College sports tickets, jewelry, lingerie: Should Alabama follow Kansas in …

If you receive public assistance in Alabama, the state already limits where you can spend the money: no alcohol, gambling, tattoos or body piercings, psychics or the euphemistically named “adult entertainment.”

If you live in Kansas, however, your list of welfare no-nos just got a lot longer.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback signed a bill recently that’s believed to place some of the country’s strictest rules on where people receiving public assistance can spend the funds. Such restrictions aren’t rare – most states restrict welfare funds for tobacco and alcohol, for example – but Kansas has added a dozen or so additional restrictions.

They includes purchases of tobacco; lottery, concert, professional or collegiate sporting event tickets or tickets for other entertainment events; sexual oriented adult materials; at jewelry stores, tattoo, massage, body piercing, spas or nail salons; lingerie shop; tobacco paraphernalia and vapor cigarette shops; psychic or fortune telling businesses; bail bonds companies; video arcades; swimming pools or cruise ships; theme parks or any business that prohibits those 18 and younger from entering.

The law has been criticized as being mean-spirited but Brownback said the assistance program isn’t designed to serve as permanent income.

“We want to get people off of public assistance and into private-sector employment, and we’ve had a lot of success with that,” Brownback said during an interview this week with The Associated Press.

That doesn’t mean the law will solve all the problems of public assistance funds being misused.

The problem with this law and all those like it is people can withdraw cash using their assistance cards and it’s almost impossible to track what it’s spent on once that’s done.

The Kansas law does limit ATM withdrawals of cash assistance to $25 a day, the only state in the nation to set a daily cap.

We want to hear from you. Should Alabama follow Kansas in tightening its restrictions on where public welfare funds can be used?

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Video Reveals 2 Bra Bandits in Latest Mall Lingerie Heist

Newly released surveillance video shows two women were behind the latest bra heist at a northeast Pennsylvania mall.

The women can be seen brazenly stuffing bras into a bag at the Victoria’s Secret store at the Wyoming Valley Mall last week. Twenty-five bras were stolen.

It’s the first time police in Wilkes-Barre Township have been able to lay eyes on the suspects.

They say the store never turned over video of three previous thefts that netted nearly 150 bras.

Police say 94 bras were taken from display drawers on Feb. 17, and 39 bras were stolen on Feb. 25.

They say 12 more bras were taken from a rear display on March 7.

The stolen bras are valued at more than $7,700.

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Surveillance video: http://on.fb.me/1Q2yv1Q

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