JESUS ON THE ISSUE OF SYRIAN REFUGEES

At least Russell Moore has stood up for a real, not political, version of Jesus:

The Sheep and the Goats

³¹ “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. ³² All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. ³³ He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
³⁴ “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. ³⁵ For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, ³⁶ I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

WHAT YAHOO REPORTED TRUMP SAID

This is from the Yahoo interview:

After Paris, Trump said “security is going to rule” in the United States, in order to take on what he calls “radical Islamic terrorism.” America has currently agreed to take in 10,000 refugees from the ISIS stronghold in Syria. However, if he is elected, Trump said he would deport any Syrian refugees allowed to enter this country under President Obama.

“They’re going to be gone. They will go back. … I’ve said it before, in fact, and everyone hears what I say, including them, believe it or not,” Trump said of the refugees. “But if they’re here, they have to go back, because we cannot take a chance. You look at the migration, it’s young, strong men. We cannot take a chance that the people coming over here are going to be ISIS-affiliated.”

Yahoo News has reported that about half of the approximately 2,000 refugees from Syria who have come to the U.S. so far have been children. Another quarter are more than 60 years old. The Obama administration has maintained that the extensive screening process for these refugees makes the program safe to maintain — not to mention a reflection of America’s core values.

But Trump doesn’t buy it. He also has concerns about the larger Muslim community here in the U.S., he said.

Yahoo News asked Trump whether his push for increased surveillance of American Muslims could include warrantless searches. He suggested he would consider a series of drastic measures.

“We’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule,” Trump said. “And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”

Yahoo News asked Trump whether this level of tracking might require registering Muslims in a database or giving them a form of special identification that noted their religion. He wouldn’t rule it out.

“We’re going to have to — we’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely,” Trump said when presented with the idea. “We’re going to have to look at the mosques. We’re going to have to look very, very carefully.”

A LITTLE CONTEXT FOR THE LAST POST

I recall reading somewhere online that there were about 1,000 Christian sects in America and about 3,000 worldwide and according to this source, those are gross under-estimates:

Number of Christian Denominations:
According to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity (CSGC) at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, there are approximately 41,000 Christian denominations and organizations in the world. This statistic takes into consideration cultural distinctions of denominations in different countries, so there is overlapping of many denominations.

THERE ARE MANY ISLAMS

And ISIS is one of them:

The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.

CHRIS CILLIZZA HAS BECOME A VILLAGER

Perhaps he has been one all along and I just didn't notice.  His latest BJ for Booby Jindal is an absolute disgrace:

I met Bobby Jindal 12 years ago. He was running for Louisiana governor against Kathleen Blanco. At 32, he was one of the most impressive candidates for any office that I had ever met.

In the long run-up to his eventual bid, Jindal came through Washington and we got together for a background conversation about his plans. He came across the same way I remembered him from the early 2000s: a guy with real policy chops and, unlike many policy-oriented elected officials, a nuanced understanding of politics — up to and including how he planned to distinguish himself in the 2016 field.

AMERICAN POLITICS AS OF NOVEMBER 15, 2015

I've been thinking about what a waste of time polls and pundits are this far away from the 1st primary but I think the best retort to the babble is the importance of Big Data to a modern campaign:

“Every night for 18 months, we did 66,000 computer simulations of the election, and that’s how we based our tactics. That’s how we based his travel, that is how we based Michelle (Obama’s) travel, to Karl’s point, we based it all on big data.”

In 2012, we had about 670 pieces of data on every single voter in the battleground states, and the most predictive behavior in the future is what you did in the past, and that ability is really important.