Gabrielle Giffords is still recovering quickly, and today she has made what is surely the best sign of progress yet, moving from playing with an iPhone to playing with an iPad. “Doctors said she had scrolled through the iPad and picked out a stuffed animal. ‘That’s how we know she’s aware,’ said Michael Lemole, the neurosurgeon who’s been overseeing her care.” No, you know she’s aware because she’s using an Apple product and not a PC or Kindle. Internet fight! Also, was the stuffed animal organic? Let’s hope so. That indicates a higher level of thinking as well. Oh, and she’s trying to talk, but that’s irrelevant because the iPad probably won’t have FaceTime until the next generation comes out.
Giffords has “made some attempts” to talk, said husband Mark Kelly, a NASA astronaut, noting she had a tracheotomy which inhibits speech. “I feel she intellectually understands.”
In a month or so, she will be performing brain surgeries herself and participating in World’s Strongest Man competitions. And soon after she will have accomplished the highest feats of each and every human endeavor imaginable and then will move on to accomplishing the unimaginable, such as converting gravity into time into space into life into new universes into free ice cream for everyone.
This is really great. [Politico]
{ 157 comments }
*applause*
Does she say anything about the Bush-hater who shot her?
Too bad the right wing can't recognize that when a person is totally insane, you cannot connect them to normal human politics.
Yes, the above wisdom applies to Loughner, Beck and Palin alike.
Fixt:
Too bad libunatics can't recognize when a person is totally insane, you cannot connect them to normal human politics.
why would you use that man's face as your avatar, and why would you make a joke name like blood liberal?! How insensitive can you be?! NOT FUNNY.
Jared is the face of all the poor people who fell through the cracks under the Lincoln Administration.
If Obamacare had been passed when Jared was a pup this would not have happened. I guess the best we can do is to take advantage of the situation and blame people who had nothing to do with it, for the good of Progressivism.
Poopyhead.
You are fucking disgusting.
Here's some more for you: Fuck you.
Fuck you and the Glock in on which you rode.
It's true that bigger is better.
Fuck, Wonkette, how am I supposed to snark on this?
Let me try. Goodbye P-Points.
I bet she has a half of a mind to give a stern talking to this Mr Jared fellow.
You've just been sitting on that for ten days, haven't you? Furtively looking at your wristwatch every fifteen minutes asking "Is it still too soon? Is it still too soon?"
It is never too soon for a Libtard to make a joke in poor taste, now is it?
Dear Rakista:
Franklin and I are horrified — HORRIFIED! — at your utterly tasteless, insensitive attempt to make a "joke" about this, the Most Appalling Tragedy In The History Of Mankind.
Aren't you AWARE that Wonkette.com is NOT the place to engage in such inappropriate comments? The TrueLiberal Wonketteers who post in here are sensitive, delicate flowers, easily reduced to puddles of quivering rage by such comments.
(There, there, SoroBots. It's alright. Eleanor will admonish the BAD, BAD Rakista.)
PLEASE CEASE ALL SUCH POSTINGS!!!! If you cannot be Sincere & Caring, Wonkette.com is NOT the place for you.
(Oh, to avoid any confusion: Your comments would have been perfectly appropriate, even uproariously funny, had Rep. Giffords been a Republican.)
Cordially,
Eleanor
You can't. That's the beauty of it.
See below…
I need an iPad like I need a hole in the head.
One of the few thumbs-down I've ever given…
You fucker!
Oh. My. Futhermucking. Ouch!
Humor = tragedy + time, true, but I think the "time" portion of the equation is getting compressed. It was at least a year after the shooting of Reagan that I first heard these jokes told about James Brady.
Then again, it was probably only a week or so after Natalie Wood's death that I heard this one: Why didn't Natalie Wood take a shower on the yacht? She preferred to wash ashore.
I don't think it was more than a week after the Challenger blowing up that you started hearing stuff like
Q: What were Christa McAuliffe's last words?
A: "What's this button do?"
Or her last words to her husband – "you feed the dog, I'll feed the fish."
Where did the Challenger crew go for vacation? All over southern Florida.
What kind of wood doesn't float?
Natalie Wood!
Also.
I'm encouraged, but Steve Ballmer isn't
Isn't Ballmer in DC trying to get Hu to pay for their pirated software?
Ballmer's outside of DC, in Maryland.
They reportedly gave her a Macbook Air and she's driving herself home as we speak.
I hope she's not texting while driving!
She's just filming her response video to Palin's "I'm being blood-libeled!" monstrosity. I hear the enunciation in her video blows Palin's away.
The rasping sounds she makes breathing through the hole in her trachea are also less distracting and annoying.
Her present condition already puts her ahead of Kathie Lee in the 'Most Sentient Gifford' category, yes?
Well said, Magic!
Frank's even worse. Too much alcohol, too many hits to the head on the gridiron.
But at least he's mostly stopped ass-raping stewardesses. Sooo, progress, right?
Little harder to do when you're so old the stews won't give you the time of day.
I can't stand Kathie Me Gifford. *shiver*
You , my friend, are fucking brilliant.
