Our Tax Dollars at play.....Air Force One and Security$$....

What a trip...........Must be nice, huh?

Gay Celebrations in California........"The judge decided against the will of the PEOPLE! HURRAH!"

I'm not going to say much on this....please weigh in on this one:

Crowd celebrates overturning of gay marriage ban....by Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO — A cheerful and noisy crowd is gathering in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood (Z; the gay neighborhood) to celebrate Wednesday's ruling by a judge overturning California's same-sex marriage ban.

After the ruling by Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, people throughout the neighborhood met in cafes and bars for small celebrations. In one bar, patrons toasted with glasses of champagne.

Coffee shops throughout the area were also packed as area residents watched the news on television.

With the crowd gathering on the street having grown to an estimated 400 early Wednesday evening, many were chanting and waving rainbow and American flags.

The celebration in the Castro neighborhood comes just before a planned march and rally to City Hall.

So, would you be clicking champagne glasses? And, ya, I can't believe I posted that picture, either. Sorry. HERE is more. Yahoo homepage news says this "reignites HOPE" :-)

z

OINK! This is HUGE, folks...Sherrod and Breitbart; a NEW SLANT

I was just sent this email....I found it attributed to a blogger called ABRAXAS who writes for undercoverage.net, a blog you might want to check out. Skim through the top stuff, you know most of it, but MAKE SURE YOU CLICK ON THE LINK IN PINK and READ THE REST! DRAW YOUR OWN CONCLUSIONS, BUT I THINK IT'S WELL WORTH YOUR ATTENTION. Here goes:

Andrew Breitbart is a media genius.
He proved it originally with his brilliant handling of the ACORN ‘hooker’ scandal which he skillfully manipulated so that the corrupt media was forced, against its will, to broadcast corruption in one of Obama’s most powerful political support groups. But Breitbart’s handing of that affair is nothing compared to his brilliant manipulation of the Shirley Sherrod ‘white farmer’ scandal.

It all began last Monday, July 22, 2010. As the country watched in horror, Breitbart released a snippet of a tape on his “Big Government” site which showed an obscure black female official of the Dept. of Agriculture laughing to a roomful of NAACP members about how she’d discriminated against a destitute white farmer and refused to give him the financial aid he desperately needed.

As she smirked to the room, she’d sent him instead to a white lawyer – ‘one of his own kind’ – for help.
The black woman was Shirley Sherrod – and almost immediately she became the center of a firestorm of controversy which exploded throughout the country.

Within a day of the release of that infamous tape, the head of the Dept. of Agriculture, spurred on by Obama, demanded – and received – Sherrod’s resignation.

Breitbart had won.

But then seemingly Breitbart’s actions began to explode in his face.

As Sherrod screamed in protest, FOX News released the entire text of her speech last March to the NAACP.
And there on tape Sherrod was shown supposedly repenting of her racism against a white farmer and instead championing his fight to win funds to keep his farm afloat.

Within hours of that entire tape being revealed, the entire world turned against Andrew Breitbart.
Conservatives throughout the country were enraged that he’d endangered their reputations by releasing a ‘doctored’ tape.
Breitbart, they thundered, had dealt a fatal blow to the conservative media.

I confess that I also was horrified at what I saw as the clumsiness and stupidity of Breitbart in ‘doctoring’ a tape to make a supposedly innocent woman look guilty. But now I discover I have been as guilty of haste to judgment of Breitbart as the Dept. of Agriculture was of Ms. Sherrod.

Only now am I realizing the real purpose for Breitbart’s release of that tape snippet. It was to allow him to cunningly trick the media into exposing one of the most shocking examples of corruption in the federal government – a little known legal case called “Pigford v. Glickman”.

Check it yourself at:
http://pajamasmedia.com/zombie/2010/07/27/pigford-v-glickman-86000-claims-from-39697-total-farmers/?singlepage=true

“In 1997, 400 African-American farmers sued the United States Department of Agriculture, alleging that they had been unfairly denied USDA loans due to racial discrimination during the period 1983 to 1997.”
The case was entitled “Pigford v. Glickman” and in 1999, the black farmers won their case.
The government agreed to pay each of them as much as $50,000 to settle their claims.

