The Nightowl Newswrap

By @BG & @YD

• It's a good-news/bad-news situation. The good news is, Mittens is sewing up the nomination and the GOP didn't go completely over the cliff and nominate Frothy, the serial adulterer Newt nor the evil gnome Ron Paul. The bad news is, Mittens is still...Mittens, and Mittens is just an unlikeable, offensive douche who reminds everyone who has lost a job in the last decade of the asshole who fired them, and everyone else just hates him on spec.

• Great moments in coserva-joke "journalism" Asshole deluxe and Breitbart minion and wanna-be bad-boy Jason Mattera thought he had a real "get" when he ambushed Bono. Except it wasn't Bono. It was a Bono impersonnator. Feel free to point and laugh and mock and ridicule and don't stop until he cries like a little girl.

• Run that by us again, please? Mittens told the attendees of a town hall meeting in Maryland on Tuesday that President Obama doesn't deserve the credit for preventing another great depression, that credit goes to George Bush. Seriously. He said that. And his tongue didn't flip off it's rollers telling an outsized lie like that.

• Arpaio keeps digging.  Now the crazed wingnut says he wants the Selective Service System to help with his "birther" wild goose chase, because he thinks that the form President Obama filled out in 1980, when he graduated from high school, is probably a forgery too, just like his birth certificate.

• Before he was a cold-blooded murderer the waste-of-skin George Zimmerman was accused of domestic violence by a woman who had the good sense to dump the loser before he ruined her life, too. Speaking of the creepy fucker, he is even more scared of the public and prosecution than he is a black kid with a bag of Skittles and has gone into hiding.

• We've been waiting our entire adult lives for this Independents are closing in on Democrats when it comes to the percentage who want churches to get the hell out of politics, and stay out. Only republicans are cool with the two operating hand-in-glove, but they're all mentally ill and delusional anyway, which makes them susceptible to magic and myth.

• Another blow to right-wing hate-radio The FCC has cleared the decks for hundreds of new low-power FM stations that can bring progressive and local-interest voices to the radio waves on what have for decades been "repeater" channels, which is how Limbaugh became so powerful to begin with.

• If GOP governors actually read their Facebook pages themselves rather than consigning them to low-level staffers to maintain, they ought to be rethinking their decision to wage war on women as women take to their facebook pages and light them the fuck up. So you know what this means...no more schooling for the uppity sluts who will just turn around and say mean things to their governor. In public.

• The only way this will stop the massacres in Syria is if Assad reads it and dies laughing. "The United Nations Security Council has adopted a statement backing joint UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan's plan for ending the violence in Syria, as a government crackdown on opposition strongholds has continued. Mark Lyall Grant, the UK's ambassador to the UN and the current president of the council, read out the statement during a UNSC session on Wednesday. The statement expressed the council's "full support" for Annan's efforts, and called upon both the government and the opposition "to work in good faith with the envoy towards a peaceful settlement of the Syrian crisis" and to fully implement his six-point proposal. The statement threatened "further steps" if the government failed to comply with the proposal."

• We notice the UN has nothing to say about Bahrain prosecuting medical workers for doing their jobs. "The Bahraini government is still proceeding with a high-profile case against medics who treated wounded protesters during an uprising last year, despite a prosecutor's statement suggesting most of the charges would be dropped, the justice minister has said. "At the end of the day, the last decision will be at the court, the court has to acquit or punish. Until a final judgment, all of them are accused," Sheikh Khalid bin Ali Al Khalifa, the justice minister, told a news conference on Tuesday."

• Now this shows Burma is serious about reform. "Myanmar has invited international observers, including from the European Union and the United States, to monitor the by-elections to be held next month, an official has said. Observers from the United Nations and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations [ASEAN] have also been invited for the April 1 polls, a Myanmar government official said on Wednesday. The ASEAN monitors have been asked to arrive in the commercial capital, Yangon, on March 28, just four days before the election, which will be held in 48 constituencies."

• Just when you think there is nothing about the Catholic Church more horrific and disgusting than what has already been revealed .... "At least 10 teenage boys or young men under the age of 21 were surgically castrated "to get rid of homosexuality" while in the care of the Dutch Roman Catholic Church in the 1950s.' ... The NRC Handelsblad newspaper identified Henk Heithuis who was castrated in 1956, while a minor, after reporting priests to the police for abusing him in a Catholic boarding home. ...Evidence emerged on Monday that government inspectors were aware that minors were being castrated while in Catholic-run psychiatric institutions. Minutes of meetings held in the 1950s show that inspectors were present when castrations were discussed. The documents also reveal that the Catholic staff did not think parents needed to be involved. There are also allegations that Vic Marijnen, a former Dutch Prime Minister, who died in 1975, was linked to the case."

And finally...

• Darwinian natural selection mystery solved - and not the way the freakazoids want. "It is a clever trick if you can pull it off - mimic another, more dangerous animal and so avoid being eaten. Many insects try it, but it has been a long standing puzzle why some of the worst mimics in Nature can still seem to escape becoming a meal. Now, Canadian scientists tell Nature journal they can answer that one. Larger animals, they say, make for more substantial meals, and so their mimicry needs to be spot on. For small prey, a great performance is not so essential. "Mimicry of harmless species pretending to be dangerous ones in order to avoid being eaten is one of the best celebrated examples of the outcome of evolution by natural selection," says Professor Tom Sherratt, of Carleton University in Ottawa, who led the research. "Good examples of mimicry are highlighted in biology text books, but many mimics are poor and their emergence remains something of a puzzle." Mimicry is common among plants and animals. Species of snakes, spiders and butterflies have all evolved to look like other species to ward off predators. But one of the great mysteries in biology is that most of this copy-cat behaviour is not very good, and bad impersonators seem just as abundant as the good ones."

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