Self Quarantine in Rhode Island Like it or Not
This came up on the radar this morning.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) – The American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island is questioning the constitutionality of Gov. Gina Raimondo’s directive allowing state police to stop vehicles with New York license plates to collect information from drivers and passengers in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
The Democratic governor on Thursday called the measure extreme but pointed out that the New York City area is the epicenter of the disease in the U.S.
While Raimondo has the authority to suspend some state laws and regulations to address a medical emergency, she cannot suspend the Constitution, ACLU of Rhode Island Executive Director Steven Brown said in a statement late Thursday.
“Under the Fourth Amendment, having a New York state license plate simply does not, and cannot, constitute ‘probable cause’ to allow police to stop a car and interrogate the driver, no matter how laudable the goal of the stop may be,” he said.
The governor’s directive is simply to ensure that travelers from New York staying in Rhode Island know they are required to self-quarantine for 14 days, Raimondo’s spokesman said.
Hat Tip CBS Boston, March 27,2020
Let’s hear it for the ACLU.
I’ve said from the beginning that as long as you stay inside you private car bubble you may roam as widely as you like — with anyone you live with — as long as you end up back in your home bubble. I’m not saying that’s the limit of what you may do in your car.
No need to die of cabin fever.
We New Yorkers are doing the right thing with NO GOD DAMN help from the White House (pardon my French but we are getting angry). Look I have no plans to visit another state right now if though I’m COVID-19 free for now at least. But didn’t they say we are all in this together. Except for that pathetic excuse we call President. New Yorkers need help right now but some people in other states seem to be tell us f&c$ off. What was that on those stupid Trump hats again? MAGA?
pgl:
Be safe. If you want revenge he will hate, hand him the biggest defeat a one term president ever incurred come November.
If, as seems likely, we are only part way through the growth phase of this epidemic then I suspect we’ll see a lot more of this at all levels. Shades of the Dust Bowl era when LA city cops stopped Okies at the border with Nevada! So, I wonder if they’re ‘gunna stop long-haul trucks with the wrong plates too? That’ll play hell with an already screwed-up system.
New Deal Democrat has some excellent posts with numeric up on the COVID 19 pandemic if interested.
Run,
I think his defeat is locked in right now. I cannot imagine him winning in MI or PA right now due to his boorish behavior and incompetence. The key date for his defeat? January 20, 2020.
A “War President” can only helped be re-elected if the war is won, or at least winning(that word pops up a lot around trump.)
Trump, and thus the US, has lost this war in a rout.
“When the definitive history of the coronavirus pandemic is written, the date 20 January 2020 is certain to feature prominently. It was on that day that a 35-year-old man in Washington state, recently returned from visiting family in Wuhan in China, became the first person in the US to be diagnosed with the virus.
New York mayor urges Trump to help as more US coronavirus hotspots emerge
Read more
On the very same day, 5,000 miles away in Asia, the first confirmed case of Covid-19 was reported in South Korea. The confluence was striking, but there the similarities ended.
In the two months since that fateful day, the responses to coronavirus displayed by the US and South Korea have been polar opposites.
One country acted swiftly and aggressively to detect and isolate the virus, and by doing so has largely contained the crisis. The other country dithered and procrastinated, became mired in chaos and confusion, was distracted by the individual whims of its leader, and is now confronted by a health emergency of daunting proportions.
Within a week of its first confirmed case, South Korea’s disease control agency had summoned 20 private companies to the medical equivalent of a war-planning summit and told them to develop a test for the virus at lightning speed. A week after that, the first diagnostic test was approved and went into battle, identifying infected individuals who could then be quarantined to halt the advance of the disease.
Some 357,896 tests later, the country has more or less won the coronavirus war. On Friday only 91 new cases were reported in a country of more than 50 million.
The US response tells a different story. Two days after the first diagnosis in Washington state, Donald Trump went on air on CNBC and bragged: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
‘A fiasco of incredible proportions’
A week after that, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion article by two former top health policy officials within the Trump administration under the headline Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic. Luciana Borio and Scott Gottlieb laid out a menu of what had to be done instantly to avert a massive health disaster.
