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| Patricia Maisch, 61, with her husband John. |
Patricia Maisch watched a gunman shoot a woman who was using her own body to shield her teenage daughter.
"I thought: 'I'm next. I'm next to her. He's going to shoot me. I'm next,'" she said in an interview Sunday.
The attacker, whom authorities identified as Jared Lee Loughner, fired a series of shots and began moving down the line of people who had been waiting for Giffords. He paused to reload after shooting the woman directly in front of Maisch.
"She was shot at least two times, once in the back and once in the arm," Maisch said.
Two men tackled the gunman, and they fell close to Maisch. She saw the shooter reach into his pants pocket for another ammunition clip, and she grabbed his hand. Then she knelt on his ankles to help subdue him.
Please click the link at the top and red the entire story. This woman was amazing.
Then there was Rep. Gabby Gifford's newly hired intern who demonstrated amazing bravery and clarity of thought in the most extreme of circumstances.
I am not a religious person but it is hard not to call these two, and the others who ran to help despite putting themselves in harms way, anything but "angels."
This is slightly off-topic, but I want to make sure Gryphen and others see this blog entry about Palin's page and the types of edits her staff members engage in:
ReplyDeletehttp://obamalondon.blogspot.com/2011/01/inexplicable-edits-on-sarah-palins.html
You will be disgusted. Maybe not surprised, but disgusted. Please be sure to read the whole thing.
"...and then he paused to reload." That's one of Sarah's favorite expressions, "Don't retreat, just reload." Very soon after the shootings, Sarah's Facebook was already offering condolences to the Giffords family while Christina was in surgery, fighting for her life.
ReplyDeleteRebecca Mansour (who usually speak and writes for Sarah) claimed that the provocative cross hairs were map marks. Sarah's twitter described the marks as bulls' eyes and targets.
For someone who once aspired to be President of the United States (or Vice President), there is a deafening lack of leadership coming from Sarah Palin now. She can't still be reloading. (Her father had to load her gun during the TLC caribou hunt). The one lame statement offered on her behalf was as believable as a woman who was leaking fluid, in labor flying 12 hours to deliver a premature baby in a small local hospital with no neonatal facilities.
Most of the time, Sarah Palin says too much. She tries to cover her lack of real knowledge with useless words. Sarah's silence is deafening. I hope that it has finally happened...that Sarah finally sat down and shut up.
Thanks for the post Gryphen; those people are real heroes and patriots.
Here is something worth reading from Daily Kos:
ReplyDeleteWas Ms. Palin directly responsible for 6 murders and the assassination attempt on an American Congresswoman? No.
Is she guilty of poor judgment, inciting anger, irresponsible behavior, being self-righteous and possessive of a Herculean sized amount of conceit? Absolutely.
Ms. Palin has never been able to do any wrong with her supporters. Anytime she appears to look like a fool, she will turn it around, shrug it off, and use it to make her audience laugh. If the media attacks her then they are just pawns of the liberals. If Republicans attack her then they are just scared of her. All her supporters need to see is that annoying, patronizing wink of hers and all is well.
Hopefully at the very least she will learn that her image is capable of being tarnished and that she cannot spew angry, vile rhetoric and lies out of her mouth without possibility of consequences.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2011/1/10/934911/-Should-Sarah-Palin-Share-Any-Of-The-Responsibility-For-The-Shooting-of-Congresswoman-Gabrielle-Giffo
WTG Mrs. Maisch.
ReplyDeleteMedal of Honor to her and to the others who stopped the monster.
Dr. Cathy Baldwin Johnson, you have blood on your hands now, don't you? Christina's blood.
ReplyDeleteLook at Patricia Maisch, look at Daniel Hernandez, look at that man who was killed protecting his wife, look at the woman trying to shield her daughter -- those people, and countless more-- acted in an instant with courage and integrity, putting their own lives in jeopardy to help others.
And you, who could have brought that woman down with the truth about Trig two years ago, still hide behind your lawyer.
You can rationalize yourself to sleep every night, but you'll never know, will you? Did your cowardice kill Christina?
