SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- After another haphazard and hasty rush to promote Republican Party messaging on Twitter, the GOP removed an offensive tweet only hours ago that read: "Free at last! Kenyan-Muslim-socialist-Madrassa-food stamp-crazed dictator dies." The post was deleted by administrators of the RNC (@GOP) account on learning that iconic South African peace activist Nelson Mandela had died Thursday, not U.S. President Barack Obama. Defending the confused Mandela-Obama tweet, RNC spokespeople confessed to poor judgment but explained that the similarities between the two groundbreaking presidents led to an error "any reasonable person could have made when the news broke."

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- More than 50 years after Rosa Parks helped ignite the civil rights movement in America by refusing to relinquish her seat on a segregated bus and move to the rear of the vehicle, she became the first African American woman to be commemorated with a life-size statue in the Capitol's Statuary Hall. The dedication ceremony was held on Wednesday, with President Obama and Parks' surviving relatives in attendance. Her act of defiance directly influenced desegregation and was instrumental in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which came under fire this week by the conservative justices of the Supreme Court -- particularly Antonin Scalia who labeled one of its key provisions a "racial entitlement." Despite drawing gasps and criticisms for his comments, Scalia continued to attack the relevance of the act, citing the slippery-slope dangers of racial entitlements as propagating racial inequality. In that same spirit of profound concern, Scalia told Congress they should move Parks' statue to a less prominent position in Statuary Hall -- the back -- to downplay the perception of racial entitlement.