monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

That is incorrect. It targeted everyone who didn't have their own checks mailed to them. There was no assessment as to whether these people were incapable of having checks sent to them.

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Yes Roger, kinda proves my point - we care more for migratory birds than people.

And least of all for migratory people.

It’s been known for months that President Trump — or, more likely, Vice President Mike Pence — has filled top positions at the Department of Health and Human Services with individuals who have devoted their adult lifetimes to the anti-abortion cause.

The American suburbs appear to be in revolt against President Trump after a muscular coalition of college-educated voters and racial and ethnic minorities dealt the Republican Party a thumping rejection on Tuesday and propelled a diverse class of Democrats into office.

From the tax-obsessed suburbs of New York City to high-tech neighborhoods outside Seattle to the sprawling, polyglot developments of Fairfax and Prince William County, Va., voters shunned Republicans up and down the ballot in off-year elections. Leaders in both parties said the elections were an unmistakable alarm bell for Republicans ahead of the 2018 campaign, when the party’s grip on the House of Representatives may hinge on the socially moderate, multiethnic communities near major cities.

Non-morons appear to be getting appropriately active after experiencing what Trump and friends have been up to.

A wave of Democratic victories ignited a ferocious debate across the Republican Party on Wednesday over whether President Trump’s un­or­tho­dox behavior and polarizing agenda are jeopardizing the GOP’s firm grip on power in Congress, governors’ mansions and state legislatures.

The recriminations sparked by Tuesday’s results — a decisive rebuke of Trump and his policies in Virginia and elsewhere — threatened the fragile GOP push to pass sweeping tax cuts by the end of the year and raised deeper questions about Republican identity and fealty to a historically unpopular president.

A year ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, Republicans are increasingly uncertain about keeping their majorities on Capitol Hill and are worried about how damaging Trump’s jagged brand of politics may become to the party.

ALEX JONES (HOST): And the deep state wants to embarrass Trump with more terror attacks and it’s all connected to the Antifa, this individual [Sutherland Springs, TX, church shooter] Devin Kelley in mental institutions the Air Force put him in. Trying to go to bases with guns to kill his commanding officers. That’s the Associated Press and CBS News. And protected and allowed to assault his wife, and other people, and children, and to be a pedophile. And then protected, and then turned loose. You know he was told, “You’re our little secret agent now of the deep state. You’re not going to go to jail. Don’t kill your commanding officers. We have a job for you.” And just like a wind-up toy right out of a government mental institutions (sic), allowed to get guns, the files not put into the [National Instant Criminal Background Check System] on purpose so their wind-up toy -- classic manchurian candidate. Let’s put Devin Kelley on screen. And what did our source start talking about yesterday? He said, “I can’t get into this, and I can’t get into him, and I can’t get into his background, but it’s all in the news.” And absolutely there it is. Mind control. If they can’t hype up a revolution on November 4th, they’ll activate their sleeper cells.

And let me tell you something. They got hardcore drugs, they got programming, they got it all. And the proof is they put him in a mental institution for trying to kill his chain of command with weapons and they let him out and then they let him continue attack people and did nothing. They protected him just like Maj. [Nidal] Hasan at Fort Hood for two years was talking to the number two in Al-Qaeda about his attacks and the CIA knew and did nothing, because they’re -- look at that mind control. Look at that guy. I bet if you did an autopsy he’s been under electroshock therapy, you name it. That guy tried to kill his high command and they said, “Put this guy into a black project. Scramble his brain. This guy’s a perfect candidate as a wind-up toy.” “You want to be a killer, son? You’re going to get to be a killer now. Heh heh. You’re in the program whether you like it or not.”

On Tuesday in Virginia, the exit poll found that health care was the top issue in the governor’s race, named by close to 40 percent of voters. Health-care voters backed Northam by better than 3 to 1. In Maine, voters defied their erratic arch-conservative governor, Paul LePage (R), and voted for the ACA’s Medicaid expansion.

....and, quotes him.

Duke had decided to end the TPS designation for the Nicaraguans, giving them until January 2019 to leave the United States or change their immigration status. But Duke felt she did not have enough information for the much larger group of Honduran immigrants, so she deferred, granting them a six-month extension, administration officials said Monday when they announced the TPS decision.

As DHS officials prepared to make that announcement, Kelly made an urgent call from Japan, where he was traveling with President Trump. He was “irritated,” administration officials said, and didn’t want his handpicked nominee for DHS Secretary, Kirstjen M. Nielsen, to face potentially uncomfortable questions about TPS during her confirmation hearing.

“He was persistent, telling her he didn’t want to kick the can down the road, and that it could hurt [Nielsen’s] nomination,” said one administration official.


Duke held her ground, the official said. “She was angry. To get a call like that from Asia, after she’d already made the decision, was a slap in the face.”

“They put massive pressure on her,” said another former administration official with knowledge of the call.

Duke wanted to proceed carefully, because the Central Americans have lived in the United States for two decades or more, and she had been contacted by former U.S. diplomats who implored her to weigh the decision carefully.

Congress created the TPS designation in 1990 to refrain from deporting foreign nationals to nations too unstable to receive them following natural disasters, civil strife or a health crisis. Previous administrations have repeatedly renewed the residency permits every 18 months, and over the years TPS has become a target of immigration hard-liners who say the law has been abused.

Trump wants to overhaul the U.S. immigration system, replacing a model based in part on family reunification with a “merit-based” approach to favor skilled labor.