You can rationalize and
Sarah Palin's Facebook Was Aggressively Scrubbed Of Critical Comments Connecting Her To AZ Shooting
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, between this scrubbing, the scrubbing of her 'Take Back the 20' website and SarahPac head Rebecca Mansour's harsh defense of the gun sights map, Palin is clearly doing her best to digitally distance herself from Saturday's shootings. Understandably so.
However, this is harder to excuse. Shortly after 6pm (London time) a comment went up criticizing nine-year-old Christina Taylor who was killed Saturday. Yes.
"It's ok. Christina Taylor Green was probably going to end up a left wing bleeding heart liberal anyway. Hey, as 'they' say, what would you do if you had the chance to kill Hitler as a kid? Exactly."
That comment, which I can no longer find, stayed up for a long while (as documented by Obama London), while ones critical of Palin were quickly removed.
Anyone who spends time on the Internet knows people say terrible things in comments section. The fact this one wasn't as quickly removed as the other far less offensive Palin-aimed remarks were, however, simply raises further questions about Palin's judgment.
http://www.businessinsider.com/sarah-palins-facebook-was-aggressively-scrubbed-of-critical-reload-comments-2011-1
Hey, Sarah Palin, hows that hatey, killy, reloady, chrosshairsy thing working out for ya?
ReplyDeletehttp://twitter.com/FrankConniff/status/23879836149743616
Remember Occam's Razor - it is in fact much easier to call them what they are: responsible, caring humans, rather than some fairy-tale supernatural beings.
ReplyDeleteBoth of these people are real heros. It's impossible for me not to compare Patricia Maisch, 61 years old to Sarah Palin, who constantly tries to prove how tough she is when in reality she's a coward. Yet this 61 year old woman didn't hesitate to grap the clip. Genuine courage.
ReplyDeleteSharon1943
Amazing! Thank you for telling the story of these brave heroes.
ReplyDeleteIt is time to support and console the families left behind, and celebrate the lives of the victims and survivors.
let us not fall into the tabloid journalism spin machine and become swallowed by the 24/7 talk of the lunatic murderer and/or Sarah and her ilk.
- kellygrrrl
Put me in the latter category. I’ve had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach ever since the final stages of the 2008campaign. I remembered the upsurge in political hatred after Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 — an upsurge that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. And you could see, just by watching the crowds at McCain-Palin rallies, that it was ready to happen again. The Department of Homeland Security reached the same conclusion: in April 2009 an internal report warned that right-wing extremism was on the rise, with a growing potential for violence.
ReplyDeleteConservatives denounced that report. But there has, in fact, been a rising tide of threats and vandalism aimed at elected officials, including both Judge John Roll, who was killed Saturday, and Representative Gabrielle Giffords. One of these days, someone was bound to take it to the next level. And now someone has.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/opinion/10krugman.html?_r=2&ref=opinion
Sarah Palin
ReplyDeletehttp://www.rominachirre.com/romina_chirre_english/romina_chirre_images/blog/Sarah-Palin-Hunter.jpg
Interesting that Daniel Hernandez, a true hero in this debacle, looks just like the people Arizonans don't seem to particularly like. I wonder if they asked him for his papers before he saved Gabrielle's life.
ReplyDeleteFLASHBACK:
ReplyDeleteSarah Palin blamed by the US Secret Service over death threats against Barack Obama
Sarah Palin's attacks on Barack Obama's patriotism provoked a spike in death threats against the future president, Secret Service agents revealed during the final weeks of the campaign.
The Republican vice presidential candidate attracted criticism for accusing Mr Obama of "palling around with terrorists", citing his association with the sixties radical William Ayers.
The attacks provoked a near lynch mob atmosphere at her rallies, with supporters yelling "terrorist" and "kill him" until the McCain campaign ordered her to tone down the rhetoric.
But it has now emerged that her demagogic tone may have unintentionally encouraged white supremacists to go even further.
The Secret Service warned the Obama family in mid October that they had seen a dramatic increase in the number of threats against the Democratic candidate, coinciding with Mrs Palin's attacks.
