The State’s Brad Warthen has picked up on an announcement that the South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles is issuing four new insignificant license plates. That brings the SCDMV’s total collection of subsidized, specialized redneck automotive bling to nearly 100 pieces.
According to the statement, the Boy Scouts of America, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., and the Surfrider Foundation license plates are now available in SCDMV offices across the state. Before I go any further, raise your hand if you have ever heard of or give a rat’s arse about the latter two?
Sadly, any of these four are probably better than 50 percent of the other options.
State-issued tags that also suck: Ancient Free Masons, Driven by the Arts, Endangered Species, Homeownership: The American Dream, No More Homeless Pets, Secular Humanists of the Low Country, Shag (unless you’re randy, baby), Share The Road Palmetto Cycling, South Carolina Ducks Unlimited, Square Dance, Technology Alliance, Working for the Wild Turkey and every single fraternity and sorority plate ever. Those are just the few that I had the patience to cherry pick and I swear I didn’t make any of them up.
There have to be a million of these damn things, including one for people with an amateur radio license. Who the hell cares if someone has an amateur radio license?
And as Warthen noted, “the state should not be in the business of providing a fund-raising service for private entities.”
More than that, the purpose of a license plate is essentially a law enforcement one — they should be quickly identifiable as SC plates, which is a standard that all these special vanity plates blow out of the water. [...] At this rate, we all might as well get a piece of sheet metal and some paint and make our own. [BRAD WARTHEN - The State]
That’s exactly what we propose to do. If all these crappy groups can have customized tags, how about a license plate for someone that’s awesome, like us?
Well, sorry folks, but that’s just a pipe dream because the SCDMV only does tags for “Non-profit organizations are classified as 501(c)(3) (Charitable Organizations), 501(c)(7): (Social Clubs) and 501(c)(8) (Fraternal Organizations) by the Federal Internal Revenue Service.” There are some exceptions, but the application is 70 million pages long and I didn’t feel like reading past the first few paragraphs. I’m just going to assume they won’t let us have a TPS tag.
Anywho, as I said when the DOT released those horrible new Clemson license plates, don’t we have more important transportation-related things to be worrying about? This really is our taxpayer money hard at work.
Sphere: Related ContentThis entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Around the state, Executive, TPS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
The Ham Radio License plates allows Ham Radio Operators in involved in Emergency Communications activities to cross police and fire lines to get where they are needed to provide this service. Long after police, fire and cell service has been knocked out. This happens much more often then most of the “Non Engaged People” out there know. Recall the recent floods in Oregon and Nevada as well as the tornado’s in the south east. And while thinking about that you need to get you website ads out oof the way of this comment box.
Rachael