owners.

There are three big problems here. The first is that his 17 tax cuts have had little if any impact on small businesses or the economy. Basically, they failed. Second, his new cuts are much like the earlier ones. They’re temporary, narrow, and not what small business owners are ...

Indian Spring

Another Massachusetts miracle for Scott Brown?

BY GEOFFREY NORMAN

Newton, Mass.

The event was called “Hoops for Our Troops,” and it was held on Armed Forces Day (May 19) in a high school gym here in Newton. The mayor, Setti Warren, came up with the idea. He is an Iraq war veteran himself and passionate about helping vets. The event brought veterans together with potential employers as well as representatives from job training programs, health care providers, counseling services, and others. Spice for the event came in the form of two basketball games. In one, the players were disabled veterans in wheelchairs. The other game, which was the draw, was between teams that were a mix of vets and local celebrities, mostly from broadcasting and sports, among them Kevin Faulk of the New England Patriots. Mayor Warren also suited up to play.

This was a made-to-order opportunity, then, for any capable, hustling politician looking to connect with constituents, early ...

Snake in Fur

The lies and loves of Lillian Hellman.

BY HARVEY KLEHR

Few American cultural figures have suffered as steep a decline in reputation as Lillian Hellman. 

Lionized in the media, Hollywood, and popular culture during the 1970s as a woman of valor and rare courage who had lived an independent, sexually liberated life long before American taboos on sexual freedom had been broken down, she was also lauded for bravely standing up for intellectual freedom and constitutional rights during the darkest days of McCarthyism. By the end of the decade, however, in the words of her newest biographer, Alice Kessler-Harris, she had been reduced to “the archetype of hypocrisy, the quintessential liar, the embodiment of ugliness.”

Kessler-Harris, a distinguished professor at Columbia and well-known feminist historian, justifies her decision to write yet another biography of Hellman (she identifies two others as offering ...

An Unmoveable Feast

Ethan Epstein, in a New York System state of mind

BY ETHAN EPSTEIN

When I learned recently that I’d be moving back to the East Coast for a job after several years out west, my girlfriend asked a question she knew would be on my mind: “How soon will you be able to make it to Providence for New York System?”

Of all the things that Rhode Island, where I grew up, is famous for—endemic corruption, Family Guy, that accent—the state’s signature food is perhaps the most underrated. The New York System wiener is a small, thin frankfurter made of veal and pork, which, when ordered “all the way,” is topped with meat sauce, celery salt and other spices, mustard, and onions. I’ve been known to throw back four at a sitting. There’s an art to its preparation. Like the chef at a blue-collar Benihana, the wiener-master lines a row of buns up one arm, while with his free hand he adds the franks and condiments at lightning speed. This elegant technique is known as “up the ...

And That’s the Way It Was

The Scrapbook likes to think of itself as sophisticated, although we realize that we’re probably not as sophisticated as we like to think. Having just read a book review by Howard Kurtz in the Daily Beast, however, we’re feeling especially urbane, all-knowing, well-schooled, and, well, sophisticated.

Kurtz, of course, was for many years the media critic for the Washington Post—and a pretty good one, as media critics go—before he jumped ship to Tina Brown’s dubious enterprise. But last week he took up Douglas Brinkley’s new biography of Walter Cronkite (“sweeping and masterful”), and the scales seem to have fallen from his eyes.

“In the early 1970s,” writes Kurtz, “the most trusted man in America did a very untrustworthy thing.” 

It turns out that, while serving as chief news reader for the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite made a private deal with Pan Am to ...