Trump in quarantine... Sweet Jesus... If I was a praying man.....

We’d have to quarantine him from his phone and Twitter account. He can still wreak havoc with that.

@RiverRick I'd just like to see his big fat mouth quarantined.

What is TDS? Thank you in advance.

@Fred_Snerd Ok, thanks, that's what I expected it meant.

Trumplerite Dumb Shits?

He should come to an end the same as Nero too!

@SeaGreenEyez Same here.

It's like FOX News, all opinion no facts. At least I admit it's an opinion editorial and not trying to pass it off as real news.

"Nothing of substance" actually sums up Trump's leadership during this pandemic to a T. History will say he hindered our response out of concern with his reelection prospects and cost thousands of lives that could have been saved if only we had had a cooordinated response earlier. Or indeed, any response. (Hopefully history will not record that it was millions of lives, but the jury's out.)

"Will be voted out" you mean? Hopefully, but his followers are still very passionate and they believe he's doing just a wonderful job. They have cognitive dissonance to the point they can't remember that he minimized the whole thing only a month ago; they believe him when he says "I thought it was a pandemic before they called it a pandemic."

@Paul4747, yes. Hopefully people will open their eyes about him and how inept he is. That's us who can see this, but after the way George Bush Jr. was put in power, I better expect the worse scenario, that will be him being re-elected. I sure hope he is voted out.

@Paddypereira If he is re- elected you can kiss this country as we know it, - goodbye.

@Paddypereira "W" was reelected because they managed to scare people about terrorists and convinced a slim majority that his party was the only one that could protect them against Iraqis and Al Qaeda blowing their children up with stolen bioweaponized Iranian nukes from North Korea (or something).
It's pretty damn clear that not only can't the Trump administration protect us from the pandemic, they made us uniquely vulnerable to it by ignoring its threat while other nations mobilized their health care systems. Not only did they not get our system ready, they effectively pulled its pants down around its ankles and told it to bend over.

@starwatcher-al, let's hope not. I shiver at the thought of Trump being re-elected.

@Paul4747, although I agree mainly with what you said, the healthcare here in Europe is struggling quite a bit too. Trump, like Johnson in the UK, didn't realise what was going on and the result is what we can see. Hopefully Trump will be voted out. In the meantime, we better deal with this the best we can.

@Paul4747 The suspected problem is that Trump will use COVID-19 in order to cancel the 2020 election. Some say he cannot do it, but this would be a real problem.

@DenoPenno We have had Presidential elections during a civil war. This is not an emergency that rates cancelling an election. Trying it would be tantamount to attempting to assume dictatorial powers and lead to his immediate impeachment, and likely his conviction this time.

It would be almost impossible to even postpone it, as a matter of law.

[snopes.com]

@Paul4747, even if this pandemic, which is a public health issue, if the election was now, they wouldn't be, in the least, postponed? Don't get me wrong and I'm sorry if I'm being ignorant, but it would make sense to me to have the election postponed, but it's my opinion.

@Paddypereira You're not being ignorant at all, no apology needed.

I'm going to quote liberally from the Snopes article here, since they did the research already.

"The Presidential Election Day Act, passed by Congress in 1845, mandates that “the electors of President and Vice President shall be appointed in each State on the Tuesday next after the first Monday in the month of November of the year in which they are to be appointed.” The sitting president has no ability on his own to alter that date — he cannot issue an executive order or otherwise act unilaterally to change the deadline.

All of the individual states could conceivably change the method by which they choose their electors to something other than popular vote, but that option would require, for the most part, that the state legislatures and governors in all 50 states approve new methods for selecting electors by Nov. 3. But such a course of action would likely be quite difficult to accomplish in time and prove extremely unpopular with voters.

Another option for states to be able to choose their electors via elections held later than Nov. 3 would be for both houses of the U.S. Congress to pass, and the president to sign, a law superseding or modifying the Presidential Election Day Act to establish a new date. But given the current highly polarized state of U.S. politics, the chances that such a feat could be accomplished in sufficiently timely fashion — if at all — are also extremely unlikely.

And even if the U.S. legislative and executive branches could sufficiently cooperate to buy some additional time by delaying the next election, they wouldn’t have much leeway. The 20th amendment to the U.S. constitution states that the current president’s four-year term ends at noon on Jan. 20. So the election couldn’t be put off by much more than two months without incurring the risk of leaving the U.S. without a president or vice president come Jan. 20, and leaving Congress the chaotic task of having the Speaker of the House temporarily govern while figuring out how to rectify the absence of a duly-elected chief executive. (Altering that Jan. 20 deadline would require amending the U.S. Constitution in a matter of months, a virtually impossible feat.)

Mail-in balloting, which is used almost exclusively in several states such as Washington and Colorado, would give voters a chance to vote without having to show up at the polls. It would ensure that fewer people would be disenfranchised. And importantly it would provide a good argument against an attempt to try to postpone voting in November (or worse yet having state legislatures appoint presidential electors themselves without a vote of the people) …

Congress has the power to pass such a law. The elections clause in Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution gives Congress broad powers to overrule the states on the “time, place, and manner” of holding congressional elections. It is this same broad power that gives Congress the ability to require states to follow certain streamlined procedures in registering voters, and to offer voter registration ability at government offices like the Department of Motor Vehicles. So long as Congress pays for all the costs, there should be no constitutional issue with requiring states to offer this means of voting. And paying for these costs is key, because even in states allowing for vote by mail, there could be millions more ballots cast by this method than are usually cast in this way, ramping up costs significantly.

As then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said back in 2004, when the possibility was being considered of having to delay a federal election should another major terrorist attack occur in the U.S., “We’ve had elections in this country when we were at war, even when we were in [a] civil war. And we should have the elections on time.”

Turns out I quoted almost the whole article, but it's a worthwhile article.

@Paul4747 Legally you are correct, as a matter of law. But since when has the repuklicins ever went after trump for anything illegal? He has broken 100's of laws from the first day in office and there is no accounting buy the senate, pure obstructionist group of thugs only in it for the money and power. We need a coup by the military, and yes I know what I;m saying here.

@starwatcher-al I have to believe there is a point where they'll recognize an outright violation of the law. As long as they could shade it as open to interpretation, they did, but this is not open to interpretation.

@starwatcher-al You do realize the military is largely Republicans? If anything the ranks were thinking of a coup against Obama...

@Paul4747 Yes, I do realize that. But i'm hoping for a group of leaders who understand what is happening and the rank and file's indoctrination to follow them. A wild shot for sure.

@Paul4747, thanks for explaining. In terms of the law, makes sense the election to carry on. I don't know when the election is scheduled in the USA, but, if it's in a date while this pandemic and quarantine is still going, in practical terms, I think it should be postponed for the sake of public health. In Belgium they had a period that they didn't have a government and the country still kept running. Well, hopefully things will start to turn for the best soon, for everybody's sake.

We still need a Central leader to give guidance and information to the entire nation. Consistency needed to get through. The only consistency we've seen is consistent incompetence from our Federal leaders.

Red states are bulking at following emergency medical protocols. They are prolonging the duration of the pandemic and increasing the mortality rate higher than it needs to be. There needs to be a national set of guide lines. The virus does not need or respect political boundaries or political parties. All the most optimistic projections are based on everybody following the emergency protocols. Therefore, we are likely to see death and infection rates approaching the more dire worst case scenarios.