Has Palin taken credit for this medical miracle yet?
No, I believe her plan is to announce that see, Jeebus can fix anything (even for the occasional, ah, Jew, I mean leftist), and Giffords is proof we don't need no stinkin' socialistic, commie, Kenyan, Trig-killin' healthcare.
No. But she did ask us to pray that she not get blamed for Ms. Giffords getting shot.
"Has Palin taken credit for this medical miracle yet?"
We all know it was embryonic stem cells what fixed her.
That's amazing — one can really make superhuman strides when one is trying to get the f*ck out of Tucson.
Hey, she gave her husband a "massage," what the hell else does she need to do. Ship her out and stop wasting the tax payer dollars!
I dunno–Tucson in the rearview, Houston up ahead? I'd say shoot me now, but that would be in poor taste.
Take THAT!
I guess Jobs wasn't kidding when he called his junk "magical."
Hell, that's what I tell that to someone at least once a week.
Universal healthcare means iPads for everyone.
Huzzah!
She just passed John McCain in technology adoption.
Gifford's can probably fly better than McCain can too.
Not really a big challenge considering how many planes McCain crashed.
Except for the whistling sounds
She just passed John McCain in technology comprehension, too.
I'm guessing she can tweet something more coherent than "T," also, too.
My kid with Down syndrome is vey proficient with the iPad. This really is bad news for John McCain. I would also like to reiterate my earlier nomination for Ms. Giffords for President in 2012.
She's got more smarts now than dear leader
She's got more smarts now than dear leader
That is not hard. After all, Little Andy Breitbart is a moron.
I'd sure hope so. Last I checked, Juan McCain was still using telegraph having just moved up from smoke signals.
The stuffed animal she picked was a loaner panda from our bankers the House of Hu. Gabby was trying to make the point that we won't get fooled again.
I'll be happy when she leaves that hospital and slaps that attention-starved, delusional, gibberish-babbling, gun-toting, faux-victim asshole right on national teevee.
And happier still when she does the same to Jared Lee Loughner.
Oh, yes. Well-said.
It will be Jared's worst day ever when she testifies against him in court. Well, next to the day they strap him in the chair.
A million up-thumbs.
That's amazing. I hope she regains her full mental abilities and goes back to Congress. If anyone can sit at a debate and say "your rhetoric is unreasonable" it's this woman.
Oh, I cannot wait, nay, I PRAY for the day when she stands again in the well of the House and calls for, well, damn near anything, but I hope it's gun control. I mean, really, no one on the other side of the aisle has balls enough to counter that. No one.
I watched the ABC special with her husband, and Dianne Sawyer was trying to get the husband to say that she is a gun advocate, and he made it crystal clear that Gabby had a gun in a lockbox in her house.
I get so tired of people trying to paint her as some kind of gun-nut I don't know what to do.
My Ex had a .38 and refused to put it in a lock box or get a trigger lock even when our son was born. 3 weeks after he was born, when she was out, I took the gun's firing pin out and threw it in the river.
Any samples of texts?
"I-M G-O-N-N-A H-A-F-T-A P-O-P-P-A C-A-P I-N S-O-M-E-B-O-D-Y-'S A-S-S I-F-F-E-N I D-O-N'-T G-E-T N-O I-C-E C-R-E-A-M"
I guess this gets Palin off the hook, or hooker, or whatever.
Geez, radio, you forgot 'hookworm.' C'mon, dude. Need I conjecture all o'er yer arse?
ZOMG, I am such a poopyhead. I need to go to remedial Wonkette comment school, or get my dials slapped. {Insert emoticon for embarrassment.}
I almost forgot what good news feels like.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
I am rendered snarkless.
Good for her.
Go Gabby, get better quick. As for Sarah can she get an uncurable cancer of the asshole please.
The old Farrah Fawcett treatment, eh?
"Giffords has made some attempts to talk"
So has Sarah (and failed miserably, of course)
Just hope she doesn't pick the Steven Hawking voice.
Oops, there goes my P's….
I give you one thumb in recognition of the fact that nothing is sacred and it's never too soon.
Yeah, lucky she didn't have cancer.
Hawking was offered a new "voice" when speech synthesizers became better, but he declined, as the old mechanical voice had become his.
I think Gifford would choose something more up-to-date, like Wonkbot's voice.
Representative Johnny Five.
she's totally like wonder woman.
I bet she's been laying around fretting about her Farmville. This will be a great relief to her.
For some reason she has developed a formidable aversion to tea parties.
First of all: Poopyhead.
Second of all, I don't like to feed trolls, but really? Crazy libs? Couldn't you have gone for the clever response and called us "Mad Libs?" Because that might actually be funny. Or is that too far off your spectrum of humor? Because, if you can't bring teh funny, you are cordially invited (with an engraved invitation, no less) to GTFO.
She seems kinda slow. I moved to an iPad months ago.
Not everyone wants to be at the forefront of technology adoption. Or maybe she was hoping for an Android tablet.
Next stage to recovery–the Maxipod.
