Alabama graft: Federally paid for but partially distributed first aid kits a lesson in crony capitalism

It's a dubious need--3,000 first aid kits for the poor and homeless in central Alabama. The kits included bandages, gauze, burn medication, but also flashlights, a weather radio, a lanyard, and a whistle. The poorest among us probably have some of these items already, and whatever the size of the kit, does anyone really expect homeless people to lug this gear around?

From AL.com:

Two Alabama community health centers asked the federal government in 2009 for the money to buy thousands of these things.

They got the money and bought the kits, but for years, thousands of the Safety & Health Emergency Preparedness (SHEP) kits sat in a Birmingham warehouse, AL.com has learned – well past the April 27, 2011, tornado disaster when they might have actually been useful.

It is still unclear how many got distributed to the poor and homeless in Birmingham and parts of Alabama's Black Belt, or when.

Where are the SHEP kits now? That's still not entirely certain.

Trouble is ahead, AL.com tells us. What will come of the $11 billion in ObamaCare cash that is headed to over a thousand community health care centers? That the kind of question liberals can never truthfully answer. When you throw money--lots of it--at real and imagined problems, greed and graft move in. That's the Chicago Way. I'm kidding. Actually, it's simply human nature--which is something else progressives can't comprehend.

It seems that a former CEO of the two Alabama community health centers purchased the kits from firms that he founded. And the woman who wrote the grant for those kits is his former lover who bore him two children, but now she claims sexual harassment.

I'm claiming crony capitalism.

The FBI and the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services are investigating.

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