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Judging Poland’s Democracy Protesters do what the EU can’t and force their leaders to U-turn.

Posted By on July 19th, 2017

Good news from Poland: Democracy lives despite an uproar over the judiciary. That’s something to note for critics who see a threat to European values in the current ruckus in Warsaw.

The ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party has embroiled itself in efforts to rein in judges since winning 2015’s election. Its latest gambit is to try to fire all the Supreme Court justices, giving the Justice Minister authority to rehire its favorites. PiS also last week passed a law giving Parliament final say over membership of the National Judiciary Council (KRS), the independent body that nominates judges.

PiS says unaccountable judges thwart the will of voters by nixing laws passed by Parliament—including PiS initiatives the last time the party held power from 2005 to 2007. That’s debatable, but it doesn’t help that the departing Civic Platform leadership in 2015 tried to rush a series of lame-duck appointments to the Supreme Court, handing PiS an early opportunity to stir public frustration with the judiciary.

Such debates are as old as the hills—judicial power, appointments and tenure preoccupied America’s Founders—and some perspective would help. Foreign activists and the European Commission in Brussels fret that PiS is a threat to democracy. They’re right that the proposals are heavy-handed. Yet there’s no perfect method for balancing judicial independence and democratic sovereignty. Brussels doesn’t have a democratic mandate to impose its view, which leans more toward judicial independence than democratic oversight.

More important are the protests from thousands of Poles in Warsaw telling their government that PiS’s court plans don’t represent the balance those voters want. The uproar has caused President Andrzej Duda, a former PiS politician whose office is usually ceremonial, to threaten to veto the Judiciary Council law.

Mr. Duda’s proposed compromise would require a two-thirds parliamentary majority to approve nominations to the commission, depriving PiS of its ability to stack the body with the simple majority it won in 2015 with less than 38% of the vote. Now Parliament, and voters, will decide.

It’s hard to find examples in history of independent judiciaries thwarting determined tyrants. What matters more is resistance from citizens demanding democratic rights. By that standard, this week’s peaceful protests—which led to Mr. Duda’s U-turn—show Polish democracy is resisting PiS’s overreach.

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‘Dunkirk’ Review: Finding Humanity in Calamity Christopher Nolan revisits the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Allied troops from a French beach during World War By Joe Morgenstern

Posted By on July 19th, 2017

In “Dunkirk,” an astonishing evocation of a crucial event during the first year of World War II, Christopher Nolan has created something new in the annals of war films—an intimate epic. The scale is immense, and all the more so in the IMAX format that shows the action to best advantage. The density of detail is breathtaking; it’s as if the camera can barely keep up with what’s happening inside and outside the frame. Yet the central concern is steadfastly human. Whether we’re watching a huge Allied army encircled by Nazi forces on a beach in France or tracking the progress of their would-be rescuers, the drama turns on individuals and their feelings—of terror, excruciating vulnerability and fragile hope that they will make it back home, only 26 miles across the English Channel.

What the film excludes is historical context. It is not, and wasn’t meant to be, an explanation of the circumstances that led, in the spring of 1940, to the entrapment of some 400,000 British, French, Belgian and Canadian troops, including what Prime Minister Winston Churchill called “the whole root and core and brain of the British Army.” Instead, “Dunkirk,” which Mr. Nolan directed from his own screenplay, is a fictionalized, impressionistic account of a calamity that culminated in a near-miracle, although many lives were lost in the process—the rescue of 338,000 of those soldiers by shallow-draft naval vessels plus a large civilian flotilla of fishing boats and yachts.

With sparse dialogue, a minimum of digital simulations and an emphasis on spectacular images, the production follows, among others, a young British enlisted man, Fionn Whitehead’s Tommy, from the moment he emerges from the streets of Dunkirk to join vast throngs of other men, most of them young and all of them frightened, on the sands of what was formerly a vacation resort. They have no more idea than he does what’s in store for them. All they know is that they’re totally vulnerable to German tanks and planes, and unlikely to survive. (The cast includes Harry Styles, of One Direction, making his acting debut.)“Dunkirk” is hardly the first film to depict the mad chaos of modern war. The champion in that category remains “Apocalypse Now,” with “Black Hawk Down” and “Saving Private Ryan” as strong contenders. Still, Mr. Nolan has spoken of his own list of influences being topped by “The Wages of Fear,” Henri-Georges Clouzot’s peerless thriller, made in 1953, about desperate men in South America driving nitroglycerin-laden trucks over primitive roads. What’s the common denominator? Existential terror, for sure, an awareness that one’s life may be snuffed out at any moment, but also classic suspense. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Run, Kamala, Run George Neumayr

Posted By on July 19th, 2017

It would be fun to watch her get demolished by Trump in 2020.

