Tom Englehardt has given us another thought-provoking snapshot of the Bush legacy. How long after January 20, 2009 will Icelanders (and everyone else we've shamed and humiliated) reconsider a US trip? How many more Muslim college students will call Australia home for the next few years? Our country needs a trip to rehab....and not a surge, but a purge of the poisons in our heads--GWOT and all of the rest of the Bush acronyms. Thanks, Tom, for showing us how much healing we must undertake for ourselves as a nation.

Decidedly underwhelming. Not only doesn't it show the big picture--what about the percentage of people dropped from BLS stats when they don't find work within a particular amount of time? (Unemployment doesn't count them, either.) This reader found herself wishing that the writer had shared whatever sedatives he was on when he wrote this--if he had, perhaps others of us would see his vision.

SWORDS were news to me. Why are there only 3 of them in Iraq? Certainly they can't be as "expensive" as 75,000 injured and 3665 dead.

Well written piece, and the first time I've seen White House "gallows humor" referred to in print. Unfortunately for the country, Bush still has time to break that record.

The story is well researched, fairly presented and UTTERLY CHILLING.

There is no exit from Katrina; and no future for so many of its survivors. This game is the Louisiana Labyrinth. How is this possible two years after the storm? We need more stories like this one, because we need to see the faces of the lost city...not the numbers, not the stats, but the individual stories. There should be one a day until every survivor's life has been restored....but it's much too easy to file this tragedy under "big story from two years ago." That is...until we have another hurricane season that makes Katrina look like a rehearsal.

Yes, it's a single finding about a planet we can't (and wouldn't want to) live on. But we are a step closer to finding out if water, and the life it supports, is truly Universal.

YES! We need to know more about the way young adults think, because they'll be in charge before you can say "social security." The fact that they are leaning toward more progressive ideas will be considered good news by lots of writers, including this one.

This was an objective view on a genuinely global issue. Well done!

Yes, concise (almost to a fault.) I wanted more.