Honesty is the best policy, 'specially if there's money in it...

“If you don’t take the money, they can’t tell you what t’do with it.”

Among my more treasured childhood mem’ries is sumthin’ that happened during my time in what is t’day called ‘Middle School’...it wuz junior high back then ‘n I don’t recall if I wuz in the 7th or the 8th grade but it wuz one of those...

South Portsmouth School, 1st thru 12th in those long-ago daze...wuz situated up a short hollow that wuz appropriately if unimaginably called, ‘Schoolhouse Hollow’.

Anyways, there wuz a forest fire that got a little close to the school ‘n the highschool ‘n junior high boys wuz allowed to volunteer to fight the fire...

which most of us did primarily becuz we got out of schoolwork t’go ‘n do it but it really wuz strickly volunteer...no one wuz forced t’do it...which really ain’t my story ‘n nuthin’ t’do with my treasured mem’ry...

No! My treasured mem’ry wuz the two checks I got from the State of Kentucky for fighting that p’ticklar fire...Now, it happens that it wuz the one 'n only fire I wuz ever paid to fight but it wudn’t so much the money as the total of the combined checks wuz less’n a dollar ‘n a quarter but the pride I felt when I went to the bank ‘n cashed those checks has stayed with me for a lot of years...

Now, this is sort of a ‘roundabout way of commenting on Newt Gingrich’s recent comment about children being allowed to work as a means of growing their self-esteem...

A lot of liberal deepthinkers like Whoopi Goldberg ‘n Joy Behar (‘n a number of Democrat pundits) have accused Newt of wanting to repeal the Child Labor Laws in order for children to do the menial jobs that ‘more important’ people don’t want t’do...

Liberals seem t’be inordinately fond of extrapolating any conservative idea that is based in a common-sense approach to address a problem rather than creating a bureaucracy that inevitably turns molehills into mountains...c’uz, y’see, I heard what Newt said, ‘n I didn’t hear him advocating repeal of Child Labor laws...’n I never heard him say that young children of 8 or 9 should be put to work as janitors altho’ I seem to recall as a young boy, pushing a broom in the school gym ‘n picking up trash around the schoolyard (in the USAF, they taught us the same thing only they called it ‘policing the area’ but that’s another story)...makes me wonder what kind of kool-aid is it that Liberals drink that make them act so funny, make them spend my money, (apologies to the Big Bopper)...

My grandpa use’ta say, “Don’t argy with an idiot. He’ll drag you down ‘n beat you with experience.”