Finding a pol as (or more) obnoxious than Barbara Boxer is no easy feat, but Golden State voters managed to perform it by selecting Kamala Harris as her replacement. Harris is a left-wing dingbat of singular rudeness. A deluded Boxer thought of herself as kittenish and charming; Harris conceives of herself as more of a clawing feline — the relentless prosecutor who is going to bring the conservative dogs of Washington to heel. Except she is too vapid and dim to pull the role off.

My favorite moment from her absurd harangue of General Kelly earlier this year came when she demanded to know why he was subjecting immigration officers and local officials to a “Hobbesian choice.” She meant Hobson’s choice. Kelly was too nice to point out her sub-literate gibbering, but he did object to her lack of basic manners. She interrupted him repeatedly and finally he told her to knock it off (as have even John McCain and Richard Burr). That, of course, has occasioned feminist whining from Harris about a culture of mansplaining and double standards.

Barack Obama once got on the wrong side of her feminist fan club after he noted her striking good looks. He duly apologized for the infraction. The press, hinting at this secret to her success, calls her a “fresh face” in prospective presidential politics, by which it means a pretty one. It is hard to imagine reporters listening with bated breath to her pronouncements about this or that “Hobbesian choice” if she possessed the looks of, say, Barbara Mikulski.

Were it not for her fanatical support for abortion and all things culturally degenerate, NOW and NARAL would see Harris as an annoying and unworthy rival to Elizabeth Warren. A nubile Harris, after all, slept her way to the middle of California politics after she had an affair with a pol thirty-some years her senior, Willie Brown. An open crook with a Cosbyesque marriage to a long-suffering wife, Brown had no problem arranging lucrative state jobs for Harris after they trysted. The legendary San Francisco columnist Herb Caen called Kamala Harris Brown’s “steady.”

These days Harris furrows her brows over Trump’s “public corruption.” But Willie Brown, to paraphrase Oscar Levant, knew her before she was a virgin. She got at least two public jobs after serving as his mistress, according to the California press. It is safe to say that MSNBC-style fretting over “emoluments” didn’t figure into their pillow talk.

The growing chatter among Dems about her as a potential 2020 candidate is yet another illustration of the party’s lack of seriousness. At a time when it should be downplaying its image as an out-of-touch bi-coastal party, it deepens that image by pushing one more San Francisco radical forward. Who knows, maybe Harris can run with Pelosi.

According to press reports, Harris wowed supporters of Hillary’s at a recent fundraiser in the Hamptons. What a compelling look for a defeated party — a San Francisco kook feted by routed East Coast plutocrats impressed by her stern questioning of General Mattis over the plight of transgender soldiers. That should work well in the Rust Belt and the South.

Even Mark Penn, Hillary’s former strategist, is wincing at the party’s direction. He recently wrote that the party can’t recover if it stays on this far-left course. He proposes that the party adopt a more measured, less intolerant liberalism. But his plea is falling on deaf ears. The party is in no mood for any Sister Souljah moments. It remains the party of MoveOn.org, evident in the gushing over Harris for having raised money for it off her classless antics against Sessions and company.

In 1984, Reagan crushed the “San Francisco Democrats,” as his foreign policy advisor Jeane Kirkpatrick called them. Trump, in his re-election bid, would do the same, should Harris somehow rise to the top in the primaries. He would probably find that even more fun than beating “Pocahontas.”

MEDIA Comments turned off

Has President Trump’s ‘Fake News’ Criticism Made a Shambles of CNN? Turmoil at the network could spell the end for CEO Jeff Zucker.by Sarah Ellison

Posted By on July 19th, 2017

After relentless attacks from Trump and his allies, a series of journalistic problems, and in the shadow of a possible merger, the network’s C.E.O., Jeff Zucker, is feeling the heat. “I think there’s a real chance that Zucker is being forced out,” said one employee. “That’s going to blow up this organization like nothing in the history of CNN.”

