SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Carly Fiorina, the embattled former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, has declared her second candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, pitting her against Democratic favorite Hillary Clinton. For one of the first times in U.S. history, voters will encounter a fresh dynamic in the battle for the White House between two viable women of stature and influence. Although misunderstood and much maligned for her countless business, social and political failures, Fiorina could emerge as one of the best chief executives for America today. In fact, she seems to understand the mindset, motivations and pulse of the public in a way that Clinton never will. Here are Fiorina’s positions on the issues and all the ways she could surpass Ronald Reagan as the country’s most beloved and effective Republican president.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) relentlessly nattered his way into the history books in 2013 after a 21-hour talkathon that has been labeled a “fauxibuster” because it did not serve to stop a vote over the Affordable Care Act, as a filibuster is intended to do. Inconsequential as his rant may have seemed, the Tea Party darling managed to portray himself as a conservative folk hero for the far-right fringes of the Republican faction. Then, this month, he did something even more bizarre: he enrolled in Obamacare. The newly announced White House contender explained his decision as a sacrifice to illustrate the dangers of socialized medicine to the American people, even though it involves putting his own family at risk. As conservative political experts understand, providing a nation’s people with affordable and universal health coverage inevitably leads to the extermination of millions within an arbitrarily chosen ethnic or religious group. But Cruz wants his constituents to know that he is not all talk. He opposes government handouts. So on Tuesday, he boldly renounced all of the Hitler-esque, taxpayer funded benefits he receives as a member of the U.S. Congress.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- A controversial bill about religious freedom, signed by Indiana Governor Mike Pence, provoked national outcry from civil liberties advocates and drew harsh criticism against the Midwestern state. The law is reminiscent of Arizona’s discriminatory Senate Bill 1062, and also allows business owners with strongly held religious beliefs to refuse service to gays and lesbians. Pence defended his Religious Freedom Restoration Act (SEA 101) as a means to protect the religious freedoms of Christian-based enterprises. As most people know, the wealthy and powerful evangelical Christian community that runs the country has fallen under attack in recent years by a growing number of hysterical socialists who want to curb that community’s right to exercise its practice of bigotry and intolerance -- a fundamental U.S. freedom. But Gov. Pence claims that the law’s detractors have grossly misunderstood its reach. “The bill doesn’t discriminate against gays, that’s a false assessment and a narrow view of its scope; it discriminates against all groups of people that Christians hate,” he snapped during a recent press conference.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Last Wednesday, conservative leaders suffered another setback in the war on women when House Representatives reluctantly canceled a vote on a controversial bill banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, instead replacing it with less extreme restrictions. The decision came one day before the anniversary of the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade. But champions for the right-to-life remained undaunted. On Thursday, after a week of fevered brainstorming and amendments, influential House leaders proposed a new “female-friendly” bill. It marks a radical departure in strategy. If passed, male masturbation, in which millions of sperm are left to die on towels or tissues after ejaculation, will be outlawed -- and prosecuted as a capital offense.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Following Tuesday’s decision by U.S. District Judge Candy Dale to overturn Idaho’s ban on same-sex marriages, the number of states legally recognizing the rights of LGBT people to wed jumps to 19, a figure that incorporates the District of Columbia. Conservative members of Congress and their constituents have expressed outrage at the federal government’s nonchalant dismissal of traditional values. They also worry about the rising number of homosexuals cropping up in society. “Why are their numbers growing so rapidly and steadily, where are they coming from and what is responsible for creating them?” asked Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), who likened the gay plague sweeping across America to the Nazi conquest of Europe. Some believe homosexuals are aliens from another galaxy who arrived on Earth during the same cataclysmic event described in the cosmogony of Scientology. But a burgeoning faction of Congressional Republicans now suspect that someone, or something, may have detonated the U.S. Air Force’s infamous “gay bomb” within the last three years.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- On Monday, officials in North Carolina announced the death of Keith Crisco, 71, who was Clay Aiken’s Democratic rival for the state’s congressional primary. Crisco narrowly trailed Aiken, but his death, called a “freak accident” by authorities, brought an end to a hotly contested race. Aiken, of “American Idol” notoriety, is not only politically inexperienced -- this election marks his first bid for public office -- he’s also an openly gay celebrity seeking to represent a district dominated by socially conservative, evangelical Christians, some of whom now suspect foul play in Crisco’s demise. “There’s a lot we don’t know about the gays and their gay powers,” one resident said. “You gotta wonder how a guy trips and kills himself walking through his door. Stuff like that never happened before the gays came.”

