Mothers Against V-Chip News (MAVINS)

By Rose A. Valenta

While the FCC has adopted rules for the use of V-chip technology in television sets with screens that are 13 inches or larger; no one has restricted the behaviors of politicians and public figures with shorter penises and a deficient supply of grey matter.

Mothers can’t V-chip prime time news, people, and we need a strong activist to help launch MAVINS - Mothers Against V-ChIp NewS. The evening news is always on in the living room while the kids are supposed to be doing homework, and it will only get worse over time.

I first noticed something was wrong during the Clinton administration, when little Johnny came into the kitchen asking about protractors, sexual harassment, and oral sex.

“I can help you out with the math manipulatives,” I said “but the other questions you’ll have to run past your father. Where did you hear that anyway?”

“It was just on the news,” he said. “They want to fire the President for sexual harassment and oral sex.”

“That’s ‘impeach’ the President,” I said, “Not ‘fire’ him.”

That scenario continued non-stop from about January of 1998 to February 1999. Obviously, our President was deprived in his youth from what the Amish call "Rumspringa." As a result, little Johnny had enough sex education to CLEP credits on the topic.

He wrote an entire Dissertation on “Cheating and Sexual Mating Behaviors of Public Figures Based on Income and Risk” for his friends, while still in middle school.

Years later, it gets worse. Recent sex scandals brought to us family-oriented viewers, during prime time news, involve Herman Cain, Barney Frank, John Edwards, Jim McGreevey, Governor Mark Sanford, Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, Tiger Woods and 'The Energizer' bunny.

It was reported on the national news last year, that the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter sex video previously leaked by former aide, Andrew Young, was going viral online.

News of the video made me cringe, as Professor Johnny is now a college student and also a YouTube junkie. He thinks it is “sick,” not a bad term in this generation, and posted it on Facebook and Twitter to his 3,000+ sick followers.

When he is home from college, he uses the computer in my kitchen.

Just what I need while I’m cooking:
“Hey, Mom, what do you think of 'The Evolution of Cheating Self-Sabotage and the Sexual Mating Behaviors of Public Figures From a Darwin Perspective”?

“Go ask your father!”

Now I know why Elvis Presley sat around shooting out television sets.
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A Sentimental Journey

by Rose A. Valenta

It was a yellow shingled, four bedroom Cape Cod with both a front and back porch purchased by my grandparents circa 1905, in Olean, NY - the home that I loved to live in every summer while growing up. It never mattered to me as a child that it didn’t have central or room air conditioning; but did have a leaky basement, a coal stove, and wood trim that needed painting every other spring. It was a comforting and wonderful summer refuge.

That home saw the birth of seven babies, four boys and three girls most of whom survived the great depression and learned how to become entrepreneurs. It hosted several weddings and two funerals in the huge floral papered living room equipped with sliding wooden doors located in the hallway across from the stairs leading to the second floor bedrooms. Later, photos of the nuptial events hung in the hallway leading into the large kitchen. Divorces happened infrequently, kids moved back home, and pictures of Mom and Dad would come down off the wall and be replaced by photos of grandchildren.

In the foyer, stood a telephone table that supported an old black Western Electric telephone and the only Heathkit hand-soldered, hard-wired, working answering machine in existence. My father built it himself after he returned home from WWII and it was the talk of the town. People would come for miles just to see it and pay him to build one for them. He dabbled in electronics after the U.S. Navy sent him to school to get certified in ship communications equipment. He built most of the CB radios used by the Olean Volunteer Fire Department and fixed television sets. He opened Bill’s Radio and TV Service out of the house, and had tubes spread out all over the dining room table most of the time, much to the chagrin of my Grandmother, who would rather serve food there, than clean up an electronics laboratory. She found resin, solder, irons, wicks, and PC boards everywhere on her good table cover. Occasionally, she would get fed up and cart boxes of the stuff upstairs and put them on my Dad’s bed. She finally convinced him to set up shop in a spare bedroom, so she could have her house back.

