I didn't watch the video, but deep down in article it says the car was originally pulled over because it violated the NJ laws about license plate coverage and window tinting. The discovery that its license had expired came later, right?
It was a Nevada car, and presumably the windows and plate covering was okay there. Doesn't NJ caring about this stuff violate the interstate commerce clause, or something? Are you supposed to not drive in NJ (a good choice!) if you have some feature legal in your home state but not in NJ?
Why can't NJ have it's rules? Certainly states can set their own weight and length standards for trucks that carry very literal interstate commerce.
Are you supposed to not drive in NJ (a good choice!) if you have some feature legal in your home state but not in NJ?
Yes.
I've driven in New Jersey. It's scary. Less traffic than Philadelphia, but way stupider aggression.
2 is correct. Driving through Indiana I was surprised to see extra-long tractor-trailers, that the drivers must have to stop using at the Ohio border.
That being said, whenever the state of New Jersey has some regulation that 90% of states don't have, you can count on it being a bad regulation.
And driving the freeways in Philly scares me. East of Harrisburg, take the train or fly.
5: We need to accept that Americans are not mentally and emotionally ready to pump their own gasoline.
6: If only. Going to Allentown, the railroad don't run no more. (Poor, poor, pitiful me.)
Doesn't NJ caring about this stuff violate the interstate commerce clause, or something?
I am not a fan of the concept of the "dormant commerce clause", but even when that comes into play state police powers are a clear exception, right?
I think we had this one out the other day about those pay-for-play police badges, but damn that's a weird American thing.
This is an oversimplification, the dormant commerce clause is complicated. But roughly, a state can have any regulation it wants so long as there's a level playing field for in-state and out-of-state actors, and a safety reg that applies to any car on the road is a level playing field.
It's easier to make sense of if you accept that the law isn't stupid and pointless (which is the assumption that courts start with about laws generally). If there's a real reason to object to tinted windows, and the elected representatives of the people of NJ think it's a powerful enough reason that they want to protect their citizens from cars with unsafely tinted window, why should the fact that a car comes from out of state exempt it from that law?
I mean, the real answer is that federalism is dumb. It is completely idiotic having 50 sets of statutes for one country, and we get by, mostly, on people assuming that they anything they need to know about is going to be the same wherever they are, which is usually good enough to get by with. But once you accept that each state gets to set its own laws, you're going to have to abide by different laws if you want to go to a different state.
Points for zeroing in on possibly the least interesting part of this story, and in the very first comment.
Also, window tinting really should be illegal. Or, where it's not, cops should get to fire a warning shot into the car before approaching.
Yes. Especially the driver's windows. I hate not being able to tell if they are looking at me when I walk across the street.
Not knowing anything about this commissioner other than that Chris Christie appointed her and she's a Democrat, this seems fairly in keeping, no?
She was the only asshole on the scene. Everyone else handled it fabulously. That was kind of nice to see.
As for her:
Don't derail my good kid's chance at life by making them suffer the consequences of their actions. Those other kids are thugs or not responsible, productive people who deserve the maximum punishment possible to deter others.
See also my daughter/son's gf/niece/friend/self should be allowed to have an abortion, but those other irresponsible women shouldn't. (Or, "sure I had an abortion, but now that I am not at risk of getting pregnant accidentally, no other women should be able to have an abortion.")
Another reason not to tint windows. Can't hide illicit sexy times.
The daughter wasn't even at risk, or really involved at all! It became a bigfooting exercise.
One thing that's comforting is not just that the cops handled it well, but that they were confident that playing it by the book was the right thing to do. God help me, that speaks to a healthy culture of respect for the rule of law in their department/township/
That's a novel use of "bigfooting", at least to me.
19.2: A lesson Comey failed to learn.
Not to be confused with the far superior Big Footin'.
Google Ngrams proposes a recent origin for bigfooting.
12: AZ has special, 'hey, tint your windows' laws and they are entirely reasonable. unlike this asshole.
It's barely ever sunny as far as I can tell.
I first read of bigfoot as a noun and (I think) a verb in Crouse's 1973 book The Boys on the Bus. A good book covering the 1972 presidential election. It pairs nicely with its stablemate by Thompson.
I've driven in New Jersey. It's scary. Less traffic than Philadelphia, but way stupider aggression.
O God, yeah. I used to think it was scary to drive in NYC. Then I moved out to New Jersey...
The stupid aggression. The gratuitously stupid "eff you! I'm on the road: give way to me or else!" aggression.
A four-way stop is like a game of Russian roulette (don't blink! don't ever let them see the whites of your eyes...). And then there's that maneuver that I call "the Jersey pull-out" (please note: not a reliable method of contraception, and I speak from experience...), where a driver without the right-of-way just barges ahead into a busy intersection, as bold as brass and without a care in the world for the rules of the road...