CNN regularly welcomes members of the Donald Trump White House to appear on New Day, its morning show. When the administration sent word last Monday evening that White House adviser Sebastian Gorka was available the following morning to discuss the retaking of Mosul from ISIS, CNN producers readied the script. New Day co-anchor Alisyn Camerota handled the interview, and spent the first portion of the conversation on the scheduled topic. But when the discussion inevitably turned to Donald Trump Jr.’s recently revealed “I love it” e-mail to the Russian attorney, Gorka had his opening to change the topic. He made CNN, and its coverage of the Russia investigation, the story. Gorka scoffed at Camerota, deriding “the amount of time you spend in desperation on a topic that has plummeted you to 13th place in viewership ranking across America.”

“More people watch Nick at Night cartoons than CNN today,” Gorka continued, before suggesting that his appearance was revenge for a long, contentious interview the previous day between Camerota’s co-host Chris Cuomo and Kellyanne Conway. “They called us to offer that he come on the show,” Camerota told me, regarding her interaction with Gorka. “Why do they do that if he doesn’t think anyone watches us and that we don’t practice good journalism? It makes no sense.” The tactic nevertheless played very well with its most important audience. “Did you see Gorka?,” Trump reportedly told his advisers. “So great, I mean really, truly great.” It’s a tactic that CNN’s own anchors have grown accustomed to. “When the light goes on, to me, it’s like hearing the bell sound the beginning of a round,” Cuomo told me later. “When the show starts, it is ding ding ding, who is coming at me and with what kind of weapon today? Is it a personal insult? Is it questioning our reporting? Is it a false narrative? Is it whataboutism?”

This is the strange theater of Donald Trump’s battle with the media, often making for riveting television, and fantastic for ratings, but operating on multiple levels. It’s more than just theater, however, and CNN is at the center of it. The president has targeted the network more vocally than even The New York Times and The Washington Post, the outlets that have delivered the most harmful journalistic blows to his administration. Partly, this is because, with CNN, it’s personal. The network’s president Jeff Zucker greenlit the Apprentice back when he was running NBC, and the two were friendly before they found themselves as bitter adversaries after the election.

And for Zucker and CNN, the circus is already having dangerous consequences. Despite all his flaws and unpreparedness for office, Trump is good at one thing: throwing people off their game. His war with the media has kept him afloat politically while he and his family have been dogged by increasingly damaging information about their connections to Russia. As the Republicans’ latest stab at a health-care bill falters, and the Trump administration fails to rack up a single significant legislative achievement, the president has thrown much of his public commentary into trashing CNN. He rewards surrogates, such as Gorka and Conway, who denigrate CNN on its own airways, even as the network pays other Trump surrogates, such as Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany, to defend the administration’s talking points. “He’s gone full war with the media, no doubt about that,” said one editor with close ties to the White House. “It is full-on full-scale warfare with CNN.”

The struggle is coming at a time when there are backstage pressures. Zucker’s bosses at Time Warner are now preparing to merge into telecom behemoth AT&T, a deal that requires regulatory approval from the Department of Justice, and a deal Trump has said he doesn’t like.

For both Zucker and CNN, the pressure is distorting. “We may look back in five years and find that CNN was fundamentally changed because of Trump,” one CNN employee told me. “Maybe it will turn out that Trump changed the brand” through his battle with the network. “We think we’re the middle. What if there is no middle anymore?” (A CNN executive told me that the network has conducted extensive research on its brand, which has “found zero diminution in the brand as a result of the attacks on us.”)

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Pavlich: Clinton’s Russia dirt By Katie Pavlich

Posted By on July 19th, 2017

In light of Donald Trump Jr.’s changing story about meeting with a Russian “crown prosecutor” promising to give him damaging information about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign, many Democrat strategists and their liberal counterparts on Capitol Hill are once again overreacting. In the past week alone we’ve heard calls for treason charges, and one Democrat in the House has introduced an article of impeachment.

Because of the hysterical reaction, lets take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Were Trump campaign officials the only ones engaging in questionable behavior regarding Russia? Hardly. The Clintons are in the same category.
First, lets start with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server in hostile countries around the world. After all, she repeatedly bragged about the miles she traveled on the campaign trail.

