yeah, jimmy carter appears to be both shrinking and turning japanese. he's also the only one with a genuine "folksy" accent. the others are often embarrasing fakes.

Indeed, Jonathan, the first thing that struck me about this photo (and others from the same shoot) was that Jimmy Carter was standing so far apart from the others and was so much shorter. He's been an excellent ex-president, with his work on peace, fair elections, and housing for the poor. Hope Obama can be as good a president.

You do mean Obama, right? The guy with no experience, no plan, and no idea what he's doing?

The guy who campaigned on the idea

We can't just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world's resources with just 4 percent of the world's population, and expect the rest of the world to say, 'You just go ahead, we'll be fine.'

And who is now telling us all that we need drastic federal spending in order to stimulate the US economy back to our old, wasteful ways?

The guy whose party has been telling us for the past 8 years how horrible deficit spending is, how it's "mortgaging our childrens' future", and who is now insisting that if we don't take out the hugest loan in history on our childrens' future (without bothering to explain what he plans to do with it), the whole damn thing will fall apart?

And it seems odd that people who campaigned so effectively by vilifying Bush are becoming so much like him:

Senate Democrats seem to be aping Bush’s Middle East policies; their only difference on Iraq now is a weird sort of revisionism in which Harry Reid’s once serial declamations about the war being lost and a surge as lunatic are now reformulated as invaluable criticism that alone forced Bush to adopt the necessary Democratic changes that saved Iraq. Obama himself on matters as diverse as the Patriot Act, FISA, NAFTA, Iran, Iraq, missile defense, and the surge seems to have gravitated away from his early Moveon.org/ANSWR campaign rhetoric to positions almost indistinguishable from those of the present Bush administration — as the appointments of centrists like Bush veteran Robert Gates at Defense and Gen. Jones as National Security Advisor attest.

That's part of an excellent article at National Review: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MGEyN2JjYWVjZTAxNWVlMmVhNGU3NmUyNTQwYTJhNzI=.

I'd be amazed at how the media is still distracted by Obama's "glistening pecs" and selection of a family pet, or his photo ops with former presidents (one of whom is still romantacized by the left, because when a Democrat gets us repeatedly attacked by terrorists, perjures himself, and unilaterally bombs innocent people it's aw-shucks charming). But really after the embarrassing way the mainstream media conducted themselves during Obama's sanctification, it's hard to be amazed at anything.