Downtown Business Owner Tony George Sends Open Letter To Cleveland

I heard from several sources that Cleveland's "leadership" issued a stand-down order for law enforcement during the weekend riot.  Whether or not that is true, earlier today, Lou Dobbs reported on Fox Business that many cities under liberal leadership issued stand-down orders during the riots. Below is a letter by Cleveland businessman Tony George on the subject. 

Via WTAM News Radio:

My family has lived in the Cleveland area for generations. We are business people who provide more than 1600 jobs. We are invested in Cleveland financially, emotionally and spiritually. That is why it is heartbreaking to see the great damage done to our community by those who hijacked a protest held in the name of justice and peace.

Dozens of downtown businesses, including ours, sustained substantial damage during this past weekend’s riots. Those aren’t just businesses, they are the dreams of people who believe in Cleveland, who put life savings into enterprises to provide food, drink, music, baked goods, groceries, clothing, and other products and services for the benefit of our community.

We are Clevelanders. We support peaceful protest. We stand for the equality of all people. We abhor race-based violence, no matter who commits it. What makes Cleveland special is that people of every race, color and creed want to live and work together. I look around and I see the looting and the destruction to our downtown - - that is not who we are.

It is not enough to say that violence is happening everywhere, in response to the killing of George Floyd. Someone has to take responsibility for what happened, or didn’t happen in Cleveland. The city had 24-hour notice before the march. There was no preparation by city leaders to establish a strict parade route, to block off commercial districts, to protect against the infiltration of a peaceful march by those who came prepared to commit violence. There was no call-up of off-duty police to provide additional protection, in case things went out of control.

When the destruction and looting began it would appear that police were told to stand down. We must have an explanation! Who is in charge of Cleveland? Where were the elected leaders in this moment of crisis?

I have raised this question about our absent leadership repeatedly. This failure of leadership is why I supported council reduction. I reluctantly withdrew the issue from the ballot, in the hope that a renewed effort toward unity would be a wake-up call. Nothing doing.

Cleveland City Hall leaders, especially the Mayor, continue to be asleep at the switch, with devastating results for our city.

First Cleveland’s businesses had to shut down during the height of the Covid-19 virus. Then, when we try to open back up, the riots start and shut us down again. Add to that, the reduction in business, due to the curfew.

This is a nightmare, which can end only when we have leaders who can rise up to meet the moment.

A four-day curfew is not leadership. It’s a confession of an inability to control lawlessness, or a capitulation to thugs. We don’t pay taxes for the police to be ordered to stand down in the face of looting. We don’t pay taxes to ensure the security of our streets, only to see the streets taken over by gangsters.

Tony George

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Aftermath of the “peaceful” riots

Michael P. Ramirez cartoon via Townhall

Many media reporters and anchors turned into Baghdad Bobs, as they reported that the “protests” were/are mostly peaceful -- while buildings burned to the ground behind them.  And yet we all know liberals who buy into this phony narrative that the riots were indeed mostly peaceful and the "protesters" were spontaneous participants, expressing anger over George Floyd’s death. 

The riot in Cleveland was pre-organized.  Rocks were pre-set in various locations.  In other cities, pallets of bricks were pre-staged.  But it’s the rioters’ playbook that gives them away.  Let the local protesters who are there out of genuine outrage and anger start things off with signs and chants. Then the rent-a-mob rioters start doing what rioters do:  they throw objects to injure, deface, or damage; vandalize; loot; set buildings and cars on fire; and so on.  Peaceful? 

Here is a link to Instapundit with a compilation of videos of destruction in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Santa Monica, DC, etc.  Click here.  

And here’s what downtown Cleveland looks like today in the aftermath.  Every door or window that is now boarded-up was deliberately smashed, and in the case of several stores (Geiger’s and Heinen’s among others) looted and trashed.  Clevelanders will recognize downtown restaurants, businesses, theaters, and landmarks.  Click here.

