Remember the American SAFE Act? It’s the bill that would have done … something … about tightening up the flow of refugees from Syria to the US. Exactly what it would do was never entirely clear, but it had its 15 minutes of fame when the House passed it last month. At the time, I was unsure it was anything more than a feint to make it look like Republicans were doing something, and suggested that the Senate would ignore it until refugee hysteria had died down and they could quietly kill it.

Yesterday I got curious: how’s it doing? I tried a Google search, but that brought up nothing. Finally I just went to congress.gov to see where it was in the legislative sausage machine. On the day it passed the House, this happened:

Received in the Senate. Read the first time. Deemed read the second time, pursuant to the order of November 19, 2015. Placed on Senate Legislative Calendar under General Orders. Calendar No. 300.

And that’s it. It apparently hasn’t been assigned to a committee. It hasn’t been scheduled for a vote. Not a single thing has happened. If there’s a hold on the bill, I can’t find it. It appears that it’s just being ignored in hopes that by January nobody will care anymore. That may or may not turn out to be a good bet. We’ll see.

Last night, as I was mass-deleting email, I noticed a message from some conservative group touting NEW! Benghazi information that proved something or other. I almost thought about reading it, but why bother? My finger continued clicking the delete key and it was soon history.

Today, though, I see that it was apparently based on yet another bombshell from Judicial Watch:

Judicial Watch today released a new Benghazi email from then-Department of Defense Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash to State Department leadership immediately offering “forces that could move to Benghazi” during the terrorist attack on the U.S. Special Mission Compound in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012.

….Bash’s email seems to directly contradict testimony given by then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2013. Defending the Obama administration’s lack of military response to the nearly six-hour-long attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Panetta claimed that “time, distance, the lack of an adequate warning, events that moved very quickly on the ground prevented a more immediate response.”

….“The Obama administration and Clinton officials hid this compelling Benghazi email for years,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The email makes readily apparent that the military was prepared to launch immediate assistance that could have made a difference, at least at the CIA Annex. The fact that the Obama Administration withheld this email for so long only worsens the scandal of Benghazi.”

The copy of the email that Judicial Watch received was redacted, so perhaps their excitement is understandable. But here’s the whole email:

Yep: just the same old stuff. There were forces in Croatia and Spain that could have responded, but it would have taken hours to get them to Libya. In the end, there was no hope that they could respond in time, so they weren’t mobilized. This is exactly what Panetta and every other Obama official have been saying for the past three years.

Repeat after me: There is no Benghazi scandal. There may have been mistakes, but nothing nefarious or negligent.

Why is Donald Trump not paying a price for his increasingly unhinged rhetoric? Two recent polls tell the story.

At the top is a Bloomberg poll that asks if you agree with Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims entering the country. Less than a quarter of Republicans oppose it. At the bottom is an MSNBC poll that asks what kind of person Trump is. Only a quarter of Republicans think he’s insulting and offensive. These aren’t polls of tea partiers. They aren’t polls just of conservative states. These are polls of all Republicans in the nation. By a very wide margin, ordinary Republican voters think the stuff Trump is saying sounds great. Only about a quarter don’t like what they’re hearing.

I don’t really know what to say about this. On 9/11, nineteen Muslim terrorists killed 3,000 Americans and destroyed two skyscrapers. There was an enormous thirst for revenge, and eventually George Bush used this to send us to war in Iraq. But even at the height of the fear, there was never any call to ban Muslim immigration.

This year, 14 people are killed by a couple of deranged Muslims with no real ties to international terrorism, and two-thirds of Republicans are in favor of banning all Muslims from the country. So what’s happened over the past decade? Multiple things, I suppose. This is an election year, and 2001 wasn’t. In addition to the San Bernardino shooting, there have been several overseas attacks and a huge tide of refugees coming from Syria. Republican voters have been driven crazy by Barack Obama, who they’ve been told repeatedly is all but a Muslim mole. Finally, in 2001 a Republican president spoke pretty firmly against anti-Muslim bigotry. No one on the Republican side is doing that now.