While FBI investigators say there is no evidence hackers infiltrated the server, they also admit good hackers could have gotten in, taken important information and left without a trail. Further, because Clinton failed to turn over all 13 devices she used to access her private server (after claiming she only used one), the FBI could not conduct a full examination of possible intrusions.

According to an FBI report produced last year, the server was attacked by bad actors multiple times. Foreign spy agencies and enemies of the United States, including Russia, quickly became aware Clinton was using an open, unprotected system and did their best to access it. At one point, the server was attacked 10 times in just two days. When Clinton received emails from aides with details about attacks, she brushed them off and didn’t call for an increase in security on the network. Hackers were notably successful in obtaining emails containing sensitive foreign policy discussions between Clinton and her political allies such as Sidney Blumenthal.

When Clinton traveled to Russia, known for its hackers and cyber warfare against the United States and other democracies, she didn’t bother to tap into the government-protected email system provided by the State Department. Instead, she continued to communicate through her personal, home-brewed and unsecured server. Essentially, she left classified U.S. secrets wide open for access.

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MY SAY: THE NEW GENDERALIZATION

Posted By on July 19th, 2017

When my brother and I were kids, my parents had a subscription to National Geographic magazine. The photography and the articles on flora and fauna in the jungles of the world, and lost and hidden tribes in exotic places were wonderful. Most important in those prudish days, it was the only magazine permitted in the home where one could occasionally see full frontal nudity. We eventually gratified our prurient interest in movies and television and stopped reading National Geographic.

Yesterday, at a doctor’s office I picked up the January 1, 2017 edition which was totally devoted to “Gender.” No more jungles. Just an intro by the doyenne of passe feminism, namely Gloria Steinem, who has decided that proper pronouns are anti public good. He and she, and all such gender descriptive terminology are unnecessary at best and hurtful at worst. Then the entire issue contains testimonials, lexicography, pictures of “theys” who are unsettled in their skin as a result of sexual and gender identity.

Why in the world is this subject in a whole issue of the magazine? Where are the tigers and tigresses and lions and lionesses, and hippopotamus and “hippoptamissus” of earlier issues ? Where is the gorgeous photography of mountains and jungles and giant water lilies and exotic frogs that delighted the readers?

rsk

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Entitlements Are Out of Control We are entering an economic death spiral. By Michael Tanner

Posted By on July 19th, 2017

While the White House was busy getting its latest Russia story straight, and congressional Republicans were inventing another new way to not pass health-care reform, few noticed the latest double-barreled dose of bad budgetary news. But anyone who cares about the long-term economic health of the country should be paying careful attention.

First, the Congressional Budget Office reported that this year’s budget deficit will hit $693 billion. That’s $134 billion higher than the CBO predicted just six months ago, and $100 billion higher than last year’s shortfall. Under current baselines, deficits are soon expected to hit $1 trillion per year. All this deficit spending will add more than $10 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, bringing it to more than $30 trillion.

Of course, those projections are based on current policies. President Trump has proposed deep cuts in domestic spending. Assuming the president gets everything he wants, the debt will increase to only $27 trillion. Hurray? Of course, after the health-care debacle, and given the president’s other distractions, does anyone really believe that all those cuts are going to happen?

But as frightening as those numbers are, most budget observers know that the real problems come farther down the road, when the true cost of entitlement programs, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid kick in. (Before legions of outraged seniors attack, let me simply point out that “entitlement” is simply a budgetary term for programs that are not subject to annual appropriation.) And it is these programs that are responsible for the second dose of bad news.

According to the latest report of Social Security’s trustees, the program’s unfunded future liabilities now exceed $34.2 trillion (in discounted present-value terms). True, the program can maintain technical solvency until 2034 (cold comfort to anyone 50 or younger today). But that number is largely an accounting fiction that assumes that the Social Security Trust Fund is an asset that can be used to pay benefits. In reality, of course, the Trust Fund is just a claim against general revenues. On the far more important cash-flow basis, Social Security is already spending more on benefits than it brings in through tax revenue.