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WKYC wants to bail out looters

From our friend Steve Salvi at Ohio Jobs & Justice Pac posting via social media: 

Channel 3 TV Cleveland wants to help bail out the rioters and looters that caused millions of dollars of damage to hard working Clevelanders trying to make a living and destroyed lots of public property including damaging historic statues and buildings.

Why don't you contact Channel 3 and tell them what you think about them bailing these people out? I'm sure they will be so grateful they won't smash your company's windows, loot your property, and burn your car.
.
In case you want to reach out to Cleveland TV3: 216-344-3333

Riots: What is really going on?

Patricia McCarthy at American Thinker has a column titled “Who is recruiting, moving and paying the professional anarcho-rioters?”  Good question.  Here are some of her thoughts:

The death by cop of George Floyd in Minneapolis was grotesque, a clearer example of police brutality that has otherwise rarely been filmed for all to see.  Even if, as has been reported, Floyd did not die of asphyxiation or strangulation as it appeared, his death was without a doubt caused by that officer’s cruel and unnecessary action and the inaction of his fellow officers who stood by and watched. 

Yet that does not begin to explain the rioting. McCarthy continues:

Is it really the citizens of Minneapolis [and other cities, including Cleveland] who have set the city on fire, burning down small businesses as well as the police precinct building, libraries, etc.?  Who are those masked men in black with secret-service quality ear-pieces, military grade gas masks and backpacks full of Molotov cocktails?  They are very likely professional rioters, recruited, transported and paid by the likes of some George Soros front group or other anonymous Cloward-Piven devotees who share Soros’ hatred of America and want to see this nation bought to its knees.  Panic over the virus was waning. These orchestrated riots across the country are the next ploy.  Someone is organizing this madness.  Someone is supplying the most lethal rioters with all the accoutrements of conflagration and moving them into place to all the affected cities.  That all costs a great deal of money.  Antifa owes its funding to Soros as do the more violent branches of Black Lives Matter.  These players seem strangely secure that they will not be arrested or that if they are, they will be quickly released.

. . .

What is happening all over America these past several nights is not about George Floyd.  The rioters are using his death to embark on rampages, to loot small and large businesses alike.   These are not protests.  What we are seeing is mass thievery under color of protest.  Chances are if the looters in Los Angeles were asked “who was George Floyd,” they would not have a clue nor would they care. 

. . .

No matter how much the media loves to fan the flames, indicting America as a racist nation and blaming Trump for every single thing they can, these riots have nothing to do with race beyond it being a convenient excuse for criminal behavior.  Those rioting, setting things on fire, smashing store windows and looting businesses are black, white, and Hispanic; they are a conglomeration of races, but are all thugs without a shred of decency.   

Read the rest here.

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Not “protests” - RIOTS

The outrage over the death of George Floyd is justified;  the violent “protests” are not.  Many of the local news outlets are reporting on the “protests” today in downtown Cleveland.  Here’s Cleveland.com’s headline:

Protestors break windows, set police cars on fire 

as George Floyd demonstrations turn violent in downtown Cleveland

And Fox 8 news:

Protests Continue in Cleveland

Not "protests."  RIOTS.

Here’s footage from earlier today taken from a balcony overlooking Lakeside Ave.:

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Stop Voter Fraud Handbook: Voter Registration lists

 

Your precinct is, relatively speaking, a small part of your city or town.  The following is from Judicial Watch’s Stop Voter Fraud Handbook;  it contains some suggestions of how to help clean up voter registration rolls in your precinct:

Perform Voter Registration Research

Without question, the key to ensuring voter integrity during an election is being able to verify that the names and addresses on the voter registration list are legitimate and up-to- date. In each state, voter registration lists can be obtained ahead of the election. Checking these lists against other available data is a laborious, time-consuming — but essential — job for which your help would definitely be welcomed.

While voter registration lists can be purchased from an online service and directly from some of the states (either of which can be expensive), you should have no difficulty getting a copy of the list for your precinct from the state headquarters of your candidate or your party. You can also file an “Open Records” request with your state.

