Skip to main content

Defense Logistics Agency: Barber chairs so dangerous they must only be used by law enforcement agencies

Be sure to follow this one after the break--it takes a sudden turn that you never would have predicted.

In Arizona there is now government outrage against Pinal County (Arizona) Sheriff Paul Babeu requisitioning surplus military material and passing it out to other local agencies or even auctioning it off to help balance his budget:

Neither the government nor Mitt
Romney has much use for gay
conservative (libertarian) Arizona
Sheriff Paul Babeu

An Arizona sheriff has allegedly ignored a Pentagon rule, collecting millions of dollars’ worth of surplus military equipment that is intended for law-enforcement use and distributing some of the gear to non-police agencies.
During the past two years, the office of Sheriff Paul Babeu has received more than $7 million worth of Humvees, fire trucks, guns, defibrillators, barber chairs, underwear, thermal-imaging scopes, computers, motor scooters and other items, The Arizona Republic reports.
Babeu takes maximum advantage of the program:
Federal regulations, according to the paper’s report, require the surplus items to be used solely by law-enforcement agencies, especially counterdrug and counterterrorism efforts.
Yet Babeu’s office, which helps oversee the program in Arizona, has doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of unused equipment to non-police agencies and a business.
The rules also ban them from obtaining the equipment for the purpose of fundraising.
But internal e-mails obtained through public-records requests by the newspaper show sheriff's officials touting their ability to get products from the Defense Department at no cost and to fortify their finances by selling the goods at auction. In a budget presentation to Pinal County supervisors in March, Babeu said he intends to balance his budget in part by auctioning equipment procured from the military.
Of course, government officials are wringing their hands in concern:
Critics say that by requisitioning unneeded supplies, the sheriff's office may be depriving other police agencies of equipment.
Yep, damn the man!  


He is denying the Drug Enforcement Agency access to . . . barber chairs!  


Maniacal terrorists will slip past the TSA because their agents lack . . . military surplus underweare!


Certainly the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms--or other law enforcement agencies--should have first call on . . . discarded military fire trucks!


Wouldn't want local Arizona rescue squads to get hold of defibrillators . . . .


And the notion that a local government official would actually sell off government surplus in order to balance his department's budget?


Find me a hanging tree!  That bastard's too dangerous to live.


Oh, but just for the record, the Pinal County Sheriff's Office released a statement asserting that:

The equipment we have obtained has already been used to save lives and improve public safety in Pinal County.
The Department of Defense and the State 1033 Program Coordinator all have approved of our use of the equipment we have acquired. 

Final note:  Paul Babeu has also resigned from his position in the Mitt Romney campaign, and gone for Ron Paul, while running for Congress:


Babeu, an emerging Republican figure and strong border defense sheriff, resigned from his position as Arizona co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign on Saturday afternoon amid allegations of threatening to deport a former male lover.
“This is where I go Ron Paul on people,” Babeu told [CNN's Wolf] Blitzer. “I believe in less government at the federal level. They should get out of people’s lives. Unless its an enumerated power in the Constitution, it falls to the states. This is where it falls to the states.”
As for issues of sexuality, Babeu is clear that the government has no role:
“If it is not harming somebody else, then what does it matter? You can’t legislate love.” 
Nor does Babeu equivocate about his own sexuality.  Caught up in allegations of misconduct by a former partner, the Sheriff said:
“I’m here to say that all the allegations that were in the story were untrue — except for the instance that refers to me as gay,” Babeu said. “That’s the truth — I am gay.”  

Comments

Dana Garrett said…
I guess if you are an elected official like a sheriff and you can dole out surplus government equipment to various constituencies, then you are placed at a high comparative advantage at reelection time or if you decide to run for some other public office. I am quite certain that I don't want to underwrite through my tax dollars this sheriff's giveaways so that he can taint election processes. Sounds like a good government rule to me.

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

More of This, Please

Or perhaps I should say, "Less of this one, please." Or how about just, "None of them. Ever again. Please....For the Love of God." Sunshine State Poll: Grayson In Trouble The latest Sunshine State/VSS poll shows controversial Democratic incumbent Alan Grayson trailing former state Senator Dan Webster by seven points, 43 percent to 36 percent. A majority of respondents -- 51 percent -- disapprove of the job that Grayson is doing. Independents have an unfavorable view of him as well, by a 36/47 margin. Grayson has ignored the conventional wisdom that a freshman should be a quiet member who carefully tends to the home fires. The latest controversy involves his " Taliban Dan " advertisement, where he explicitly compares his opponent to the Taliban, and shows a clip of Webster paraphrasing Ephesians 5:22 -- "wives, submit to your husbands." An unedited version of the clip shows that Webster was actually suggesting that husba...

A reply to Salon's R. J. Eskrow, and his 11 stupid questions about Libertarians

Posts here have been in short supply as I have been living life and trying to get a campaign off the ground. But "11 questions to see if Libertarians are hypocrites" by R. J. Eskrow, picked up at Salon , was just so freaking lame that I spent half an hour answering them. In the end (but I'll leave it to your judgment), it is not that Libertarians or Libertarian theory looks hypocritical, but that the best that can be said for Mr. Eskrow is that he doesn't have the faintest clue what he's talking about. That's ok, because even ill-informed attacks by people like this make an important point:  Libertarian ideas (as opposed to Conservative ideas, which are completely different) are making a comeback as the dynamic counterpoint to "politics as usual," and so every hack you can imagine must be dragged out to refute them. Ergo:  Mr. Eskrow's 11 questions, with answers: 1.       Are unions, political parties, elections, and ...