Oops. Yeah. The ten at the top. You're a TEN Jared. It doesn't carry quite the same powerful meaning as with Bo Derek in the movie "10" [ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078721/ I know, I know. Decades before your time. ], but it is a GREAT GOOD thing (that I conveniently overlooked) and it is unanimous. So, OK. But you STILL should not let the journalism that takes place here get corrupted by PR vultures. I'm just sayin'.

Ooo, Sports fans. It's late in the 4th quarter; this story will soon be past its expiration date. Let us look at the stats: Jared 0 - 3 Ooo, tough one, there, Mr. Ed. and GM You're getting shut out. T.Cat 9 - 3 Yowza! Amazing. Dale 3 - 0 Way to go, Mr. Kooyman. You are a star. Aaron 2 - 0 Very nice! Clearly, the public is demanding reform! Since leadership at the SacPress graciously bows to the wishes (and whims) of the all-powerful public, a Tea Party take-over of SacPress will be combatted! Public Relations personnel and their Tom Foolery will be SMASHED, CRUSHED and JETTISONED INTO THE SUN! The good, the true and the beautiful win!! Hooray, Hurrah!

A journalistic enterprise -- even one that is journalism-light -- should regale truth in contrast to lies and promote honest opinion over outright deception. In the world of today, one of the two major political parties shamelessly uses deception in order to get its way. The latest news is that Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert is saying that Americans need guns to protect the nation from Sharia law. That is fear-mongering disguised as opinion. It is "successful" because a great many Americans are out of touch with reality to an extent that has never been the case before. Chevron has TV commercials purporting to show how much good they are doing in the world. Of course they can well afford to do some good since they have bribed congress such they they don't have to pay corporate taxes. All that masquerades as "opinion" is not equal. Sac Press should be judicious about what it allows.

"If an organization or a business has news to share, then it will be all the more powerful if that story is told with an independent voice and perspective." <-- Whoever said/wrote this is Right On. NO PR-written articles or -- in particular -- op-ed pieces!!

Jared, Thy synonym for PR professional is Professional Liar. Or, it would be if PR professionals weren't also heavily into obfuscation. Their very job is to deceive. Name me one legitimate journalistic enterprise that doesn't rightly, properly reject 'professional deceivers of the public' from posting/publishing in their publication You shouldn't let poisonous snakes in the door.

Great points, Dale Kooyman. There should be some sort of metrics system that measures success! The efforts of <a href="http://www.charitynavigator.org/">Charity Navigator</a> and <a href="http://www.guidestar.org/">Guidstar</a> and other charity evaluators are laudable, but they are mostly in service to the charities, and NOT looking out for contributors to the charities and the people who are meant to be helped. What would be ideal is for the homeless themselves to help draft a document of what would best be done for them for specific charities. Here in Sacramento -- like anywhere, probably -- charities take on certain roles. The <a href="http://www.ugmsac.com/">mission</a>, for example, has a role in providing a bed for newly homeless solo men; feeding adults an evening meal; providing showers and clothes to men on weekdays; and helping men overcome addictions; et al. It would be NICE for all this to be evaluated by those receiving the services, but it is unlikely in the extreme that the mission would put up with the judgment of non-administrators. Likewise, but in a different way, <a href="http://www.sacloaves.org/">Loaves & Fishes</a> is authoritarian and actively obstructs legitimate objective evaluation. In L&F's case it is because the public might find out about the horrors.

Not all non-profits are angelic enterprises. Many will produce very little in the way of BANG for any BUCK they are given. While there is something that seems altogether nice about giving to swell-sounding charities that claim to address important arenas where there is need and pain [Cure cancer! House the homeless!], many charities are spectacularly inept and unmotivated to work very hard. One large charity I know rather recently ditched what work they were committed to do for a day and the staff near-spontaneously leaped into cars and went bowling for the day. [ http://sacramentohomeless.blogspot.com/2012/11/more-on-loaves-fishes-unreliable-service.html ] This is something no capitalist organization could or would ever do; the competition would roll over them. Don't make any special provision for charities. The charities are in there hustling for dough and throwing sharp elbows just like Monsanto and Chevron and Enron and other non-charitable businesses.

