President Barack Obama, joined by the entire first family, on Wednesday began the Thanksgiving holiday by serving dinner to the local homeless population and veterans at Friendship Place Homeless Center in Washington.

“It’s not only of the spirit of giving during this holiday season, but our national obligation to make sure all those who serve and sacrifice for our country have a place to call home,” Obama said from the Rose Garden. “My administration considers this one of our top priorities, making sure that we’re bringing about the reality of zero homelessness for our veterans.”

Obama was in charge of serving turkey and gravy to the veterans and other homeless people, while first lady Michelle Obama served up vegetables. Daughters Sasha and Malia gave out other holiday favorites including mashed potatoes, stuffing and cranberries.
— CNN, 11/25/15

Despite the president’s idea of “reality”, at the end of any charitable endeavor is another non-profit….

Friendship Place Homeless Center received a $3.1 million dollar grant from the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2015 for veteran homelessness capacity-building.

As they’ve been around for 22 years, just where do you think a grant to a top-heavy non-profit, employing around 60 people would go? Instead of going towards bloated nonprofit salaries, that $3.1 million VA “grant” could have paid the rent and utilities for modest apartments to house over 1,550 veterans for one year.

Aside from doing the math and dividing that grant money up, you might want to assess the effectiveness of any kind of successful “veteran services” run by these two….

Or a “Community Engagement Manager”… seriously?

Let’s be real. No matter how altruistic the mission statements may be, these non-profits talk a good game about helping those in need, but in reality they can’t end homelessness because they’d be out of work.

And it could be argued that others are doing the real heavy lifting.

Friendship Place—supported by 26 congregations and more than 300 volunteers a year—retains the feel of a small, caring, neighborhood organization.
— Friendship Place, Mission History

Liberals sure love those volunteers because those inside those nonprofits stay fat and happy without breaking a sweat. And when it comes time to pat themselves on the back, they get the very people whom they’re supposed to be helping for their entertainment.

Atlanta’s homeless choir, the Atlanta Homeward Choir, will sing at the White House on December 21st. The 26 men, all currently homeless, will travel to the nation’s capitol to sing at the White House Open House Holiday Celebration.

How fucking pathetic. If their efforts were successful, there would be no need for an Atlanta Homeward Choir.

In sad reality, it’s all about bringing the real deal to the White House to entertain the elitist snobs who’ll fundraise off these poor men, most of whom won’t see a meaningful dime of what will be raised, and when they get back to Atlanta, they’ll be sent back onto the street.

Homelessness is NOT a game. Politicians and non-profits play games with people’s lives, telling themselves and others they’re making a difference by sticking people in a shelter they’d never set foot in, let alone want to spend a night in. What would be more useful, a real place to live or towels with pretty little bows on them that make the staff feel good about themselves?

Democrats are now claiming nationwide that they’re eradicating homelessness and it appears to be a bumper-sticker slogan slowly taking root around the country, at least while a Democrat is in the White House.

Buncombe close to ending veteran homelessness
Norfolk ends veteran homelessness
City of Las Cruces ‘functionally’ ends veteran homelessness
Connecticut was the first state in the country to eliminate chronic homelessness for veterans

Wait, it wasn’t Virginia…?

Trenton vows to end veteran homelessness by end of 2015
Mayor Reed vows to end veteran homelessness in 2015
Syracuse among U.S. cities to end veteran homelessness
Students hope tiny homes will help end homelessness
VA awards grants to prevent and end vet homelessness

Yes, more grants doled out by bureaucrats and issued to top heavy non-profits to end homelessness… functionally (whatever that means).

That being the case, we won’t see any of this next month….

What are the chances?

The homeless population has risen to an all-time high, forcing the de Blasio administration to house desperate families in decrepit tenements red-flagged by the city’s own inspectors as hazardous. Since he arrived at City Hall pledging to turn things around, Mayor de Blasio has struggled to confront a long-intractable problem that has only gotten worse.

By mid-December, the homeless census reached a record 59,068 — nearly the population of Utica, city records show. The Coalition for the Homeless says it peaked even higher at 60,352.
— New York Daily News, 2/1/15

Hopefully, some of you have noticed the pattern where the liberal media very seldom highlights the homeless tragedy during Democrat administrations, but Republican presidents are always asked what they plan on doing about it.

Unfortunately the homeless issue is one that can’t be solved on a major level, thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union but you’d never hear all the facts if you left it to liberal propaganda.

More than a third of this country’s homeless population have severe mental health issues, including schizophrenia and manic depression. At least one in every six inmates in America have been diagnosed with serious mental health conditions.

The gutting of public mental health services began with Reagan, first in California where he closed state-funded mental health facilities. As president he cut aid for federally-funded community-run mental health programs. The result: thousands of more homeless people in California and nationwide and a spike in the prison population.
— The Nation, 12/1/07

Richard Kim is either ignorant, or a liar perpetuating a liberal myth that was actually (yet again) a story of liberal condescension run horribly amok with a disastrous “consequence” that negatively affects the homeless and all they come in contact with to this day.

An unforeseen consequence of this “deinstitutionalization” was that “the shift from state to local services was unexpectedly accompanied by a sharp increase in the population of the mentally ill within California’s criminal justice system,” with more than 30,000 seriously mentally ill prisoners housed in state prisons, effectively “making California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) the de facto mental health treatment provider in the state.”

The irony is that civil liberties advocates who fought against the involuntary confinement of the mentally ill contributed to their entry into the criminal justice system. “It should be noted that LPS [the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act] was signed by Governor Reagan in California but only after pressure from groups like the ACLU stepped in and sued on behalf of patients who were being involuntarily hospitalized.”
— California Civil Liberties Advocacy

While too many of the mentally ill wound up in jail, even more wound up on the streets with the inability to take care of themselves.

Ask a liberal what they plan on doing about the homeless tragedy and you’ll find out either just how little they know and how useless their remedies truly have been.