Top of their to-do list: work with private industry to develop an “easy-to-use, rapid diagnostic test” – in other words, just what South Korea was doing.
It was not until 29 February, more than a month after the Journal article and almost six weeks after the first case of coronavirus was confirmed in the country that the Trump administration put that advice into practice. Laboratories and hospitals would finally be allowed to conduct their own Covid-19 tests to speed up the process.
Those missing four to six weeks are likely to go down in the definitive history as a cautionary tale of the potentially devastating consequences of failed political leadership. Today, 86,012 cases have been confirmed across the US, pushing the nation to the top of the world’s coronavirus league table – above even China.
More than a quarter of those cases are in New York City, now a global center of the coronavirus pandemic, with New Orleans also raising alarm. Nationally, 1,301 people have died.
Most worryingly, the curve of cases continues to rise precipitously, with no sign of the plateau that has spared South Korea.
“The US response will be studied for generations as a textbook example of a disastrous, failed effort,” Ron Klain, who spearheaded the fight against Ebola in 2014, told a Georgetown university panel recently. “What’s happened in Washington has been a fiasco of incredible proportions.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/28/trump-coronavirus-politics-us-health-disaster
The only question is how much we are going to lose.
I cannot think of anything that would be more appropriate.
“Report: Fox News is worried about legal action after misleading viewers about coronavirus
Vanity Fair’s Gabe Sherman: Fox News is concerned their downplaying of Coronavirus exposes them “to potential legal action” from misled viewers.
HERMAN: Yea. I mean, this is the question, what’s more pernicious or deceptive about Sinclair is that their local newscasts are not labeled as a Sinclair channel. You don’t know that it has a right-wing ideology behind the owners of the local news station, so you’re absorbing it as if it’s just straight network news. I just want to get back to the Fox of it all real quick. When I’ve been talking to Fox insiders over the last few days, there’s a real concern inside the network that their early downplaying of the coronavirus actually exposes Fox News to potential legal action by viewers who maybe were misled and actually have died from this. I’ve heard Trish Regan’s being taken off the air is, you know, reflective of this concern that Fox News is in big trouble by downplaying this virus and The New York Times reported days ago that the Murdoch family was privately taking the coronavirus seriously. The Murdochs, of course, own Fox News. So, they were taken personal steps to protect themselves while anchors like Trish Regan and Sean Hannity were telling viewers that it’s a hoax and putting themselves in potentially mortal danger. So I think this is a case where Fox’s coverage, if it actually winds up being proved that people died because of it, this is a new terrain in terms of Fox being possibly held liable for their actions.
REID: Interesting. It will be interesting to see how long they let Dr. Oz keep going on and on and on with the things that he’s been saying on that network given what you just said.”
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-worried-about-legal-action-after-misleading-viewers-about-coronavirus
EM:
I am sorry; but, I do not know how many times they have become down right ugly and angry when you point out their hero is a liar and a fraud. “Oh, but he has done everything he said he would do.” Yes, everything wrong and lies, now thousands of us are going to die because of him and your believing his lies. There are some bars I do not go to anymore when it was safe to do so..
“downplaying of the coronavirus actually exposes Fox News to potential legal action by viewers who were stupid enough to maybe be or were misled and actually have died from this. I’ve heard Trish Regan’s being taken off the air is, you know, reflective of this concern that Fox News is in big trouble by downplaying this virus and The New York Times reported days ago that the Murdoch family was privately taking the coronavirus seriously.
Just when you think he cannot get worse…
“More Than 2,000 Americans Have Died of the Coronavirus. Trump Is Tweeting About His TV Ratings.
Can he get any more out of touch with reality?
More than 2,000 people in the United States are dead and at least 135,000 have confirmed cases of COVID-19. But President Donald Trump has decided to use his Sunday to tweet about his TV ratings. His White House press briefings are as popular as The Bachelor finale and Monday Night Football, he boasted in a series of tweets on Sunday:
Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
Because the “Ratings” of my News Conferences etc. are so high, “Bachelor finale, Monday Night Football type numbers” according to the @nytimes, the Lamestream Media is going CRAZY. “Trump is reaching too many people, we must stop him.” said one lunatic. See you at 5:00 P.M.!
Fen ratings. Just surreal.