These favorable (to Obama) comparisons are not without merit. Operation Eagle Claw, the failed attempt to rescue the Americans held hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Iran in April 1980, marked one the low moments in American military history. A sandstorm rendered three helicopters unable to function, and another crashed into a C-130 transport aircraft during the hasty evacuation, killing six servicemen. The debacle undoubtedly contributed in some part to Jimmy Carter's failure to win reelection later that year. Carter didn't personally pilot those helicopters, but his legacy has been stained with the embarrassment ever since.

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In politics, both Carter and Reagan sought to exploit the "white backlash" in the aftermath of the civil rights revolution that had led many white Southerners and white Northern "ethnics" to defect from the Democrats to support third-party populist candidate George Wallace. Reagan did so by beginning his general election campaign in 1980 in Neshoba County, Miss., where white supremacists had recently fire-bombed a black church and had earlier murdered three Northern civil rights activists, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney. In a thinly disguised appeal to white Southern racism, Reagan declared, "I believe in states' rights."

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The former president brokered a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt in 1978. He calls the unrest the most profound situation in the Middle East since he left office in 1981.

The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer reported Carter's remarks to the Sunday school class he teaches at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains.

Mubarak was vice president when the peace accord was signed and became president in 1981 when Anwar al-Sadat was assassinated by opponents of the agreement with Israel.

Carter said that as Mubarak's 30-year rule has continued, the Egyptian leader has become more politically corrupt.

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Samuel Makoy is not interested in the bucolic scenery, though. He has an epidemic to quash.

Makoy points out to the women the fingernail-length worm-like creatures whose tails flick back and forth. Then a pond-side health lesson begins on a spaghetti-like worm that has haunted humans for centuries.

This fight against the guinea worm is a battle former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has waged for more than two decades in some of the poorest countries on earth. It is a battle he's almost won.

In the 1950s the 3-foot-long guinea worm ravaged the bodies of an estimated 50 million people, forcing victims through months of pain while the worm exited through a swollen blister on the leg, making it impossible for them to tend to cows or harvest crops. By 1986, the number dropped to 3.5 million. Last year only 3,190 cases were reported.

Today the worm is even closer to being wiped out. Fewer than 1,700 cases have been found this year in only four countries -- Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali and Sudan, where more than 95 percent of the cases are. The worm's near-eradication is thanks in large part to the efforts of Carter and his foundation.

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In Carter's telling, his dark horse 1976 presidential campaign became a vehicle for Tea Party-ish sentiments. "We capitalized on deep dissatisfaction with the policies and practices of government officials," he writes, "especially those who served in Washington." In reality, though, the Tea Party of his era sprang up from the same place and for the same basic reasons as the Tea Party of today. Then as now, the presence of a Democratic president with substantial Democratic majorities fed a conservative revolt (which was also directed at "establishment" Republicans deemed by the right to be too cooperative with Democrats).

When Carter came to office in 1977, Democrats controlled 62 seats in the Senate and 277 in the House. (This was the last time before last year that a Democratic president enjoyed a filibuster-proof majority, although filibusters weren't deployed nearly as commonly back then.)

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Carter had been scheduled for two events in Washington on Wednesday, including one at the Smithsonian Institution, to promote his book "White House Diary."

Kathy Daneman, publicity manager at publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux, said no decision had been made about an event planned at a Columbia, S.C., bookstore Thursday.

Book signings in a Cleveland suburb and Durham, N.C., were canceled Tuesday when the 85-year-old Carter fell ill on a flight to Cleveland.

Christina Karas, spokeswoman at MetroHealth Medical Center, said Wednesday that doctors recommended additional observation during the day, but that Carter feels normal and looks forward to resuming his schedule soon.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

CLEVELAND (AP) -- Former President Jimmy Carter, feeling normal and hoping to resume a book publicity tour soon, remained in an Ohio hospital Wednesday after doctors recommended additional observation following an overnight stay for an upset stomach.

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Jackie Mayo, a spokeswoman at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, says the 85-year-old former president was a passenger on a Delta flight to Cleveland late Tuesday morning and became ill. She says he was taken off a plane by rescue crews.

He was taken to MetroHealth Hospital, where the Carter Center says he is resting comfortably.

The website for Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cleveland says Carter was scheduled to appear at 1 p.m. Tuesday to sign and talk about his new book, "White House Diary."

The center says he is expected to resume his book tour this week.

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Carter was a passenger on a commercial flight to Cleveland on Tuesday morning and became ill.

Jackie Mayo, a spokeswoman at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, says Carter was taken off the plane by rescue crews.

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"Afterward," Carter writes in his diary, "Kennedy drove over from his hotel, appeared on the platform along with a lot of other people, seemed to have had a few drinks, which I probably would have done myself. He was fairly cool and reserved, but the press made a big deal of it."

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The former president made the comment in an interview with CBS' "60 Minutes" to be aired Sunday. Parts of the interview were posted on the show's website Thursday.

In the interview, Carter accuses Kennedy of "deliberating blocking" comprehensive health care legislation Carter proposed.

Kennedy, who made health care reform a prized cause, died in August 2009 from brain cancer. The Massachusetts senator challenged Carter for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination, but fell short. Kennedy and Carter had competing health care reform plans.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Jimmy Carter says Americans could have had comprehensive health care coverage decades ago if the Edward Kennedy hadn't blocked a plan Carter proposed while in the White House.

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Last year, former President Bill Clinton met with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, to bring home two American journalists. And now former President Jimmy Carter has brought out Aijalon Mahli Gomes. Neither leader would have gone to Pyongyang if anything less could have saved the American prisoners from years of misery.