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Over the last week, the mainstream media has maliciously attempted to discredit presidential hopeful Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) with claims that he plagiarized a number of speeches and entire sections of his books. Although Paul has responded with only terse denials and the suggestion that slander should be grounds for justifiable homicide under the rules of the duello, The Bennington Vale Evening Transcript has obtained an unreleased draft of a speech he is expected to give later this week. We are told this is not an apology, only a formal statement and defense on the matter.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- As the government shutdown lumbers into its 16th day, pushing the United States precariously close to defaulting on its bonds, House Republicans abruptly scrapped plans Tuesday evening to vote on a revised budget and raise the debt ceiling before Thursday's deadline. The Senate had already been close to finalizing a proposal that would have prevented the default while keeping the government functioning until 2014. The House, however, announced that it was drafting its own resolution. Speaker John Boehner's failure to submit the conservative-friendly alternative is seen as a severe blow to his standing and authority. But shortly after House leaders officially called off their efforts, Boehner surprised reporters by admitting that ranking conservatives had no desire to reopen the government. Ever. "After considering everything in detail, we believe that leaving cumbersome elements of the federal government closed indefinitely will actually save our economy by doing away with unnecessary, financially prohibitive regulations."

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- The small Amish enclave in the Kinneret Hills surrounding San Narciso County was rocked this week by the discovery of Tourette's syndrome in one of its teens, according to reports from the community newspaper and a local physician who resides near the area referred to as "Amish Acres" by neighboring residents. Tourette's is a congenital neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by physical spasms and peculiar vocal tics, which can include profanity, derogatory remarks and socially unacceptable outbursts. Elders within the reclusive Amish community said the "grave spiritual impurity" came to light Thursday after Tobias Verschmutzt, 12, disrupted school services by asking his teacher for a "gosh darn" pencil sharpener. The schoolmistress, a 22-year-old spinster, swooned with shock and fainted before her pupils. She remains unable to work and will need to convalesce for at least another week. In an interesting corollary, conservative politicians in the area are exploiting the incident to reveal the fatal flaws of social welfare programs like Obamacare.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Pope Francis' visit to Rio on Monday, where three million people gathered on the sands of Copacabana to hear the new pontiff, was met with enthusiasm, curiosity and rapturous applause. Using language uncharacteristically candid, Pope Francis delivered a radical vision about the future governance of the Catholic Church -- a blueprint for progress and change that his predecessors would never have dared to consider. He called for young people to push the old guard from its comfort zone and take the "Church to the streets." But the most memorable moment came during a casual conversation with reporters when Francis declared, in disarmingly direct speech, that gays should not be judged. The statement elated many, confused others and led to outright dissent from the far-right faithful. The biggest shock, however, was Justice Antonin Scalia's enthusiastic agreement on Thursday: "Pope Francis is correct -- judging gays and their rights has just made the problem worse."

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Conservative lawmakers in the House of Representatives announced plans to file articles of impeachment against President Obama no later than Monday following what they called a "loaded statement by the president" that implied "aggression toward Caucasians." President Obama made a surprise appearance in the White House briefing room Friday to address, on a more personal level, the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case. In his most extensive public discourse about race in five years, Obama declared that "Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago." The comment whipped conservatives into a furor of fear and panic. As legal experts pointed out, Zimmerman's not guilty verdict under Florida's Stand Your Ground legislation demonstrated that Martin was deemed the aggressor in the confrontation. By extension, Obama equating himself to the slain teen could be interpreted as an implicit threat, as it was by white attendees at the conference.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Wednesday's ruling against Section 3 of DOMA by the Supreme Court left long-suffering members of the GLBT community jubilant and hopeful, but devastated religious conservatives who are opposed to promoting the rights of people they view as sexually immoral. Former Rep. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) has been one of the most newsworthy anti-gay politicians over the past decade. In 2003, he famously warned that relaxing the legal definition of marriage would open the floodgates to all manner of deviant behavior, including "man on dog" relations. Today, in protest of the Supreme Court's ruling and to illustrate the very dangers implicit in the decision, Rick Santorum announced that he will marry a dog.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a watershed ruling on Wednesday by recognizing same-sex marriage in states where it has been legalized, striking down Section 3 of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which restricts the definition of wedlock as between a man and a woman for the purposes of receiving federal benefits. But anti-gay conservatives derided the ruling as a "dangerous precedent set by activist judges that will cripple the economy and immigration reform." Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissenting opinion, blasted the decision. Legalizing gay marriage, he declared, discriminates against people who are opposed to it. In that same vein, he also cried foul on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 for overturning segregationist Jim Crow Laws. Scalia deemed those decisions equivalently abhorrent because they discriminate against racists who don't wants blacks treated as equal citizens.