And of course, there’s Donald Trump. Is he cause or effect? A bit of both, I think. In any case, it’s increasingly clear why Trump isn’t paying a price for what he says: It’s because most Republicans like it.

UPDATE: I’m not trying to drive you all into despair for the country. Honest, I’m not. But here’s another one:

Exciting news! The trial over the copyright to “Happy Birthday” has been canceled and all parties have signed on to a settlement. This might mean that commercial use of the century-old song will finally be allowed royalty-free.

Then again, it might not. It’s possible that the copyright will simply be transferred to a different owner. We’ll find out when the settlement is made public.

Steve Benen makes a useful point today about Donald Trump’s brass-balled religious bigotry:

Jeb Bush told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd yesterday that the Trump campaign is relying on “dog-whistle proposals to prey on people’s fears.” That’s half-right — Trump is clearly preying on people’s fears, but these aren’t “dog-whistle proposals”; they’re the exact opposite. The whole point of dog-whistle politics is subtlety and coded language. Trump’s racism, however, is explicit and overt. “So what? They’re Muslim” is less of a dog whistle and more of a bullhorn.

Even Jesse Helms felt it necessary to talk about the “bloc vote”—wink wink, nudge nudge. In other contexts, candidates will use phrases familiar to evangelicals, or terms of art specific to deep knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or academese with a very specific meaning only to those in the know. Trump isn’t bothering with any of that. He thinks Muslims are all potential terrorists and he’s saying it just as loudly and as clearly as he can.

And guess what? It turns out that maybe you don’t need dog whistles after all. Republicans don’t need them because their base turns out to be pretty tolerant of outright bigotry. Democrats don’t need them because Republicans will just make up dog whistles of their own if they miss the meaning of the real ones (Agenda 21, hockey stick, etc.).

We should all hail our new era of two-fisted politics. Finally, we can just say all the stuff we’ve been holding back for so long. Doesn’t that sound great?

We could all use a little entertainment today, couldn’t we? Here’s mine. A few days ago I went to Angie’s List and bought a deal for four hours of housecleaning (i.e., two people for two hours, four people for one hour, etc.). Here’s how it went down:

8:45 am, four cleaners arrive

Cleaner: Do you have any special requests?
Me: Nope. Just clean the house.

9:45 am, with about two-thirds of the house cleaned:

Cleaner: Our four hours is up! Do you want us to stay and clean the rest of the house?
Me: Um, what?
Cleaner: We charge by the hour, and you bought four hours.
Me: You couldn’t clean the whole house in four hours?
Cleaner: We clean a lot better than other people. This is a deep cleaning.
Me: A what?
Cleaner: When I came this morning, I asked if you wanted anything special.
Me: And I said I didn’t.
Cleaner: That means you wanted a deep cleaning.
Me: That’s what that meant?
Cleaner: Yep.
Me: Couldn’t you have just asked if I wanted a regular cleaning or a deep cleaning? Wouldn’t that have been a better way of making sure everything was clear?
Cleaner: The deal you bought was for a deep cleaning. If you call us back for regular service, we’ll do a normal cleaning.
Me: Oh.
Cleaner: So do you want to buy more time?

I passed on the additional time. But I admit I’m curious to get some feedback. It’s true that the listing for this service said it was a deep cleaning. Apparently I read the headline, which only said “housecleaning,” and didn’t read much further. I guess I should be more careful about reading all the fine print in the future.

And yet, surely this was an easy thing to clear up at the start. Did I want a regular cleaning of the whole house, or a deep cleaning of whatever could be done in four hours? I feel pretty annoyed by all this. Should I? Or am I the one at fault for not reading carefully enough?

UPDATE: Interestingly, opinion is split. A majority seems to be on the “you got ripped off” side, but a substantial minority says the service advertised a deep cleaning, and that’s what I got. I should have asked more questions if I wanted to make sure the whole house got cleaned.

