Miss Monica just received a fundraiser email from a Republican group asking people to buy coffee for the troops  

You can show your support for our troops by buying a pound of coffee or more and sending them a message of support for their efforts.

Has the war so bankrupted the military that they can no longer provide coffee for the troops? Inquiring minds wish to know. Miss Monica, who was baffled as to why she got this email in the first place, replied and asked the logical question, is it fair trade coffee?

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Red Cross investigators had found a system devised to break the will of prisoners through “humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions.”

“The construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture,” the paper quoted the report as saying.

When a mainstream respected organization like the Red Cross says the U.S. is engaging in torture, one might hope for a burst of investigative journalism from mainstream media, with maybe a few outraged Op-Eds about this loathsome practice. But, as usual, their silence is deafening. I guess the media is too busy reporting breathlessly about Julia Roberts giving birth to twins to bother much about torture. I’m glad they have their priorities right.

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Yeah, right…

Otpor, the group that overthrew Milosevic, received some funds from the U.S. government via the National Endowment for Democracy and the Agency for International Development. Veterans of Otpor helped train the Kmara movement in Georgia, the Zubr movement in Belarus, and the Pora movement in Ukraine. The revolutions they inspired—part Yippie street theater, part Gandhian resistance—got a hand from some of the same financial sources, including George Soros’s Open Society Institute. Washington has endorsed them warmly.

“Got a hand from?” “Were created by” is more like it. This isn’t so much about democracy as about new markets for goods, cheap sources of labor, and sites for military bases - military bases that help encircle Russia. That such moves will destabilize the entire area, and you can be sure that if the West is successful in installing a puppet government, that such a government will not have the needs of its people as the main priority.

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Proving that diamonds indeed are forever, a widower got a gem of a keepsake made from his late wife’s ashes this month: a 0.35-carat, round yellow diamond.

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In a new take on fighting spam, Web portal Lycos Europe has launched a screen saver designed to bombard Web sites promoted in unsolicited e-mail.

A graphic on the Lycos Europe site advertises the ability of its customers to “annoy a spammer now!”

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