Michelle Obama, the future First Lady, was so upset that she turned to her friend and campaign adviser Valerie Jarrett and said: "Why would they try to make people hate us?"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/sarah-palin/3405336/Sarah-Palin-blamed-by-the-US-Secret-Service-for-death-threats-against-Barack-Obama.html
the lady is the real mama grizzly...
ReplyDeleteSarah is the fake grizzly
With a long list of enemies, a taste for incendiary rhetoric and responsibility for a campaign website graphic that placed gunsight logos on a map of targeted congressional districts, it didn’t take long for Sarah Palin to get pulled into the orbit of Saturday’s massacre in Tucson.
ReplyDeleteSo far, the former Alaska governor has said little, only posting a brief message on her Facebook page Saturday offering condolences to those affected by the shooting. But the rush on the left to affix some of the blame on her for the assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has suddenly turned the tragedy into a defining moment in Palin’s meteoric political career.
Whether she defends, explains or even responds at all to the intense criticism of her brand of confrontational politics could well determine her trajectory on the national scene—and it’s likely to reveal the scope of her ambitions as well.
Palin didn’t respond to an email Sunday afternoon. Her advisers are furious that she’s being linked to the tragedy, but recognize the delicacy of the situation and are trying to assess how best to halt it from spiraling further without making it any worse.
Part of Palin’s quandary is rooted in the unique spot she occupies. Since her resignation from the governorship in the summer of 2009, Palin has played a role that is part talk-show personality and part political figure. It’s a positioning that has served her well, creating personal wealth and celebrity appeal while energizing her core supporters.
But now, for the first time, Palin is being forced to choose between the public and private spheres she operates in. If she has any intentions of running for the presidency, she must begin to appeal to the country’s broad political center. And that task just got harder in the wake of Tucson.
The other option is to simply remain in the private sector where she can continue to issue the envelope-pushing jeremiads and employ the overheated rhetoric that appeals to her loyal base, sells her books, draws TV viewers and makes her irresistible to a sound byte-hungry media.
Either way, she’ll have to show her hand, signaling whether she wants to be Ronald Reagan or Rush Limbaugh.
Palin’s allies point out the unfairness of the situation, one that may force her to respond to a tragic event where there is so far no evidence that deranged shooter Jared Lee Loughner ever even mentioned Palin’s name, let alone found inspiration from her “targeting” of Giffords.
...Consider these metrics: As of mid-day Saturday, Google trends showed that Palin ranked as the sixth-most popular search on “hot topics” and “Sarah Palin crosshairs” was number nine on the list of “hot searches.” Further, Facebook’s Randi Zuckberg told ABC that the top question being asked on Facebook Sunday was: “’Is Sarah Palin to blame?” (See: Tea party's message: Don't blame us)
Few Republicans would speak openly about the political stakes for Palin, but privately a number of strategists said that the mere existence of these internet searches and questions underscored her challenge.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/47351.html
Andrea Mitchell reported the Palin team blamed the contrator for not removing her map with crosshairs earlier. Video of Palin in AZ in her infamous biker chick jacket was shown. Palin laughed, smiled ssying she isn't promoting violence, she means to use your vote. My question is why does she not say that instead referring to reloading, sniper gun sights on people, laughing about confronting people with bumper stickers after violence was committed.
ReplyDeleteThis weekend is no different with RAM claiming black is white.
I trust the Gifford family and her dad have just cause to point to political rhetoric being responsible for the threats. Just as I am certain those who threatened McGinnis referenced the insinuations he is a pedophile due to what Palin alleged.
I honestly hope they find evidence of the shooter collecting information from the queen of vile rhetoric, sharpshooter winkin' rill Amerikan Palin who says viscious things with a smile on her face. I do hope this is a political downfall for her for she adds nothing positive to the climate.
Yes indeed. Along with the lady who knocked the gun away from the shooter. It takes courage to do that while being in the line of fire. Those are TRUE American Patriots. Not these scooter riding morons who carry signs about taking their country back.
ReplyDeleteThis whole thing has made me crazy mad, but the woman stepping in front of her teenage daughter moved me to tears.
ReplyDeleteI think she was shot twice. Did she make it?