Big numbers like $34 trillion tend to make the eyes glaze over, so consider this: Restoring Social Security to permanent sustainable solvency would require immediately a roughly one-third increase in the payroll tax (or an equivalent in other taxes), or a permanent reduction in benefits for all current and future beneficiaries of about 25 percent.

Meanwhile, Medicare is in even worse shape. For the record, the Trust Fund for Medicare Part A will be technically exhausted by 2029, but like Social Security, the program is already running a cash-flow deficit. The big Medicare shortfalls, however, will be in Part B and the prescription-drug program, both of which are funded largely out of general revenues. Taken as a whole, Medicare’s unfunded liabilities are nearly $49 trillion, a slight improvement from previous forecasts.

Those projections may, however, be overly optimistic. They assume that Medicare’s rising costs will probably trigger automatic spending cuts through Obamacare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), starting next year. But those cuts, which almost exclusively fall on doctors and hospitals, are potentially devastating. In fact, Medicare’s trustees warn in their report that payments to doctors would “fall increasingly below providers’ costs.” As a result, as many as half the nation’s hospitals, 70 percent of skilled nursing facilities and more than 80 percent of home health agencies would be losing money. More and more doctors will be driven to abandon the program.

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Time, Trump Jr. and Double Standards Time demonizes the president’s son — but guess who it hails as the “Hero and Icon of the Century”? Humberto Fontova

Posted By on July 19th, 2017

“Russia is a fierce rival of the U.S. and has been for generations. What politician jumps in bed with Russia? For advisers to a would-be President to take at face value an offer of clandestine assistance from Moscow is foolish at best, reckless for sure and potentially treasonous in the worst-case scenario.” (“Tailgunner” Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater and J. Edgar Hoover were all limp-wristed pinkos compared to this week’s Time magazine.)

Yet this very same Time magazine hails the Soviet Russians’ most faithful devotee/agent in the Americas as “Hero and Icon of the Century.”

“The solution to the world’s problems lies behind the Iron Curtain.” (Che Guevara.)

“I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won’t rest until I see these capitalist octopuses (the U.S.) annihilated!” (Che Guevara.)

“I have come to communism because of daddy Stalin and nobody must come and tell me that I mustn’t read Stalin.” (Che Guevara.)

“If the nuclear missiles had remained in Cuba we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of Atomic victims.” (Che Guevara, 1962.)

“What!? Is he (Fidel Castro) proposing that we start a nuclear war? That we launch missiles from Cuba…But that is insane!…Remove them (our missiles) as soon as possible! Before it’s too late. Before something terrible happens!” (Nikita Khrushchev Oct. 28th 1962.)

As documented above, had an aghast Butcher of Budapest not yanked the missiles from their “hero and icon” and his sidekick in the nick of time, the cinders representing New York’s Time-Life building along with its staff would today fit in a milk carton.

In 1999 when Time magazine hailed “The 100 Most Important People of the Century,” Che Guevara was among them, which at first glance seems reasonable. The term “important,” after all, can be construed as morally-neutral.

But Time placed Che in its “Heroes and Icons” category of the Century’s Most Important People, alongside Anne Frank, Andrei Sakharov, Rosa Parks and Mother Theresa. Sean Hannity’s former partner, the late Alan Colmes, scoffed when I pointed to Time’s classification of Che’s “heroism” as a classic example of the ignorance (if not outright insanity) of the mainstream media’s treatment of the mass-murdering terrorist. Colmes flat-out refused to believe me, smirkingly implying to his huge TV audience that I was a typical “right-wing Cuban-American crackpot!”

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President Trump Reverses Obama’s Anti-Christian Refugee Policy Christian refugee admissions increase during the first five months of Trump presidency. Joseph Klein

Posted By on July 19th, 2017

After declaring that Christians have “been horribly treated” by the refugee program under former President Barack Obama, President Donald Trump has reversed the Obama administration’s disgraceful discrimination against Christian refugees.

According to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. State Department refugee data, during the period from January 21, 2017 – President Trump’s first full day in office – through June 30, “9,598 Christian refugees arrived in the U.S., compared with 7,250 Muslim refugees. Christians made up 50% of all refugee arrivals in this period, compared with 38% who are Muslim.”