Over at 538, Hayley Munguia has an article titled “Here’s What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action In College Admissions.” Her charts surprised me:

What surprised me was how little effect affirmative action policies seem to have. Both blacks and Hispanics are substantially underrepresented at public research universities, but their underrepresentation is nearly the same in states with and without affirmative action bans. There’s a small effect from the bans, but that’s all.

If this data is correct, it’s a little puzzling that either side feels as strongly as they do about affirmative action at public universities. If race-based policies have this little effect, maybe it really would be a good idea to try something different.

In the spirit of the old-school blogosphere, I give you Shorter Bob Somerby™:

There are 1 million kids in public preschools in the United States. In 2012, about 8,000 of them were suspended. Is that really a lot?

Good question! That’s less than 1 percent, which doesn’t immediately strike me as “astounding”—Melinda Anderson’s description in the Atlantic a couple of days ago. It means that out of every five pre-K classrooms, about one child is suspended per year.

The racial disparities in preschool suspensions are disturbing, and it’s possible that the overall suspension rate has increased a lot lately, which would also be disturbing if true. But we have no data prior to 2012, so we don’t know.

It’s also possible that suspension is just flatly inappropriate for 3-year olds, in which case even 1 percent is too high a number. But Anderson doesn’t really make that case either.

So do we have a real problem here? Beats me.

Chris Cillizza says Hillary Clinton had the “worst year in Washington.” Jonathan Bernstein says that’s wrong. In fact, she probably had the best year in Washington:

One year ago, Clinton was the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, perhaps in the best position any non-incumbent has been in modern times. Yet two potentially strong contenders, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Vice President Joe Biden, were lurking around the edges of the contest….A year later, Warren and Biden are no longer threats. While Senator Bernie Sanders put together an impressive campaign, he’s about as weak a major opponent as Clinton could have imagined drawing.

….Meanwhile, Clinton has amassed more support from party actors than any previous non-incumbent in the modern era. A potential threat from a House select committee that appears to exist just to do opposition research on her has turned into a bad joke. The summer scandals seem to have died down; they could return, but it’s not clear if voters will care. And her performance in the marathon session in front of that select committee quieted the whispers that her age might be an impediment in her campaign.

Cillizza’s case is based almost entirely on Clinton’s email problems during the summer. That’s it. But Bernstein is right: Clinton had a trying summer, but not a bad year. She eventually overcame the email issue and ended the year in a position about as strong as you could imagine. She’s a virtual lock for the Democratic nomination, and the meltdown of the Republican primary race has made her an even stronger contender to win the presidency. What more could someone in Washington ask for? If this counts as someone’s worst year, I could use a few more bad years myself.

So who did have the worst year in Washington? Cillizza correctly pegs Jeb Bush as one of the nominees. John Boehner and Kevin McCarthy are on the list. Scott Walker certainly bombed in spectacular fashion. Benjamin Netanyahu is an honorary Washingtonian, and he didn’t do himself any favors this year. Anyone else?

With Silvio Berlusconi out of the picture, Angela Merkel is arguably the worst leader among the major democracies. But Time magazine apparently disagrees:

Time magazine has named German chancellor Angela Merkel its Person of the Year, citing her resolve in leading Europe through this summer’s Greek debt crisis, and her encouragement of other countries to open their borders to migrants and refugees….By the beginning of 2015, Time said, “Merkel had already emerged as the indispensable player in managing Europe’s serial debt crises; she also led the West’s response to Vladimir Putin’s creeping theft of Ukraine”.

Yeesh. Merkel’s role in “managing Europe’s serial debt crises” has been astonishingly destructive, and if what she did about Ukraine counts as “leading,” Time and I have very different ideas of what that word means. Her government nearly succeeded in scuttling any agreement about Greece, and even her refugee policy, which is morally praiseworthy, probably wasn’t very sensible.

Then again, apparently it was a lean year:

Other finalists included the founder of Uber, the $62.5bn ride-sharing app that has been met with both resistance and enthusiasm; Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Isis terror cell; Iranian president Hassan Rouhani and Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump.

Against competition like that, I guess I’d vote for Merkel too.