And then you can't even pump your own gas in NJ. It's all chaos and anarchy, at least until you hit a gas station...
sasquatching
abominabling snowmanning
And then you can't even pump your own gas in NJ
My Dad used to always make sure to buy gas when he was in Jersey because they pump it for you. I avoid buying gas there for the same reason.
12. The weird NJ laws about cars were the only interesting thing about the story. "Entitled official tries to pull rank and comes across as an idiot" happens about 800 times a day in NJ alone. Chris Christie comes to mind in this regard as a poster child.
28. Are you sure you didn't move to Massachusetts? At least we let you pump your own gas. I think we also have a tinted windows law but I've never heard of anyone being pulled over for violating it.
31: If such petty pulling of rank happens every day, then this is news because of how the cops acted to stop it.
I've never heard of anyone being pulled over for violating it.
Signs all your friends are white...
Some of my best friends are white people.
My Dad used to always make sure to buy gas when he was in Jersey because they pump it for you. I avoid buying gas there for the same reason.
I tried to fill up my rental car before returning to the Newark airport, but at the only nearby gas station, not only do you not pump your gas, but it was so busy that I was being waved over to the side of the parking lot to seemingly hand over my car to valet parking attendants who would drive it over to the pump when ready. This was the last thing I wanted to deal with when trying to catch a flight, so the situation must work out great for car rental places.
Can't you just fly out of LaGuadia or JFK like a normal person?
This was to get to Doylestown. Yes, the Philadelphia airport is so inconvenient that Newark is often better for the northern Philadelphia exurbs.
I don't know about exurbs, but the one time I flew into Philly (with somebody else paying because it was $700), I found the airport really convenient. Get off the plane, hop on a train, and be downtown (City Center?) in twenty minutes. Pittsburgh's airport is like an hour from my hour with traffic.
City Centre? I don't feel that's important enough to look up.
Only in America would anyone build the airport a full time zone away from the city.
You literally invented spellcheck.
That's because of our great work ethnic.
As an Irish-Italian-American, you can say that without being racist.
When we moved to NJ, my sister's (not very) bitchin' Camaro had dark window tint from its Miami days, and my mom had to scrape off the film. Sliced her hand open with a razor and had to go to the hospital. Welcome to New Jersey!
It's funny that everybody fixates on the gas-pumping without noticing that, thanks to the ghost of Standard Oil of NJ, until very recently "full service" gas in NJ was considerably cheaper than pump-your-own in adjoining states.
It just occurred to me that it's much more common to see gas stations in NJ without canopies, since why would you waste that money just to keep your employees dry?
49: The tax on gasoline in New Jersey used to be very low.
48.2 ought to warm the cockles of economists' hearts.
38 is insane. Doylestown is in the middle of nowhere and is maximally far away from the airport. It's further north than Trenton.
Doylestown, Trenton, Newark, London, Berlin, etc. are all basically in the same place, the other side of the Squirrel Hill tunnel.
50: Thanks. Why though didn't all the other Standards leave similar legacies in all the other states?
Standard Oil of Ohio was so crappy it had to get purchased by BP.
I don't think I'd heard "bigfooting" used thatvway before but it seems extremely useful as a word.
Encountered recently at the park when a dog owner wanted the guy at the ride-on mini train for kids under 5 to bend the rules and let the dog on the mini train because "this is kind of a celebrity dog."
38/51: LVIA's sometimes an option. (Where the "I" stands for "Toronto, on rare occasions.")
55.last is a probably just a California thing.
Westmoreland County has ogged's back.
I'm just saying, the Philly airport is wedged between Philadelphia and Delaware, getting to it from the north or west by driving is a pain, and therefore a large number of people in Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, are surprised to see they are better off flying out of somewhere else, the aforementioned LVIA, or Baltimore, or Newark.
The Trenton airport should really expand and take some of that business. Where are you, Trenton airport?
And Doylestown is not in the middle of nowhere, you maniac. It's only 10 miles from Horsham. Perhaps you're thinking of New Hope.
The only think I know about Trenton is that they have oblivious Hessians.
I hear they also make stuff, but the world keeps taking it.
I just got a free six pack without taking it. I was charged for it, walked out to the car before it occurred to me I wasn't charged for it, and when I went back to pay for it the owner thanked me but wouldn't take the money.
58. MA allows tinting on all windows. They must allow 35% of light through (compare 70% in the linked article). The windshield is treated specially. Most of it can't be tinted, but not all. NJ (home of the OP) officially allows no tinting at all.