From April through June 2017, Iraq was “the only Muslim-majority nation among the top six origin countries.” The number of Syrian refugees admitted to the U.S. from January 21, 2017 through June 30, 2017 was 1779. Comparing the number of refugee admissions from Syria for the entire month of January with the entire month of February 2017, the number dropped by nearly half. By June 2017, the number of refugees admitted from Syria was about 26 percent of the already low number of 673 admitted in February.

By contrast, Pew Research Center reported that in fiscal year 2016 – Barack Obama’s last full fiscal year as president – “the U.S. admitted the highest number of Muslim refugees of any year since data on self-reported religious affiliations first became publicly available in 2002.” Overall, the number of Muslims admitted as refugees exceeded the number of Christians who were admitted.

Of the 12,486 refugees from Syria admitted to the United States during that same fiscal year by the Obama administration, about 99 percent were Muslim and less than 1 percent were Christian. Estimates of the Christians’ proportion of the total population of Syria have ranged from 5 to 10 percent since the onset of the Syrian civil war. Muslims made up 87% of Syria’s total population.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry declared in March of last year that the Islamic State had been committing genocide against Christians, Yazidis and other minorities in the Middle East. Nevertheless, the Obama administration decided that Christians and other refugees belonging to minority religious faiths did not deserve any priority for admission to the U.S. In fact, the Obama administration discriminated against Christians. It admitted proportionately less Christians relative to the total number of refugees from Syria than even the lower end of Christians’ estimated proportion of the total population of Syria. Incredibly, since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, approximately 96% of the Syrian refugees admitted to the United States by the Obama administration were Sunni Muslims even though ISIS and al Qaeda jihadists are themselves Sunni Muslims. The ideology of Wahhabism fueling the jihadists’ reign of terror, exported by Saudi Arabia, is of Sunni Muslim origin.

IMMIGRATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Improving Muslim Integration: Sending in the Clowns The surreal world of Sweden’s new migration policy. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on July 19th, 2017

If some of the things that are being done in Sweden today weren’t demonstrably true, they’d be unbelievable. If they weren’t so idiotically tragic, they’d be brilliantly funny.

What follows is not a joke. Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven and his crew have come up with a great new way to improve integration.

One word: clowns.

A quick reminder: thanks to the astronomical cost of feeding, housing, and clothing immigrants who prefer not to support themselves, and the equally formidable expense of policing those multiculturally enriched, high-crime areas that the authorities haven’t already given up on policing, Sweden is bleeding cash – big time. Among the results: major cutbacks in outlays for schooling, health care, and benefits for the elderly.

Nonetheless, the Swedish Migration Board has managed to find an unspecified number of kronor – apparently in the millions – to spend on the services of an organization called Clowner utan Gränser. Translation: Clowns without Borders (hereafter CWB). According to an article in the invaluable Friatider website, CWB plans to “’play’ its way to better integration.”

The Migration Board specifies that the clowns will be used to integrate non-EU immigrants – which in Sweden, of course, mostly means Muslims.

After reading Friatider’s story, I naturally went straight to CWB’s website. Front and center is detailed information about how to contribute money to this thing: “Become a donor and spread laughter every month!”

Click on “about us” and you’ll find out that CWB was founded in 1996 and operates in a dozen countries, sending clowns into refugee camps and youth prisons. CWB’s declared mission is “to meet children in pleasure, play, and joy.” It seeks to create “hope, humanity, and the will to live.” Its vision is “a world filled with play, laughter, and dreams, where all people have the opportunity to develop, express themselves freely, and feel hope even in vulnerable situations.” All its work “is done in our belief that it creates a better world.”

Of course it would be terribly cynical to call B.S. on all this. I’m sure it’s totally on the level and every bit as wondrous and magical as it sounds – and worth every kronor.

Just speaking for myself, however, the last thing I can imagine wanting to see if I were a little kid in a Third World refugee camp or youth prison would be a bunch of guys in clown outfits climbing out of a tiny car, juggling bowling pins, riding unicycles, making balloon animals, and sweeping up spotlights. Not to put too fine a point on it, but is any child ever really entertained by the antics of clowns? I’ve always had my doubts. All I know is that for as long as I can remember, clowns struck me me as witless, depressing, and vaguely creepy. Their costumes look as if they must be sweaty and smelly. A painted-on smile seems the very opposite of cheery. But hey, maybe that’s just me.