But then on February 23, 2010, something shocking happened in relation to that original judgment: In total silence, the USDA agreed to release more funds to “Pigford”.

The amount was a staggering...... $1.25 billion. This was because the original number of plaintiffs – 400 black farmers – had now.... swollen in a class action suit to include a total of 86,000 black farmers throughout America.

There was only one teensy problem:

The United States of America doesn’t have 86,000 black farmers!

According to accurate and totally verifiable Official USDA 2007 Census census data, the total number of black farmers throughout America is only 39,697. Hmmm... by the Official USDA 1992 Census data the US had only 18,816 black farmers!!
Oops!
Well, gosh – how on earth did 39,697 explode into the fraudulent 86,000 claims?
And how did $50,000 explode into $1.25 billion? Well, folks, you’ll just have to ask the woman who not only spearheaded this case because of her position in 1997 at the “Rural Development Leadership Network” but whose family received the highest single payout (approximately $13 million) from that action – Shirley Sherrod.
Oops again!

Yes, folks. It appears that Ms. Sherrod had just unwittingly exposed herself as the perpetrator of one of the biggest fraud claims in the United States – a fraud enabled solely because she screamed racism
at the government and cowed them into submission. And it gets even more interesting.

Ms. Sherrod has also exposed the person who aided and abetted her in this race fraud. As it turns out, the original judgment of “Pigford v. Glickman” in 1999 only applied to a total of about 16,000 black farmers.
But.... in 2008, a junior US Senator got a law passed to reopen the case and allow more black farmers to sue for funds. The Senator was Barack Hussein Obama.

Because this law was passed in dead silence and because the woman responsible for spearheading it was an obscure USDA official, American taxpayers did not realize that they had just been forced in the midst of a worldwide depression to pay out more than $1.25 billion to settle a race claim.

But Breitbart knew. And last Monday, July 22, 2010, he cleverly laid a trap which Sherrod – and Obama + his cronies– stumbled headfirst into which has now resulted in the entire world discovering the existence of this corrupt financial judgment.

As for Ms. Sherrod? Well, she’s discovering too late that her cry of ‘racism’ to the media which was intended to throw the spotlight on Breitbart has instead thrown that spotlight on herself – and the huge corruption.

Sherrod has vanished from public view. Her ‘pigs’, it seems, have come home to roost.
Oink!
But the perpetrator of that law passed in dead silence leading to unlawful claims & corruption..... is still trying to fool all of US.

Z: Some of the style of the piece seems mildly excitable or hyperbolic but the LINK IN PINK, halfway down the article, has the facts and figures and I urge you to see that. You can't PUT enough lipstick on THIS pig of a story. Trouble is, nobody really IS hearing it, are they. That the mainstream media's not covering this is, well....how shocked can we be? I guess that, today, by now, I'd have to say ...."normal", right?

"When I was a kid..."

I did NOT WRITE THIS but Priscilla emailed it to me and I thought it was pretty funny.....and TRUE........enjoy!

If you are 40, or older, you might think this is hilarious! ..... and if you are younger here's a history lesson !!
When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning...Uphill... Barefoot... BOTH ways. yadda, yadda, yadda...And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it! But now that I'm over the ripe old age of forty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia!

And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don't know how good you've got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have the Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!

There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter - with a pen!
Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox, and it would take like a week to get there! Stamps were 10 cents!

Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our ass! Nowhere was safe!

There were no MP3's or Napsters or iTunes! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up! There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car.. We'd play our favorite tape and "eject" it when finished, and then the tape would come undone rendering it useless. Cause, hey, that's how we rolled, Baby! Dig?

We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal, that's it! There weren't any freakin' cell phones either. If you left the house, you just didn't make a damn call or receive one. You actually had to be out of touch with your "friends". OH MY GOD !!! Think of the horror... not being in touch with someone 24/7!!! And then there's TEXTING. Yeah, right. Please! You kids have no idea how annoying you are.

And we didn't have fancy Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your parents, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, the collection agent... you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn't have any fancy PlayStation or Xbox video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids'. Your screen guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!!! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen... Forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel!!! NO REMOTES!!! Oh,no, what's the world coming to?!?!

There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying? We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little rat-finks!