I think the public library is very much escaping the ax that is coming down on other public services in our county. A 2% cut is unlikely to impact library services at all. What is likely to happen is that all services will be provided with attempts made to provide them in a way that is just a tad more economical. This can be healthy for the library, or any organization, to see what it can do more efficiently. I have one suggestion where money can be saved [and, btw, I hate offering this up because I take advantage of this "flaw" in their system]: Right now, printing documents from their catalog computers is free if the document is 5 pages or less. Because it is easy to print any long document by a series of five-page print jobs, I never have to pay for catalog computer print jobs. And some documents I print can be long, if they are magazine articles or academic essays. I haven't felt bad about my "immoral" conduct because the Central library, unconscionably, makes it difficult NOT to overpay for use of their copier or printing pages using their microfiche machines. [There are long explanations for this, which I won't go into here -- but, hey, Ms. Sass: post a reply to this comment and I'll give YOU the skinny.]

C'mon, y'all! It's a cut of something just over 2%. Two percent! Right now, the library is refusing the help of volunteers in an effort to keep jobs. That is understandable. But next year, volunteers can do much of the work reshelving books and otherwise helping out to keep things running. Volunteers can easily keep the library functioning as it has been, until the economy bounces back. Also, it is not unjust to press the library to find efficiencies to perform better. Sacramento will continue to have a public library system that is remarkable and loved in a county that greatly supports the many branches of the Sacramento Public Library.

Rhys02, I think I'm right in saying that Merin passed a part of his fee for the suit against the county to Loaves & Fishes, which got its own bundle of money out of the county suit, and, then, all that was received disappeared into the L&F black hole. Certainly, nothing was forthcoming for the homeless during the recent very cold and wet winter in the way of shelter -- which is, supposedly half of L&F's mission. SHOC also got $100,000 relating to administrative responsibilities, which is a joke. There is only one person identified as responsible for SHOC, and that person is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, if you catch my meaning. While it is excellent and appropriate that the homeless are compensated for city police/employee misadventures with people's property, how the money disappears and is distributed is, in large part,, a moral black hole. But some percentage will get to victims who deserve compensation.

Maybe if Anaheim steals our Kings, we could find a billionaire to buy the Angels, disband the team, and insert the River Cats into the American League. Tit for tat. Or, tit for Cat.

I had the pleasure of being in attendance for this game, my first at Raley Field. It was great fun. I cannot wait to go again to root on the home team. Nice article & pics, guys!

I think the count is highly inaccurate -- it explicitly counts the majority of the homeless, then supposes it can extrapolate the count to those areas where no one was sent to find homeless people. The Los Angeles County count from 2009 showed a huge surge in the homeless population that has to have been significantly bogus. SSF could give us some kind of slightly cooked figure of what confidence we can take in the final total -- you know, what the standard deviation is, sumpin like that -- but that isn't provided, of course. So, what bothers me the most is they seem to give us a total number they mostly pretend is precise, delivered by Pan, direct from Mt. Olympus. It is a Statistics 101 class calculation to determine what the likelihood is that there were fewer homeless in 2011 than in 2009. It's probably something like an 80% likelihood because of the wiggly figures, but we won't get the numbers to do that kind of a calculation. We are supposed to BELIEVE; have FAITH that what the number is, now, magically, explains the SUCCESS -- IT'S A SUCCESS! -- SSF supposes it has had in its other activities. It may be that I am over sensitized, but in the wide homeless-services industry, which includes some politicians, certainly including Johnson, there is this weasel quality -- this inability to be authentic and fully forthcoming -- that is wearisome and worrisome.

The agreement that Sacramento had with the Maloofs has to have defined the terms of repayment of the loan. I don't think that a state law can, retroactively, rewrite the agreement. Hopefully, there isn't wording in the loan, as written, that precludes it being repaid appropriately. City/county officials who bind the public in massive loan arrangements are the ones who are supposed to look out for us, at the getgo -- not lawmakers courting voters many years later.