Gomes, a 30-year old American citizen from Boston, entered North Korea without a visa in January. The authorities tried him in a closed proceeding, sentenced him to eight years of hard labor and fined him $700,000. His crime? Illegal entry and unspecified "hostile acts" against North Korea.

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Here's a typical comment from a conservative reader:

"He is personally responsible for this mad regime in Iran."

The general line of argument seems to be as follows: Carter should have responded to the hostage crisis by nuking Iran, or otherwise initiating military action that would have prevented the establishment of a fundamentalist Islamic regime. But he didn't, which emboldened the forces of revolutionary jihad. The subtext: If Carter had taken a stronger line then (perhaps even before the hostage crisis, by providing military to support to the embattled Shah), maybe we wouldn't be facing such a mess now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Needless to say, I was rather shocked at the outcome of that election, and have pondered its significance ever since. While I think Carter was largely doomed by factors that he had little direct control over -- the oil shocks and the hostage crisis -- I am willing to admit that he had his flaws and didn't leave much of an enduring legacy. He certainly wouldn't be on my list of the top 10 U.S. presidents.

But in what universe does he qualify as the Worst American of All Time? How does that work?

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This is quite true. But the story of the GOP's Carter attacks is actually a complicated one, simultaneously providing today's Democrats with a hopeful example and a cautionary tale.

Carter and Bush, of course, left office under similar circumstances: feeble economy, brutal job approval ratings, sagging national confidence, and so on. And they were both replaced by charismatic leaders, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, whose inaugurations spawned widespread public optimism.

But when the economy worsened in 1981 and 1982, Reagan's popularity wore off -- just as Obama's has deteriorated in the face of strikingly similar unemployment numbers. Which is why, as they confronted grim midterm election outlooks, they both took to invoking their unpopular predecessors on the campaign trail.

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"Every single person in the United States is going to be affected," Roosevelt said. "[Business] profits are going to be cut down to a reasonably low level by taxation ... [Americans] will have to forgo higher wages ... All of us are used to spending money for things that we want, things, however, which are not absolutely essential. We will all have to forgo that kind of spending."

For its honesty and purpose, the speech remains a shining example of leadership. For its bravery in telling painful truths the country needed to hear and for Americans' subsequent rise to the challenge, the address today stands as a sad commemoration of a tragically lost ethos.

That is the only conclusion to draw when comparing Roosevelt's clarion call to those following the past decade's Pearl Harbor-like calamities. Rather than encouraged to sacrifice or accept self-denial in the face of emergency, we are now instructed to embrace our inner hedonist.

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Grownups who were unable or unwilling to take the policy measures necessary to reduce inflation told us children that price inflation was our personal responsibility, just as similar cowards and charlatans today tell us that addressing global warming is a moral responsibility of ordinary people, not a technological issue to be resolved by governments and utilities. I remember the U.S. retreat under fire from Indochina under President Gerald Ford and the debacle of the Desert One mission to rescue the American hostages in Iran under President Jimmy Carter.

And then there is the most painful memory of all: the killer rabbit. On April 20, 1979, a White House photographer captured an image of the beleaguered President Carter using his paddle to fend off a rabbit as it swam toward his fishing boat in Georgia. The photo was suppressed until the Reagan years, and Carter's press secretary explained that the creature was a ferocious "swamp rabbit." But headlines like "President Attacked by Rabbit" gave a comic spin to the widely shared feeling that the U.S. government had become feeble and ridiculous.

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Yet we've committed not $1 trillion to the incompetent and/or corrupt, but more than $4 trillion. That's according to a report to Congress from Special Inspector General Neil Barofsky, the overseer of the bank bailout program.

Technically, Barofsky adds, Wall Street's IOU to you and me is at about $3 trillion these days, since some of it's been paid back. Relieved? Don't be. As these tsunamis of public wealth pour out, ignore the slosh and focus on the order of magnitude. The entire gross domestic product -- the number reflecting all wealth generated in this nation for this year -- is only $14.1 trillion. So whether the sum of our money that's now their money is $3 trillion (1/5 of all wealth generated in America in a year) or $4.7 trillion (1/3 of all wealth generated in America in a year), it still means that, for a big chunk of the year, every single one of us was working for Goldman Sachs et al.

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Mondale was asked about former President Jimmy Carter's thoughts on the matter Wednesday night, Politico reports. He said he agreed, adding:

I don't like saying it. Having lived through those years, when civil rights was such a bitter issue, and when we argued those things for years ... I know that some of that must still be around.

I don't want to pick a person, say, he's a racist, but I do think the way they're piling on Obama, the harshness, you kind of feel it. I think I see an edge in them that's a little bit different and a little harsher than I've seen in other times.

Carter and Mondale are saying what's on the mind of more than a few Democrats right now. That doesn't mean, though, that the White House will be happy about it. The Obama team has always been reticent about engaging in discussions of how race affects opinions of the president, and especially about accusations of racism against him.

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Conservatives aren't likely to enjoy Cosby's latest statement about race quite so much. On his Facebook page, the comedian had this to say about former President Carter's allegation that racism is behind much of the animosity towards Obama, and about Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C.:

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Asked at his daily press briefing about Carter's remarks, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, "The president does not believe that the criticism comes based on the color of his skin. We understand that people have disagreements with some of the decisions that we've made ... I don't -- I don't think that, you know, the president does not believe that it's based on the color of his skin."

Gibbs then got into a bit of a back-and-forth with Helen Thomas:

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