And we didn't have microwaves. If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove! Imagine that!

And our parents told us to stay outside and play... all day long. Oh, no, no electronics to soothe and comfort. And if you came back inside... you were doing chores!

And car seats - oh, please! Mom threw you in the back seat and you hung on. If you were luckily, you got the "safety arm" across the chest at the last moment if she had to stop suddenly, and if your head hit the dashboard, well that was your fault for calling "shot gun" in the first place!

See! That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled rotten! You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1970 or any time before!

Regards,
The Over 40 Crowd (of which Z is not, of course :-) ya, well..................
z

Feeling DEJECTED about politics?

A Cure for Political Dejection
I don't post LONG ARTICLES much but, TRUST ME, YOU could have written this and it'll MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD that someone ELSE GETS IT THIS WELL:
By Quin Hillyer for THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR: (Z: by the way, I had this ready to post and then heard Monday morning that Obama is now saying that those people fighting for the AZ law (I guess he's specifically picking on Gov Brewer now) just "want to make a name for themselves." If that doesn't make ANY American feel dejected, when your president suggests those who are fighting for what they think is right are just trying to 'make a name', then I don't know what would
Here is Hillyer's article:

I really don't know what to write. We have a president who is so divisive that two longstanding pollsters of his own party write that "President Obama's divisive approach to governance has weakened us as a people and paralyzed our political culture."

We have columnists for major newspapers who are so nastily partisan that they fail to do even the most basic of investigatory requirements before sliming good, honest, decent Americans such as Justice Department whistleblower J. Christian Adams.

We have congressmen so eager to play gotcha that they try to blame former presidents for failing to do a constitutional duty even when the well-reported facts are that the operatives for the president of the congressman's own party unwittingly were the culprits in the supposed problem at issue. (Yeah, you won't know what I'm talking about; that's why you absolutely must read this link.)

We have a major congressional committee chairman who has conniption fits about not being given a $1 senior-citizen's discount, but who won't apologize for costing taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars by refusing for years to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (He also didn't seem too exercised about his boyfriend running a male prostitution ring out of his own basement, but that's another story.)

We have writers for publications respected by the "mainstream" media who are so vicious and dishonest that they would suggest randomly throwing around charges of racism without a shred of evidence -- a charge made the more despicable because one of the named victims of the smear happens to be one of the nicest, most decent people in all of Washington punditry or politics.

We have a national debt exploding so rapidly, by deliberate design of the president, that one almost believes he is trying to implement the Cloward-Piven strategy of manufactured crisis. Cause a political and economic cataclysm; use it as an excuse for radical executive orders and proto-martial law; that sort of thing. Again, I did say "almost." But we are getting to a point where it almost doesn't matter what the motivations are; the reality being created could have the same effect whether by intention or by autocratic reaction to the fruits of the leader's own incompetence.

We have a president who may as well have declared war on my home state. Or on the whole central Gulf Coast.

We have a speaker of the House so cynical (or batty) that she says we must pass a bill first in order to know what's in it, and a majority leader so accustomed to railroad jobs and internal autocracy that he actually makes fun of the idea of requiring that congressmen be allowed at least 72 hours to examine bills before voting on them.

We have Supreme Court nominees sailing through despite saying that genetic differences might make Latinas better judges (Sotomayor) and despite openly flouting the law to harm military recruiting in a time of war (Kagan), and despite wanting to rule that the Constitution forbids states from keeping currently incarcerated rapists and murderers from voting (Sotomayor) and despite manipulating both science and the law in order to keep the barbaric practice of partial birth abortion legal for another decade (Kagan). (Sorry, readers: I'm tired of providing links, but Google these things at the Washington Times and you'll find them.)

I could go on with other bad news, but I'm tired. I'm dejected. I'm disgusted. I'm furious. I'm disheartened and disillusioned.

I want fair play and integrity and intellectual consistency and common decency from all points on the political spectrum. But those attributes are not as prevalent on the right as they should be, and it seems they are almost nonexistent on the left. I don't mind honest and respectful disagreements; I am sickened by vicious attacks without substance.

And, dear reader, I assume you agree. I hate writing all these "I" sentences (yikes: I almost sound like Obama!), so let's make this about you. What are you going to do about all this? What do you want to see happen? How much do you care about your country and your community?

