Commenting on the Iranian situation Juan Cole notes:

Supreme Jurisprudent Khamenei’s pledge of no first strike against any country by Iran with any kind of weapon, and his condemnation of nuclear bombs as un-Islamic and impossible for Iran to possess or use, was completely ignored by the Western press and is never referred to. Indeed, after all that talk of peace and no first strike and no nukes, Khamenei at the very end said that if Iran were attacked, it would defend itself. Karl Vicks of the Washington Post at the time ignored all the rest of the speech and made the headline, ‘Khamenei threatens reprisals against US.” In other words, on Iran, the US public is being spoonfed agitprop, not news.

Although Iran’s protestations of peaceful intentions are greeted cynically in the US and Israel, in fact Iran has not launched a war of aggression in over a century. The US and Israel have launched several during that period of time.

Here’s the problem: I know of several instances of the American and Israeli governments flat-out lying to their people and the world, but I can’t find the same kind of example for Ayatollah Khamenei. I’m opposed at the most basic level to many of the man’s beliefs, but I can’t say that I know him to be a liar.

The first hurricane of the season is doing a number on Haiti this morning and then will mug Cuba. The passage over Cuba will weaken the storm, but it will have plenty of warm water to help it recover strength once it enters the Gulf.

The current track has it going over the lower Keys and then cruising up the western Gulf coast of the Florida peninsula before turning inland to pass into the Atlantic around Jacksonville.

It looks like the people still in FEMA trailers from Charley in 2004 are going to get hit again.

As I wrote last year: the response was screwed from the beginning.

In the map below, the area in yellow are those parishes included in the 08/27/2005 FEMA emergency declaration:

The area in red are the parishes actually at risk from hurricanes – they got it exactly reversed, which prevented aid from being pre-positioned in northern Louisiana.

[Read more →]

Florida License Plates

Beneficiary

A weekend feature of Why Now.