was not aware of this. would be interested in seeing the language in the Act that covers this. on edit: this 2004 report for the Congressional Research Service says the Executive Branch lacks the authority to postpone elections: Under a variety of possible scenarios that could arise as a result of a terrorist attack before or during an election, either the Congress or the states might pass legislation which would affect the timing of these elections. The suggestion has been made, however, that the Executive Branch might have some role in determining whether an election is to occur or whether it can be cancelled. While the Executive Branch does not currently have this power, it appears that Congress may be able to delegate this power to the Executive Branch by enacting a statute. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/RL32471.pdf
If the President claims a national emergency, he would then seize the power available to do this legally. Now, this would be challenged in the courts just like the border wall funding in which the Supreme Court bent over backwards in a pretty clear case that was obviously illegal if the National Emergency was not declared. So if the President can convince the Supreme Court that there is a legit National Emergency (and it seems they are pretty easily persuaded) there's no reason to believe the broad powers in that case won't be upheld. The good news is it would still have to be rescheduled I'm sure (would assume the SCOTUS' stay would not be infinite), and at that point, Trump's approval would be so incredibly low he would surely lose by a healthy margin... at least one would think. Despite the legality... there is the politics of doing this, and how on its face is a pretty clear dictatorial act that I'm sure would immediately make him the least popular president of all time. Even a dumba$$ like Trump knows that would be the end of his legitimacy as president and would make the rest of his life a miserable catastrophe. I could see his hardcore supporters still loving him more for doing it, and would certainly cheer for joy at the thought of Trump taking over the government for life so an evil liberal would never hold office again.
Iran Can’t Hide Its Coronavirus Explosion, But It’s Trying Hard—and Putting the World in Danger https://news.yahoo.com/iran-t-hide-coronavirus-explosion-102629171.html
"Do liberals want Trump to spark a panic?" https://theweek.com/articles/898608/liberals-want-trump-spark-panic Do liberals want Trump to spark a panic? by Matthew Walther February 27, 2020 I am old enough to remember a time when President Trump's response to coronavirus was decried as heavy handed and authoritarian by observers who thought that restricting air travel to and from China and the imposition of a quarantine were over-the-top responses to a disease that posed less of a threat to the health of the average American than seasonal influenza. These impressions were preceded by sweeping assurances that the assassination of Qassem Soleimani was about to spark war with Iran and that the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement quietly approved by Democratic leaders in the middle of the failed impeachment process would actually worsen our trade relations, to name only a handful of the alas so-far unrealized crises into which L’Éminence orange was confidently assumed to have plunged us in the first month and a half or so of the new year. Perhaps a national moment of silence in acknowledgement of the various dooms to which we have managed not to succumb individually or collectively in the ensuing days would be in order. We are certainly lucky. As of this writing, roughly 60 Americans have been diagnosed with coronavirus, which is about the same as the number who own copies of Out of the Bachs, an obscure 1968 garage rock album often considered among the rarest and most valuable in the world. A whopping one of them appears to have contracted the disease on these shores. This seems to me about the best one could hope for given the reality of globalized commerce and the unwillingness of millions around the world to forego travel or subject themselves to inconvenient screening processes. (I for one would be happy to see far more stringent restrictions in place.) You would not know this from reading the headlines or watching television news. On Thursday morning our paper of record greeted us with the following invitation: "Let's Call It Trumpvirus." Let's not, maybe? I am reliably informed that Gail Collins' readers consider her something of a humorist. (Given her audience, one wonders why she did not suggest "cofevevirus," which, no pun intended, would really have knocked them dead.) Her column was painfully unfunny, not because this president never lends himself to mockery but because it assumed that a plague of well-nigh biblical proportions has been visited upon the American people while their feckless commander-in-chief conducts a propaganda campaign meant to distract us from the wagon loads of corpses being carried through the streets. This item is of a piece with hundreds of articles and late-night comedy rants now accusing Trump in some vague manner of downplaying the significance of coronavirus. The impression one gets is that instead of what he is doing now (i.e., taking advice from relevant officials; declaring a public health emergency; instituting the first Centers for Disease Control quarantine in half a century; coordinating a response among an almost uncountable number of federal, state, and local bodies charged with everything from screening travelers and contacting Americans abroad to educating doctors and the general public) he should spend hours a day on television engaged in an omnidirectional attempt to induce panic in as many people as possible. What else would these people prefer to Trump's calm, decisive action here? If he had taken more sweeping measures — restricting business travel by executive order, for example, rather than with the tacit cooperation of Apple and hundreds of other firms — he would have been called a fascist. If he had gone to the airwaves (or his favorite social media platform) to warn everyone of an imminent outbreak, he would be dismissed as an uninformed crank whose scare-mongering posed a more serious threat to global peace and health than the disease itself. Fact-checkers are handing him Pinocchios for saying that the situation is "very much under control." What would have been more accurate? Him declaring that coronavirus is on the verge of destroying civilization as we know it and suggesting the average American family stock up on masks, food, and gasoline and pray that the end, when it comes, be swift and painless? The mind reels. The cynicism of the president's critics here is boundless. There are thousands of valid grounds upon which Trump can be criticized. His administration's sober response to coronavirus is not one of them. To quote The New York Times again: "If you're feeling awful, you know who to blame." I have no trouble believing that millions of my fellow citizens really do feel this way. But their bizarre emotional needs are their own problem, not Trump’s.
Let's just inhale the vapors a sec as we burn: Toxic Narcissist/Liar/Mentally Unstable President is alarmed by global pandemic because of threat it poses to the millions of Americans he is sworn to protect to economic growth which he very dimly sees as more or less equal to the DJIA. which effects him personally He doesn't actually care of course about economic growth as a general rule, merely he realizes that a lack of it will threaten his reelection prospects and cause him to have to rig/cheat even more than he already is (in which he committed various impeachable acts/crimes, dating back 2016, and is only being held back by a feckless group of henchmen ruining the DOJ and Moscow Mitch,)and raises the possibility he may one day face justice for his half century of criminality and straight up betrayal of what most of us believed in. And so, this individual gets extremely upset, when he sees the DJIA drop last week, so he decides to do something about ti by both lying (and markets, unlike MAGA, tend to realize that he is a liar and discount his lying), and by installing his smiling dipshit of a henchmen VP to fix/deliberatley obscure it, sidelining the scientists, with a suitably disastrous and rambling press conference that only an idiot surrounded by sycophants would ever think was good. THe end result of it after one day - a bunch more MASSIVE RED NUMBERS ON THE DOW, somebody better block CNBC from teh west wing tonight, it ain't gonna be pretty. He might even have to continue his emergency unscheduled annual physical!
The coronavius correction has now hit 3500 points in a week. Great time to buy or still going lower? Even my defensive stocks such as utilities and bond funds are taking a beating.
We're all sold to forgone conclusions from personal biases, but it's not the media's job to sell it to us.
I just looked up 3M stock. It is down about 15% for the month, up a little over 1% today. They make surgical masks and pay a dividend of about 4%. May buy some shares tomorrow.