If you are reading this, the answer to the questions in the last sentence is probably "one heck of a lot." You care. You have aspirations for communities of freedom and comity. You want to stop all of these political horrors, and you want to stop cultural horrors not even touched upon here but that could take pages and pages of exposition. You want to believe in America. And, dare we say it without sounding too pie-in-the-sky, you want to do what Ronald Reagan said all good Americans want to do: "to dream heroic dreams." And to work to make them reality.

So get to it. Keep up your activism. Talk to your neighbors. Volunteer at campaign headquarters. Contribute financially to candidates. Make phone calls. Go to rallies. Write thoughtful and concise letters to the editor. Help register like-minded voters. Drive elderly or infirm like-minded voters to the polls in November.

Get involved and stay involved. For the sake of your country, your loved ones, your future. Our future. Together. As Americans. Go do it. Now.

Quin Hillyer is a senior editorial writer for The Washington Times and a senior editor of The American Spectator. He can be reached at Qhillyer@gmail.com. (thanks for the tip, Ron)

Z: 8:00AM Tuesday morning: I just watched CNN for a few minutes and want to take my hat off to Alan Chernoff, who did an excellent job ON CNN warning about Obama's desire to repeal the Bush tax cuts....he carefully showed how damaging this will be to most American families and included how their having less to spend into the economy will bring LESS income into the federal government...I've got to give credit where credit is due. Good job, Chernoff.

z

WHY does Obama SAY these things?

(the video takes ten seconds, please watch!)

Obama: "My father served in World War II, and when he came home, he got the services that he needed." (Sen. Barack Obama, Remarks At The NALEO Conference, Washington, DC, 6/28/08) Oops!:

Barack Hussein Obama Sr. (Obama's father) Born 4/4/36, Died 11/24/82 at the age of 46 ... He was 5 years old when WW 2 started, and less than 9.5 years old when it ended.

Lolo Soetoro (Obama's step father)...Born 1935, Died 3/2/87 at the age of 52 ...He was 6 years old when WW 2 started, and 10 years old when it ended.

One of these guys must have been the youngest Veteran in the war.

WOW. (thanks MGM) (imagine the media if Bush or Palin said anything CLOSE to this.... untrue?)
z

"She's black, and she feels this way?" And WHY NOT?

I am proud to post this: You can skip all her credentials and start reading at FELLOW AMERICANS ........
The amazing and timely piece down below was written upon the election of Barack Hussein Obama, by a woman named Dr ANNE WORTHAM. Here are her credentials: She is a member of the American Sociological Association and the American Philosophical Association. She has been a John M. Olin Foundation Faculty Fellow, and honored as a Distinguished Alumni of the Year by the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education.
In fall 1988 she was one of a select group of intellectuals who were featured in Bill Moyer's
television series, "A World of Ideas." (Z: wait, MOYERS had someone like THIS on?!) The transcript of her conversation with Moyers has been published in his book, A World of Ideas. (Z: Oh$)
Dr. Wortham is the author of "The Other Side of Racism: A Philosophical Study of Black Race Consciousness" which analyzes how race consciousness is transformed into
political strategies and policy issues.
She has published numerous articles on the implications of individual rights for civil rights
policy, and is currently writing a book on theories of social and cultural marginality.
Recently, she has published articles on the significance of multiculturalism and Afrocentricism in education, the politics of victimization and the social and political impact of political correctness.
Shortly after an interview in 2004, she was awarded tenure. (Z: All that to say "this woman is NO DUMMY!") Wait till you read this:

Fellow Americans,
Please know: I am Black; I grew up in the segregated South. I did not vote for Barack Obama; I wrote in Ron Paul's name as my choice for president. Most importantly, I am not race conscious. I do not require a Black president to know that I am a person of worth, and that life is worth living. I do not require a Black president to love the ideal of America (Z: I do) .
I cannot join you in your celebration. I feel no elation. There is no smile on my face. I am not jumping with joy. There are no tears of triumph in my eyes. For such emotions and behavior to come from me, I would have to deny all that I know about the requirements of human flourishing and survival - all that I know about the history of the United States of America, all that I know about American race relations, and all that I know about Barack Obama as a politician. I would have to deny the nature of the "change" that Obama asserts has come to America .

