Here's a Republican "good government" agenda for you. The GOP believes in two governmental programs:

1. Military Spending through endless undefined wars (privatized to the greatest extent possible)

2. Prison construction and minimizing vacancies (privatized to the greatest extent possible -- often to the same companies as #1 above)

Shining City on the Hill, Land of the Free, Home of the Non-competitive Bid and all that patriotic mumbo-jumbo!

When we start going on about the human rights abuses of the Chinese (which are merited), god forbid we hold up a mirror to our true selves in doing so:

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

We sing many praises, Republican, Independent, Democrat alike about how we're the greatest country on earth because of our "freedom", the "last best, hope of earth" as it was said by Lincoln so long ago. We declare and praise our Constitutional due process protections. But this statistic, by itself stares us in the face and tells you all you need to know about how deeply we actually believe in the principals we so glibly espouse.

But sadly, tragically, and most of all embarrassingly, we are in no position to brag about "freedom" to anyone. We have, in many ways aggressively or passively allowed ourselves to be self-terrorized into a virtual police state. The term "police state" is not used lightly. It does describe how badly we have been manipulated by our politicians and media -- but mostly it demonstrates how blithely we all have allowed ourselves to be manipulated.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

Can anyone read these stats and be proud? And this is without breaking down the statistics into the even more shocking statistics of the incarceration rates by ethnicity, race, and economic status.

And now, the true relationship, our nation's true suicide pact, the perverse interpretation of the Second Amendment (because James Madison was TOTALLY in the bag for increased lethality via handguns, the man was a total douchebag prophet):

The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s. (These numbers exclude people held in jails, as comprehensive information on prisoners held in state and local jails was not collected until relatively recently.)

The nation’s relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.

“The assault rate in New York and London is not that much different,” said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group. “But if you look at the murder rate, particularly with firearms, it’s much higher.”

Of course, no one is arguing violent crimes be punished less, but the appalling ease in which people can get guns in this country makes their use in crime and increased lethality a more serious consequence upon the victims. However, this fact can easily be ignored and we as a society have apparently decided to do so.

But it is more than that, as the Times details what we all know, it's the fact that we send people to prison for the most non-violent of offenses, including our continual delusional "war on drugs":

But that is only a partial explanation. The United States, in fact, has relatively low rates of nonviolent crime. It has lower burglary and robbery rates than Australia, Canada and England.

People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Mr. Whitman wrote.

Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000.

Those figures have drawn contempt from European critics. “The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism,” said Ms. Stern of King’s College.

There are arguments made that drops in crime rates are due to these higher incarceration rates. But they are matters of dispute.

The extraordinary rate in which we deprive citizens of their freedom, however, is not subject to any debate. It is a palpable, and appalling fact.

There are obviously differences in party politics on some matters. Republicans are totally beholden to the Gun Lobby, while Democrats are merely in the bag for them. Republicans favor locking up damn nearly everyone who looks at them strangely, Democrats are comparative wimps, only favoring locking up everyone squirrelly.

But the end result in either case is disgusting, this incarceration rate is embarrassing, but political anathema to discuss for any politician. What the hell can we do about it?