In Politics, You get what you Voted for.

We are all born with certain skills. From the very poorest of us to the richest, there is something that comes naturally to each of us. For me, I was born with a well honed bullshit detector. I can see the fakes around me. I can see though their woven strings of lies. My detector isn't 100%. I've been fooled at times. But many times I've seen though people that others swore on their mothers graves that they were on the up and up. With politicians, about 98% of them set off the bullshit detector. Why? Because they are full of it. There are several issues I just don't understand and one of them is people who fall for fake politicians. They understand in general that politicians are liars but their pol? Their pol is the best thing since sliced bread. Their pol is on the up and up, it's all the rest that are bad. Their pol is on the up and up because he/she smiled at them, shook their hand and expressed sympathy for them, that means they are good people. They ignore the fact that their pol then went to his/her respective legislature and voted for their lobbyist buddies. It's this attitude that keeps idiots like Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and John Boehner in charge. Notice, my BS detector is an equal opportunity alert. But what is worse are the tea party and libertarian groups. These people fall all over any politician who declares they support them. Why? They understand that RINO's exist (Republican in Name Only), but they don't understand that TPINO (Tea Party in Name Only) and LINO's (Libertarian in Name Only) exist. I just don't get that. The LINO's are easy to spot. They advocate for liberty for every single one of their favorite causes and tyranny for yours. That's not Libertarianism. But some TPINO's are harder to spot. (setting aside big government statists like Rick Santorum) I use the issue of crime to denote a TPINO. Why? Because crime fighting, court systems and prison's all take tax payer dollars and today's court systems operate as nothing more than a branch of the IRS.

TPINO's will express themselves as being for God, Country, Guns, and Tough on Crime. Their constituents fall all over them. Take for example animal rights extremist William Lamberth in Tennessee. His website literally promoted, God, Country, Farmers, Guns and Tough on Crime. People fell all over to support him. He was elected (of course). What he didn't tell you is that part of his "Tough on Crime" stance involved prosecuting the elderly for crimes they hadn't committed. That's how he helped to build up his prosecution jacket. He gleefully assisted in taking assets away from the elderly through the court system. Now he's in the Tennessee legislature giving him a whole new arena to take assets away from the people. And Tennesseans voted for him. Quite frankly when he starts voting for legislation to take away their assets, rights, and liberty, they brought it on themselves and get no sympathy from me.

Being tough on crime is not a stance solely held by the right. The left also holds this view but you will find more people on the left who understand that America's judicial system is corrupt and provides no justice to anyone. It's much harder to find these people on the right. Politicians love it when the judicial system lets a hard core criminal go. Why? Because YOU then fall all over yourself to demand that your local pol pass more "tough on crime" laws. What you just don't get is, those laws do not target the hardened criminal that was let out early, they target YOU. Politicians use these cases over and over again to get YOU to agree to pass more laws that strip your liberty away, not that hardened criminal.

Every single day across America, stories are told in the media of cases where a defendant was found to be innocent decades after the crime. The National Registry of Exonerations run by the University of Michigan Law School was formed in 2012 and already has documented 1,536 cases of innocent people who were exonerated. Just in the last two weeks the following stories were in the news:

Joseph Sledge of North Carolina. 36 years in prison for a double murder he never committed.

Donald Stiers of Texas.  Two years in prison for drug possession. Laboratory tests later confirmed that there were no illegal drugs. The drugs in question were legal antihistamines.

Derrick Hamilton of New York. 23 years in prison for a murder he never committed. He wasn't even in the state when the murder occurred.

Eric Polk of Texas. Sentenced to 180 days in jail for drug possession. Laboratory tests later confirmed that there were no drugs.

Milyn Pierce of Texas.  Six months in jail for drug possession. Laboratory tests later confirmed that there were no drugs.

Oakley Engesser of South Dakota.   14 years in prison for vehicular homicide. Exonerated when it was proven that he was NOT the driver of the car.

Kwame Ajamu/Ronnie Bridgeman of Ohio. 27 years in prison for a murder he never committed.

Joel Miller of California. Sentenced to 2 years in prison for illegal possession of a machine gun. Exonerated when it was proven his ex-wife and her lover framed him for this crime.

Ricky Jackson of Ohio spend 39 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit. He was locked up for so many years like an animal that he said upon his release, "I didn't know what the sky looked like anymore." Yet here in my home state of Virginia, there is very little support for a reformation of the Virginia judicial system. Here people still have the old fashioned view that everyone charged must be guilty. Here in Virginia, the judicial system knows that many convicted criminals are innocent and it does nothing about it. I covered this in my first book, Staring the Dragon in the Eye. I talked about cases that occurred within 50-100 miles of my home of known innocents convicted of murder. In at least once case which is still in the legal system, the prosecution knows the defendant is innocent yet they still continue to go after him. What about all the lesser crimes? No one is focusing on establishing the innocence of people charged with lesser crimes.

There are a few small groups such as the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia that works to prove the innocence of a few small cases a year but tens of thousands more exist that are not receiving any attention. In the most recent elections, former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, I think, would have changed this. He was known as a champion of the innocent. Instead Virginian's voted for Mark Herring, who just formed a new official task force to go after and prosecute more innocent Virginians for crimes they have not committed. I wrote about that in my article you can read here. Like everywhere else, you get what you voted for. Those that voted for Mark Herring now have no excuse if they are then targeted for crimes they didn't commit. You brought it on yourself. Deal with it.

Even within groups of people that understand that abuses of power are occurring and innocents are convicted of crimes they didn't commit, there are still two crimes that defy them. Two crimes in which almost universally people believe that if you were charged with these crimes you HAVE to be guilty. Those crimes are pedophilia and animal abuse.

Sorry, but the world doesn't work that way. There are innocents in those cases as well, many of them. Just recently, Stephen Wray was found innocent of child sex charges in Maryland, his lawyer so eloquently said of sex crime charges, "the closest thing to the Salem witch trials as we’ll ever see."  Wray spent three years in a Maryland jail waiting for his trial.  Three years gone from his life that he will never get back.  Many other cases also exist in which those convicted of child sexual abuse have served decades in prison before being found innocent.  Now organizations exist like the National Center for Reason and Justice that focuses on false convictions for anything that causes "harm to children."  

As of yet, there is no organization that exists that fights to prove the innocence of those convicted of animal abuse charges.  Stay tuned, that's about to change.