Most importantly, I would have to abnegate (Z: "renounce"..who knew?!) my certain understanding that you have chosen to sprint down the road to serfdom that we have been on for over a century. I would have to pretend that individual liberty has no value for the success of a human life. I would have to evade your rejection of the slender reed of capitalism on which your success and mine depend. I would have to think it somehow rational that 94 percent of the 12 million Blacks in this country voted for a man because he looks like them (that Blacks are permitted to play the race card), and that they were joined by self-declared "progressive" whites who voted for him because he doesn't look like them. (Z: oh, gad, she's good)

I would have to wipe my mind clean of all that I know about the kind of people who have advised and taught Barack Obama and will fill posts in his administration - political intellectuals like my former colleagues at the Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

I would have to believe that "fairness" is equivalent of justice. I would have to believe that a man who asks me to "go forward in a new spirit of service, in a new service of sacrifice" is speaking in my interest. I would have to accept the premise of a man that economic prosperity comes from the "bottom up," and who arrogantly believes that he can will it into existence by the use of government force. I would have to admire a man who thinks the standard of living of the masses can be improved by destroying the most productive and the generators of wealth.

Finally, Americans, I would have to erase from my consciousness the scene of 125,000 screaming, crying, cheering people in Grant Park, Chicago irrationally chanting "Yes we can!"
Finally, I would have to wipe all memory of all the times I have heard politicians, pundits, journalists, editorialists, bloggers and intellectuals declare that capitalism is dead - and
no one, including especially Alan Greenspan, objected to their assumption that the particular version of the anti-capitalistic mentality that they want to replace with their own version of anti-capitalism is anything remotely equivalent to capitalism.

So you have made history, Americans. You and your children have elected a Black man to the office of the president of the United States , the wounded giant of the world. The battle between John Wayne and Jane Fonda is over - and Fonda won. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern must be very happy men. Jimmy Carter, too. And the Kennedys have at last gotten their Kennedy look-a-like. The self-righteous welfare statists in the suburbs can feel warm moments of satisfaction for having elected a Black person.

So, toast yourselves: 60s countercultural radicals, 80s yuppies and 90s bourgeois
bohemians. Toast yourselves, Black America . Shout your glee Harvard, Princeton , Yale, Duke, Stanford, and Berkeley. You have elected not an individual who is qualified to be president, but a Black man who, like the pragmatist Franklin Roosevelt, promises to - Do Something! You now have someone who has picked up the baton of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. But you have also foolishly traded your freedom and mine - what little there is left - for the chance to feel good. There is nothing in me that can share your happy obliviousness. God Help us all.

Z: And, of course, nothing that's happened since she wrote this has done anything to change her opinion, I'm sure; if anything, it's been cemented. Isn't she good? And doesn't she represent more Black Americans than you might think? I believe so. I sure hope so.
z

Voter Intimidation.....fraud.........worst than we thought?

PLEASE watch at least the top video...Every American NEEDS to see this.


And here is PART 1 of the documentary mentioned in the above video (you can watch the rest of the parts on YouTube), Gigi Gaston's WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED:

Most of us thought Black Panther thugs with night sticks were bad enough. It seems that the Obama machine was altogether pretty powerful and effective. Well, the mainstream media's still keeping all of this quiet (tho Gaston approached them first with her documentary), but it's DEMOCRATS complaining, and this information's finally getting out (it happened in 2008!). And...please read the LETTER FROM CAMP two posts down, it's SO important that I'd like you to know about it. thanks.
z

FOX in the CATBIRD seat?

FOX is getting a front seat in the briefing room at the White House. "Fox's upgrade is an acknowledgment of its "length of service and commitment," the association's board said in a statement."
Okay, it might have something to do with that, but I have this vision of the lefty journalists (most of the room) all hiding behind FOX's Major Garrett and whispering "Ask him THIS and ask him THAT so we don't have to look like Conservatives if WE ask the tough stuff to finally get the truth!"

A Letter from Camp.....Do YOU think even "tough kids" can change? .Sunday Faith Blog ...