Sonny, Your series, here, is splendid. I am hopeful that you've achieved more than you intended: Putting in the minds of many what the truth of the circumstance of being homeless is. The story of each homeless person is unique, but we are each confronted by the boggling homeless-services bureaucracy, which is two parts bad for every good and salvific thing it does. I praise to the skies your Warrior Spirit, courage and perserverence! [And, yowza, your excellence at the writing craft!] Keep it up, O Mighty brother! I know you are no longer homeless, but I hope to meet you out on the streets, or along the avenues in my journey, always in progress. Always, always. It is a great good that you've shone some light of truth in a situation that is darkened by the bathos coming from many charities, and journalistic laziness of the professional scribes who never leave the desk in their office [and, thus, mostly bellow into the echo chamber of homeless myths]. Right on! Oh, and write on, too!! -- Homeless Tom

I'm not sure how you would know, Dr. French, living in Roseville with clientel from there. The Rosevillians, famously, do little for the homeless other than pushing them into Sacramento county. That is, the homeless there are pushed out. While, from my experience, talking to the guys, it is true that some guys move around, going to those places where conditions for them are best, most have connections in the one place where they stay. But I'm not sure why this is always thought to be such a horrible problem. You've been practicing for 40 years, right? That means you're old and probably somewhat stink and aren't so nice to look at. Shouldn't the city and people of Roseville be thinking of ways to sluff you off onto some other community!? If I may speak for Sacramento County, we don't want you. Go die somewhere else.

Charity Navigator believes that nonprofit executives should be paid on a par with corporate executives, which is outrageous. Corporations are [ideally] in competition and there are benefits derived for the corp. and society if creating better products, independently, are derived from incentivizing high executive pay. A part of how a charity gets a higher rating comes from being well capitalized. And having a building [instead of spending money to help homeless people] enlarges the Loaves & Fishes empire. I say to you that charities SHOULD NOT act as corporations. They should be co-operative with other charities and focus on THEIR MISSION and not AN EMPIRE. A recent article in Fast Company magazine, "Why Charities Should Have an Expiration Date" [ http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/151/do-something-why-charities-should-die.html ] makes the case that for-profit companies come and go — they don't live forever … like vampires. Whereas not-for-profit organizations just attach themselves to a new mission when what they are doing turns sour, for one reason or other. Rotted nonprofits, like Loaves & Fishes, forget what they're about and succomb to the "vampire principle": suck blood for the purpose of sucking yet more blood out of people so that it can go on to suck more blood and continue to exist to suck more blood. It's a bloody business. The article concludes thus: The broader principle here is that companies and organizations don't exist simply to exist. A not-for-profit should ideally be not-for-perpetuity. [They] should not be donor-funded jobs programs. People give not because they believe in [charities as places with] employable human beings but because they believe in what nonprofits do. Once [the nonprofit's mission is accomplished, its employees] should wear a termination notice as a badge of honor. In other words, it's time we all invested in wooden stakes.

I am wholly pro economic activity in our metropolis. I do want sports and entertainment venues appropriate for our wonderful metropolis as it is now, and for our triving more populous metropolis as it will be in the future. I'd love it if a deal to keep the Kings can be found, but not if it means further enriching the Maloofs with a fat bribe in a tug-of-war over a basketball team. Sacramento will find its way even if the Kings leave and the blow to state workers is severe and permanent. We need new industries and other attractions to bring conventions and tourists. And we should be poised to bring in some other professional sports team. In the meantime, we can love the River Cats all the more.

Here the rudist and most straightforward and NECESSARILY non-sugar-coated opinion piece I know of since George Carlin died. http://momocrats.typepad.com/momocrats/2010/11/bill-maher-takes-on-jon-stewart-and-stephen-colbert-and-challenges-them-to-take-a-stand-and-hes-righ.html We need more of this -- and, really, only this. Say what you mean, by locating where the truth is, as best you can. Here some of the criticism Maher delivered, critical of the Jon Stewart rally in DC last November: "Martin Luther King spoke on that Mall in the capital and he didn't say, 'Remember folks, those southern sheriffs with the fire hoses and the German shepherds, they have a point too.' No, he said I have a dream, they have ...a nightmare...Liberals, like the ones on that field, must stand up and be counted and not pretend that we're as mean, or greedy, or short-sighted or just plain bat-shit as they [the Republicans] are. And if that's too polarizing for you, and you still wanna reach across the aisle ... try church" It's brilliant, and could only have been said with brio Would this not pass the Barton test? Of course, Barton is delivering the Stewart message, and Maher is, savagely, showing that Stewart (and Barton; sorry, David) is/are wrong, both with WHAT Maher says AND in the way he says it.

I'm a huge fan of Bill Maher, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. They are on TV, of course, not in print, but break every rule of uber-politeness, which appears to be the thrust of the instruction that Barton gave in writing opinion pieces (based on this article; I didn't attend the seminar). Sometimes you just have to tell people what you think. I prefer from others that which is uncooked rather than sugar coated. So, at least I'm not a hypocrite.