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- It comes as no surprise that conservative politicians continue to denounce the landmark Roe v. Wade decision. It comes as no surprise that these same congresspeople fight tirelessly to find ways of overturning the ruling. So Rep. Michael Burgess' (R-Texas) declaration that the Supreme Court should dissolve the 23- to 24-week abortion window it legalized in 1973 also seems par for the course. What stunned the nation this week was Burgess' reasoning -- that fetuses masturbate as early as 15 weeks into pregnancy and therefore feel pleasure. This also means they feel pain, he contends, which is the basis for his argument to ban abortions much earlier than the prevailing laws allow. Clearly, Burgess is seeking to rally support from religious conservatives who have made ending abortion their foremost political and moral cause. But like abortion, masturbation is also a sin.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- In another attempt to solidify bipartisan support for tougher gun control measures amid escalating incidents of mass shootings, the White House released a photograph Saturday of President Obama firing a shotgun at Camp David. The intended message seemed to suggest that Obama not only supports Second Amendment freedoms but also enjoys squeezing off a few rounds himself, which would make his rally for increased controls on firearms permitting and heightened weapons restrictions more palatable to conservatives. The reaction to the photo, however, was more controversial than administration officials had expected. Skeptics scoffed, saying that one carefully orchestrated photo couldn't erase "a lifetime of supporting every gun ban and every gun control scheme imaginable." Comedians seized the opportunity to poke fun at the president. But the biggest surprise came from the National Rifle Association (NRA). In a stark about-face, the powerful gun lobby said the image of America's first black president armed to the teeth had inspired its members to reconsider their historic opposition to gun control. The NRA is now lobbying to ban certain types of weapons -- and their owners.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- California congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) has pulled out all the stops to defend America's growing population of technology criminals. Citing the need for new legislation, she proposed a bill to introduce "Aaron's Law," which would allow people to break the Terms of Service used by online paid service providers without any legal repercussions. Most online providers require consumers to agree to what were once binding terms and conditions, designed to protect their intellectual property. The namesake and basis for this new law, which would essentially amend the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, is Aaron Swartz, a young man who recently committed suicide while under indictment by the federal government for wire and computer fraud. The federal government invoked the CFAA as the basis for Swartz's indictment.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre ruffled the feathers of many Americans in his now infamous December 21 press conference, including those belonging to NRA members. Not to be outdone by other conservatives who advocate for unfettered weapons ownership, LaPierre confidently asserted that "guns don't kill people. Video games, the media and Obama's budget kill people." Mr. LaPierre cited statistics from the International Federation of Journalists that tallied over 120 journalists being summarily executed in 2012 while covering conflicts and insurgencies in hot zones such as Syria, Somalia, Mexico, Pakistan, Iraq and the Philippines. He also reminded the public of President Obama's proposed Death Panels included in the healthcare reform -- a contentious budgetary item. But LaPierre wasn't willing to stop with simply taking shots at video games, reporters and Obama. The National Rifle Association fired a second volley across the bows of electronic game manufacturers this week to back up claims that their products kill people -- by releasing an NRA-licensed game that doesn't kill people.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- After failing to persuade the federal government to place armed security forces at schools or weaponize the teaching staff, the National Rifle Association (NRA) announced its funding of specialized security training initiatives for the nation's hall monitors -- those student volunteers who are in charge of maintaining order in school corridors. "The position of hall monitor is itself an American institution -- but one that has historically been underutilized to the point of gross impotence," said NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre. "That changes today."

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Conservative Tea Party lawmakers, attempting a definitive victory in their crusade to stave off the damage from the decades-old War on Christmas, are appealing to federal agencies and embassies abroad to restrict travel visas for pilgrims hoping to visit the resting place of Saint Nicholas. Eager to celebrate the traditional festival of Saint Nicholas Day -- a largely European holiday that falls on December 6 -- groups of Santa Claus enthusiasts regularly travel to the saint's birthplace in Turkey, seeking a deeply personal connection with the holiday. However, workers at the historic preservation site told authorities that several American visitors have collapsed over the last two years and gone into immediate shock at the conclusion of the tour. Doctors claim some pilgrims have remained under medical supervision for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from journeys dating back to 2009.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- The mountains of "Dear Santa" letters overtaking the back offices of postal facilities across the nation are still graced with adorably childish penmanship and misspellings, but this year's heartfelt scribbles tell the lachrymose tales of Americans in peril who are dealing with economic hardships, disillusionment and loss. But according to postal workers, most of these letters have been authored by adults -- conservative politicians and business leaders now facing the end of their decade-old free ride at the edge of a fiscal cliff, á la "Thelma and Louise." Ephrem Kalthor, postmaster for San Narciso County, said he's finding that for every one letter by a child, at least seven are penned by conservative adults. "A lot of the children's letters have asked Santa to provide clothing and assistance for the victims of Hurricane Sandy," Kalthor told reporters. "It's very touching. And for those with displaced relatives back east, there's a palpable amount of worry in the writing. But nothing to rival the unbridled 'End of Times' dread we're seeing from Tea Party supporters who have actually bargained with Santa to kill the president, lobotomize women and help effect a gay genocide policy."