Jail

When Larry King recently asked Iran's president about punished dissent in his country, he parried the question by alluding to America's leading the world in incarceration: 2.5 million--and rising. The most egregious disparity is blacks jailed for crack while whites are wrist-slapped for the more expensive white stuff they have gone to inner cities to buy.

Our paradigm of two systems of justice is George W. Bush's rap sheet: teenage DUI unpunished, AWOL from Champagne Squadron in Vietnam war, SEC free insider trading which loot started his Horatio Alger-like rise with the Texas Rangers. "Torture"? Lawyers let him do it!

There is a laughable discrepancy between our Leader of the Free World and duplicitous legal system. The privatization of incarceration is another new disgrace, like our hiring overpaid, uncontrolled mercenaries in the Iraq and Afghan wars.

The recent scandal of unlenient judges throwing teens into the clink for private profit shows just how corrupt we've become. Nation-building? Clarity should start at home.