Big plans for today!

I appreciate my readers for supporting this blog with your presence every day, even though the posting has been light, to say the least! I am excited today with plans to assist in getting a homeless man off the streets and into a Christian Outreach program. I can't wait to tell you about it later today.

What about shelter for the man who saved the puppies?

A woman throws her puppies into a NAPA auto parts dumpster. A homeless man carefully retrieves all the puppies. The video goes viral. The woman is identified and arrested. Most of the puppies are saved. No one helps the homeless man. Read much more here.

Do you know why this woman has a smile on her face?

The billion dollar homeless scam

Daniel Greenfield reports at Sultan Knish,

...Why do New York and California have more homeless people than 30 states combined?

Why does Texas have only 17% of the homeless population of California? Why does Colorado have four times the homeless population of Utah? Why do Oregon and Washington have more homeless than Montana, Idaho, South and North Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, Nebraska, Kansas, and Iowa combined?

The pattern is political. And lucrative.

Social crises justify huge spending and expansions of the government. The homeless crisis is largely a problem in lefty cities where it’s heavily subsidized.


...New York City is blowing through $1.1 billion to house the homeless in hotels introducing drug use and prostitution problems into luxury rooms. It’s building homeless shelters in neighborhoods that are protesting the crime and drug use such places bring. The overall plan to spend $2.6 billion to build 15,000 units to deal with the homeless crisis isn’t working very well.

The Department of Homeless Services is allowing shelters to name their own price for housing residents. Rates went from $78 per person to four or five times that. Housing the homeless runs to $328.58 a day at one shelter run by Samaritan Village, a major shelter provider. That’s the price of a luxury hotel room.

...‘Homeless’ is a fake political term that deliberately misstates the problem. The issue is mostly not a lack of housing, but some combination of mental illness and drug use that make it difficult to maintain residential status. There are ordinary people who are genuinely homeless, and the media makes a point of highlighting their stories, but homelessness is mostly not a problem of housing, but of treatment.

While the media tells only one side of the story, it’s the mentally ill and the severe addicts who are the public face of the homeless crisis that the residents of major cities encounter every day. It’s these sights that move them to approve of spending hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars on programs that they believe will remove the horrible sights that they’re seeing from public view.

And that incentivizes the social welfare system and its allied activists to worsen the problem so as to squeeze more money out of taxpayers. Every budget increase means more homeless on the street, more street crime, drug use, and random abuse. Funding the system isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.

The homeless crisis is a billion dollar scam. It isn’t being solved. It’s only getting worse.

Read more here.

Making a difference

Alexandra Zaslow writes for Today News,

At just 12 years old and with the help of a little red wagon, Makenna Breading-Goodrich has already started a movement to help the homeless in her community.

Three years ago, the Arizona 7th-grader went to her parents with the idea to collect coats for the homeless.

It occurred to her after she watched a show about the harsh realities of not having a roof over your head during the cold winter months, her mom recalled.


"She said 'I think I can really do something to help,'" Jennifer Breading-Goodrich told TODAY.com.

"Any parent would look at their 9-year-old daughter with pride and tell her they'd be thrilled to help her in any way."

So in Oct. 2013, Makenna emailed her parents asking them to print out 50 fliers she created, which she then put up around her hometown of Surprise, Ariz., near Phoenix.

She also went door-to-door, letting neighbors know she'd be back in a couple weeks to pick up any spare jackets.

She called the one-woman organization Makenna's Coats for a Cause.

"At first, neighbors were surprised by her age and actions, but there was an outpouring of support," Jennifer said.

"Who doesn't have a coat in their closet they're willing to give up? It was a simple solution that allowed everyone to get involved without leaving their home."

Sure enough, around two weeks later, Makenna wheeled her little red Radio Flyer wagon around town and collected about 200 coats to give to the Phoenix Rescue Mission.

Since then, the effort has taken off. Last year, she collected around 500 coats, and this year, she's received 872, plus 300 other donated items, including hats, gloves, blankets, sweatshirts and undergarments.

Raising their kids, Jennifer, 41, and her husband, Sheldon Breading-Goodrich, 40, have emphasized the importance of giving.

In the spring, Makenna holds a water drive for the homeless through organization St. Vincent De Paul.

She's also been volunteering at local nonprofit called The Clothing Shop, which collects clothes for the homeless, and she's a member of the youth city council, where she helps kids and teens get more acquainted with the community.

"Not only is she making a difference for the homeless herself, but she's showing all these young girls that they can put a positive footprint on the world too," Jennifer said.

Her 6-year-old brother, Jackson, plans to follow in his big sister's footsteps and hold a backpack drive this summer.

When Makenna isn't volunteering, she's playing softball with the Surprise Sidewinders. Late last year, many of her teammates helped collect coats and went with her to drop them off on Dec. 12.

One girl was so inspired that she's starting to collect bibles for the Phoenix Rescue Mission after finding out there was a shortage.

"I plan on helping her just like she helped me," Makenna told TODAY.com. "I'm happy to have inspired kids to start giving back."

Something different

Thanks to Ann Voskamp for posting this video