The White House official said Kelly did not mention Nielsen by name during the calls with Duke, but told her “this shouldn’t be a problem for the next secretary to deal with.”

The pressure from the White House ended up delaying Monday’s announcement, which DHS officials did not make until an 8 p.m. conference call with reporters, just hours before the deadline, as tens of thousands of immigrants and their families remained in suspense.

President Trump’s voter fraud commission was sued Thursday morning by one of its Democratic members, who alleged that he has been kept in the dark about its operations, rendering his participation “essentially meaningless.”

Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap said in a complaint filed in federal court that the 11-member panel is in violation of a federal law that requires presidential advisory commissions to be both balanced and transparent in their work.

“The Commission has, in effect, not been balanced because Secretary Dunlap and the other Democratic commissioners have been excluded from the Commission’s work,” says the complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “The Commission’s operations have not been open and transparent, not even to the commissioners themselves, who have been deprived access to documents prepared by and viewed by other commissioners.”

The lawsuit is the latest drama for a commission that has proven a magnet for controversy since its launch in the wake of Trump’s baseless assertion that he would have won the popular vote in last year’s election if he hadn’t been thwarted by as many as 5 million illegally cast ballots.

The 11-member panel, which is nominally chaired by Vice President Pence and is formally known as the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, has met publicly twice, in Washington in July and in New Hampshire in September. A third meeting has yet to be announced.

Pence and others have pledged that the commission has no preordained agenda as it looks at voting practices that could undermine or bolster confidence in elections.

Spokesmen for Pence and the commission did not immediately respond to requests for comment about Dunlap’s lawsuit.

Dunlap is among four Democrats serving on the 11-member commission. A fifth died last month.

“In fact, the Commission’s superficial bipartisanship has been a facade,” Dunlap says in the suit. “The Commission has, in effect, not been balanced because Secretary Dunlap and the other Democratic commissioners have been excluded from the Commission’s work.”

The commission has been targeted in at least eight other lawsuits seeking to curb its operations or make its deliberations more transparent. The filing by Dunlap, who was appointed to serve by Trump, is the first by one of its own members.

“Today's lawsuit is highly unusual and virtually unprecedented, and further underscores the chaotic and dysfunctional nature of this Commission,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, one of the groups that have sued.

Saudi Arabia's attorney general says at least $100bn (£76bn) has been misused through systemic corruption and embezzlement in recent decades.

Sheikh Saud al-Mojeb said 201 people were being held for questioning as part of a sweeping anti-corruption drive that began on Saturday night.
He did not name any of them, but they reportedly include senior princes, ministers and influential businessmen.

"The evidence for this wrongdoing is very strong," Sheikh Mojeb said.
He also stressed that normal commercial activity in the kingdom had not been affected by the crackdown, and that only personal bank accounts had been frozen.

Sheikh Saud al-Mojeb said investigations by the newly-formed supreme anti-corruption committee, which is headed by 32-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, were "progressing very quickly".

He announced that 208 individuals had been called in for questioning so far, and that seven of them had been released without charge.

"The potential scale of corrupt practices which have been uncovered is very large," the attorney general said. "Based on our investigations over the past three years, we estimate that at least $100bn has been misused through systematic corruption and embezzlement over several decades."

Sheikh Mojeb said the committee had a clear legal mandate to move on to the next phase of its investigation and that it had suspended the bank accounts of "persons of interest" on Tuesday.

"There has been a great deal of speculation around the world regarding the identities of the individuals concerned and the details of the charges against them," he added. "In order to ensure that the individuals continue to enjoy the full legal rights afforded to them under Saudi law, we will not be revealing any more personal details at this time."

Among those reportedly detained are the billionaire investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal; Prince Miteb bin Abdullah, a son of the late king who was also removed from his post as National Guard chief on Saturday; and his brother Prince Turki bin Abdullah, a former governor of Riyadh province.

It is the Saudi weekend now and the country is still reeling from the monumental changes taking place.
So far, so good, as far as the crown prince and his supporters are concerned. "Phase One", as the attorney-general calls it, is complete. Around 200 leading royal and business figures have been "called in for questioning" and there has been no visible resistance, no disaffected army hammering at the palace gates, no calls to arms on social media. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Saudi Arabia's overwhelmingly young population has largely welcomed this clean-out of the kingdom's notoriously profligate elite. The more hardline Wahhabi religious clerics, still licking their wounds from the crown prince's recent announcement that the country needs to become more tolerant of other religions, will also be welcoming the purge.
The questions on everyone's mind though, are how far will it go and who will be next?

Others are said to include Alwalid al-Ibrahim, owner of the television network MBC; Amr al-Dabbagh, former head of the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority; Khalid al-Tuwaijri, former chief of the Royal Court; and Bakr Binladen, chairman of the Saudi Binladen Group.

At least some of them are believed to be held at the five-star Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh's diplomatic quarter. Paying guests were asked to vacate their rooms late on Saturday and the hotel's exterior gate has been shuttered since Sunday.

On Tuesday, the US said it had urged the Saudi government to handle any prosecutions stemming from the probe in a "fair and transparent" manner.
Human Rights Watch meanwhile called on Saudi officials to "immediately reveal the legal and evidentiary basis for each person's detention and make certain that each person detained can exercise their due process rights".
The detentions follow a wave of other recent arrests of clerics, human rights activists and intellectuals, for which the authorities have not given specific reasons.