MOST of my my Sunday Faith Blogs "write themselves." Nothing had come to me as of this morning, but I knew it would, and it sure did, in the form of the following email (in italics) which arrived Saturday afternoon, on the heels of my Walter Williams post down below about racism. (names have been changed at the request of my friend who emailed this):
Dear Friends, Thank you for your prayers for our kids at camp. The leaders could tell that people were praying for them! I wanted to get you some details on what kind of responses we had from the kids. One of our teen moms, Vanessa (z: who is black), was brought to our Youth teen mom group by a teacher at Venice High who was very concerned about her being depressed. She was living with her "baby daddy's" parents at the time. They speak only Spanish and she speaks only English. Her leader, (Emma), said that she rarely laughed and was very withdrawn, but Vanessa was completely transformed at camp. She laughed more than she had for the whole 6 months she has been part of the group!! She tried every activity, even the scary ones like the ropes course and the climbing wall. She told Emma that she had never heard the Message before. She said she went from being "confused" about God to "curious". It was her birthday a few days ago and Emma brought her a Bible and she will continue to help her to understand what she heard.
The middle school kids all loved being at camp. They were definitely not all "easy" kids for sure! They come from backgrounds of dysfunction and poverty. Some of the boys were going around "bullying" other kids. Chris (z: who is black), one of our leaders, had to put 4 of them in the van and start to take them home. These hard core type guys (z: from the inner city) began crying and said that they REALLY wanted to be at camp and after that they were better behaved. They had a blast and got into every activity. Several told their leaders that they would like a "face to face" relationship with Christ. Their leaders are starting a new bible study for them this Tuesday, so continued prayers would be wonderful. Here is what one of their guy leaders wrote about their time together at camp:
"Stinky, sweat stained and tired, the 11 of us walked up a nasty hill after a fun mountain bike ride. After a while, I felt something tug the water bottle out of my hand, and thinking it was one of the boys trying to be funny, I turned around quickly to see our smallest guy holding a pile of water bottles as big as his chest. Without any prodding or anything, he had volunteered to carry our entire group's water bottles up the hill just because he felt like it. Little windows into how our savior works, and how he moves within us. Our week together was a fun one...we rock climbed, skate parked, pool basketballed and slap-boxed our way through six days together, and we all got to hear a great telling of the Gospel story at the same time. We sat in our cabins and talked about the resurrected Christ, and then we went out and played on the slip and slide for hours. The boys we had got to hear some truth about a God who loves them and cares for them, some of them for the very first time, and then they got to go out and spend a week just being kids. And as the other leaders and I got to just be kids with them, I'm pretty sure we smiled just as much as they did."
Middle school kids are figuring out which direction their lives will head and I know that God has planted a seed in these kids that will help them to choose the right path. Thanks for your prayers! Speaking of middle school kids, I had a wonderful meeting with a teacher at the Middle School in Watts. She wants to start a Youth group weekly club for the kids there. She told me that several of the Christian teachers meet weekly to pray over the school as it has many problems with gangs, guns, low achievement, etc. But in the midst of all trouble there are some pretty terrific kids as well. We just need some more volunteer mentors to work with them in order to start the club. Could I impose on your prayer muscles once again to be used on kids' behalf for this school? Again, thank you for prayers! I know the Lord heard and honored them. Signed....(Z's Friend)

Z: I highlighted in red the part that brought tears to my eyes. These kids were acting up, angry, trying to do what they could do to shake things up until they were threatened with this joyful time being yanked from them and going back to what they know; then they CRIED to stay. These "hard core type guys" CRIED! And then they did so much better! Kids do WHAT THEY KNOW. These kids knew to MAKE TROUBLE, maybe even to react with belligerence when faced with true goodness? But, now they KNOW DIFFERENT! How many kids even KNOW the difference anymore?

This, to me, showed that children CAN do better if given love, hope, and encouragement....I believe God had a big part in this, too, and you can see that my friend does, too. I hope this encourages you to help a child, to think the best of them and let them know it, believe in them, let them live up to their potential. Please, God, let all children feel this, help us give them a chance no matter what color or creed. Amen.

Have a beautiful Sunday.....help a child, especially a really tough one. Every life is precious.
z