The process of checking voter registration lists requires a degree of patience and creativity. For example, volunteers working on lists will attempt to check the voter entries against other available resources, such as property tax information and dates of birth. The website, www.tributes.com, and local papers can even be checked for obituaries.

Duplicate registrations, which do occur, will be more easily discovered. As indicated, the process is time-consuming and tedious, but it is an extremely important function, as it is the bedrock of ensuring voter integrity on Election Day.

Information for each county elections board in Ohio can be found at this link.  Your precinct details appear on the postcard notice from your Board of Elections.

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Vote-by-mail: the threat

Bob Gorrell cartoon via Townhall

  

Probably the single biggest threat to the future of the United States as we know it is election fraud.  Recently on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends Weekends,” Government Accountability Institute research director Eric Eggers explained if vote-by-mail was done on a mass scale that would bring “voter role irregularities into play.”  Via Pam Key at Breitbart:

According to Eggers, “a lawsuit found 30,000 more registered voters than citizens of legal age. They also found 2500 dead people that were registered to vote in the city of Detroit. This is actually a problem nationwide. The U.S. Supreme Court in a decision last decade cited statistics that said one in eight voter registrations in this country -- that’s 24 million -- have significant problems or [are] completely inaccurate.

So it’s not just limited to Detroit. But I think we’re wise to be – to use the term from the congressman in the previous segment . . . concerned because you have to remember in 2016, Donald Trump won the state of Michigan by fewer than 11,000 votes. So if you start talking about more than 30,000 registered voters and citizens of legal voting age in the city of Detroit alone, I think that’s pretty concerning.”

. . . there is a difference between people voluntarily choosing to cast a mail-in ballot as by the way 1 million people in the state of Michigan choose to do regularly and mailing everyone a ballot as they are doing in California or as they are about to do in the state of Michigan, mail everyone an absentee ballot request form. What it does brings all these voter role irregularities into play. Now you’ve got the guaranteed likelihood of people who shouldn’t be receiving a ballot, people that aren’t real voters because they have either moved or dead or, you know, they are on the roll erroneously those people will now have the opportunity or request forms will go to addresses for those people. And we know that there are forces out there attempting to sway elections. Look at what happened in Philadelphia recently. An elections judge was just charged with literally stuffing the ballot box. So, it’s not as if, you know, the idea that people are trying to sway elections illegally haven’t been proven. We saw one literally just this week in a major American city.”

BizPacReview reported on another voter fraud settlement:

Allegheny County, Pennsylvania — home to the city of Pittsburgh and its surrounding suburbs — has settled a lawsuit directing officials to clean up voter registration rolls.

County officials settled the suit on Monday with the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which focuses on election integrity, after the Allegheny election manager and three board of elections members were sued over registration rolls containing duplicate entries and the names of persons who had died, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

Representatives of the elections watchdog said researchers discovered almost 1,600 dead registrants, nearly 7,500 with erroneous data, and more than 1,500 who were older than 100 years — including 49 who were born in the 1800s.

. . .

Last year Judicial Watch won a lawsuit against the state of California which required it to purge 1.5 million inactive voters from its registration rolls, as required by federal voter registration law.

“Los Angeles County has a registration rate of 112 percent of its adult citizen population,” the watchdog group noted in a statement in January 2019. “The entire State of California has a registration rate of about 101 percent of its age-eligible citizenry.”

There have been many instances of voter registration ‘errors’ discovered since Trump’s 2016 win, including in Ohio, where, again, scores of people listed as being well over 100 years old were discovered on registration rolls.

So safeguarding future elections is no longer mostly about poll-watching.  The guidelines prepared by Judicial Watch had several sections on what citizens could do as poll-watchers, but with mail-in voting already a precedent in Ohio, Cleveland Tea Party members may ask what else can be done?

My next blog will share Judicial Watch’s section on cleaning up voter rolls by researching voter registration.  

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