The attic was where I used to hang out most of the time; I would have slept up there if she let me. I spent hours rummaging through the maze of beckoning old chests and storage boxes. Me and my friends would play dress-up there, then go next door to my friend Susan’s house, play the organ, and pretend to be show girls like Shirley Temple. I recall making my Dad bring down my old baby coach once, so I could take my dolls for a walk. One of my dolls was a boy named Oscar, he had a baby bottle, a pilfered vacuum tube, several diodes, and capacitors in his possession, when he got caught red-handed commanding the coach down the 100 block of North 14th St. by my Dad, who was missing some parts for a job. Of course, Oscar got put in the bad chair after I denied all knowledge of the pilfering and swashbuckling; plus, he got a stern lecture and no tea and sugar cookies that night.

The front porch was where my uncles would gather to smoke cigars after dinner and my Uncle Joe would serenade all of us by singing and playing the accordion. The entertainment kept my Grandmother from going over the edge about all the cigar smoke and ashes on the deck. She sat there with a dust pan and broom waiting for intermission.

Remembering the events in the yellow house always makes me smile. Grandma was a rock and lived to be 90 years old. She sold the house in the 1970s, and moved in with one of my aunts a few years before she died. I was already married at the time, and unfortunately my husband and I both lived and worked in Philadelphia, PA. However, I would have gladly purchased that house in Olean, if I could.

In 1998, my husband and I found a wonderful little yellow cottage on Chincoteague Island, VA. We fixed it up and also installed a closed-in front porch. It has an attic, where I store old clothes, Christmas decorations, and household items. Near the attic window sits a child’s rocking chair waiting for a small boy or girl to come to Grandma and Grandpa's house and rummage through the place to find small treasures. Often, my laptop and a printer sit on the good table cover in the large dining room. You can spend hours on that porch listening to crickets, ducks, and other wild life; with Big Band music or Beethoven playing softly in the background from the stereo in the corner. Occasionally, I drift off to sleep there. Sometimes, I can distinctly hear accordion music and smell cigar smoke. I have friends in high places. It is my weekend/vacation refuge from the stresses and storms of life and I love spending time there.

Then tourist season and Pony Penning set in, the area becomes noisy. Things are never really perfect are they?

Will Rogers and the 2014 Federal Budget

Wasteful government spending that makes no sense is often referred to as “pork barrel” spending or just “pork” spending. It has been referred to that way since before the Civil War.

Yes, even Honest Abe had some pork in his budget.

Pork spending often includes ridiculous things like “$2 million to construct an ancient Hawaiian canoe,” or “$1 million to preserve a sewer in Trenton, NJ, as an historic monument.”

Many of these bizarre and absurd pork items have been suitably noted in THE GOVERNMENT RACKET: Washington Waste from A to Z, by Martin L. Gross. In his book, Marti provides us with an extensive itemized list.

I have to ask myself, in these modern times, why didn’t Congress listen to Will Rogers in the first place?

Back in the pre-Obama era (1920s and 30s), Will Rogers had the right idea when he said "The budget is like a mythical bean bag. Congress votes mythical beans into it, then reaches in and tries to pull real ones out."

He also pointed out that during elections "The average citizen knows only too well that it makes no difference to him which side wins. He realizes that the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey have come to resemble each other so closely that it is practically impossible to tell them apart; both of them make the same braying noise, and neither of them ever says anything. The only perceptible difference is that the elephant is somewhat the larger of the two.”

If Will were alive today, I can just hear him advising Congress to consolidate. You know, States like Rhode Island with only four electoral votes can be easily merged into States like Massachusetts, which has 13; Vermont can go to New York; New Hampshire to Maine; and so forth, until we evolve into an economic Godzilla. Then, we can go overseas and stomp on China for pirating, bootlegging, and violating US copyright and trademark laws. We should then be able to sue and raise about $100 trillion just on what we find in Shanghai, alone. That should wipe out our national debt, right?

Americans don’t have any use for a Gōng Yáng White House knock-off.

"If stupidity got us in this mess, why can't it get us out?" ~ Will Rogers▪