Dear Gabrielle,
Please forgive the informality, but cogito ergo sum, baby, cogito ergo sum. If I knew how to say "I think, therefore I'm not a radioactive right-wing cunt" in Latin, I'd very respectfully go there. Alas, Vatican II ended mandatory Latin right around the age when I would have learned to conjugate "cunt."
With sincere best wishes,
user-of-owls
You conjugate verbs. Nouns are declined.
We'll know she's fully recovered when she can punch John Boehner in the neck, for America.
typical liberal hate-speech
Well, it seems Giffords has recovered enough to make it to the House floor and vote for the repeal of the health care act yesterday.
I hope she can vote for reaffirm 2nd amendment rights, something she favors.
And may Sarah Palin mistake you for a caribou, or a wolf whilst in a helicopter.
I've never seen a wolf or a caribou fly a helicopter
Fuck you.
Troll Union Local 217 is going to hear about this.
Right wing assholes demanding Giffords resign, they are not being 'represented'.
Yea, Jesse Kelly is the asshole with a machine gun.
http://www.svherald.com/content/our-view/2011/01/...
That link set off my anti-norton's drudge sirens.
mine too…
oh shit! sorry guys! no war blogging. fuckers
I am listening to this story now. Eugene Robinson just called them "idiots" I wouldn't have been so nice.
" I wouldn't have been so nice."
Of course not! You're a liberal, so you can be as nasty as you want.
Fuck you. Nasty.
Go fuck the barrel of an unlocked glock, needle-dick.
Was that not what this whole thing was about?
I'm willing to lay down eleventy E-Dollars that before we know it, rumors will be floating around about Gifford's being the anti-Christ because she survived a massive head wound. No joke, no snark, no pun, just a fact.
suckers bet
If you think Giffords' progress is inspiring, just think how much more inspiration we're going to get when the other nutjobs start tapping into their arsenals. They just nailed a guy in the town right to my north who said that the Constitution calls on us to shoot all our elected officials, or something. I feel this snark is a little inappropriate, so I'll quit while I'm behind and just give you all the shocking story:
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/01/20/libertarian-g...
First an iPhone, now an iPad…hope to god she doesn't turn into an iMam, or even worse, an iRobot.
Everything about her is pretty beautiful huh? I hate it when i can't snark.
See, this is what happens when you have health care that's run by some government bureaucrats.
You, uh, might actually get better.
The way Chicago government and schools have gotten "better?"
I hope she isn't downloading the lyrics to "Puttin' On the Ritz."
Yeah, I know… WAAAY too soon. I admit I'm powerless over snark, and my life has become unmanageable; now only eleven more steps to go.
time for a higher power…too bad that higher power is teh wonkbot…
For those who insist that she resign from office, may I say, "FUCK OFF, YOU DAMNED VULTURES!" No one knows how well she will recover. Way too many people write off the brain injured prematurely. With a gun shot wound, the pathway of the bullet is unique and the key to what damage is done. Unique individuals, such as Rep. Giffords obviously is, recover faster and more completely than others. She's not the kind of person to sit in bed and feel sorry for herself. Her recovery will be filled with frustration because those pathways are really stirred up right now and there's swelling. She will have to wear a protective helmet as there's likely a big chunk of skull removed. Her doctors, and they're way smarter than anybody in AZ politics, only have an educated guess as to how she will recover right now. Time will tell. If she can't do the job, she will resign, but give the woman a chance to at least stand up before you try to knock her back down, assholes.
It's astonishing that the brain can do that at all. Seems as though the docs just pick out the shards, patch up the skull, and keep her alive so the magic can happen, and it does. Wonderful.
This bullet caused damage along the path of travel. There was bleeding and fluid loss, but no major vessels were hit or she would have bled to death. Also, there was not so much damage that the brain lost the ability to keep the heart and lungs going. Bomb blasts disturb the whole brain and often cause generalized problems, but bullets cause very specific damage which you can locate through neuropsychological testing (which I did as a graduate student). What's left will eventually start working again, what's damaged won't work as well and what's been removed is gone and not coming back. The brain will make new pathways, but the more damage there was, the harder it is. A fender bender slows down traffic, but a freeway collapse shuts things down for years or doesn't get rebuilt. She's progressing very well but she likely won't be exactly the same as before. The part of the brain that makes her Gabby seems to be still there and that's the best outcome.
Dear Steverino:
Thank you for confirming, yet again, that Wonkette.com is not a humor blog, but instead the Wailing Wall of TrueLiberalism,
Cordially,
Eleanor
This is a clearer explanation than anything I’ve heard so far, and why I get all my news from Wonkette.
She's probably way more intelligent and coherent than many other congressmen… I'm lookin at you, Rep Gohmert.
Following a traumatic brain injury, a friend of mine has become an advisor to presidents. The brain is an amazing organic processor.
Nobody made Strom Thurmond resign, so why should Giffords? She seems vastly more alert.
Edith Kaplan, one of the old pros of neuropsychology, said that if a flower pot fell off a third story window and hit I. M. Pei in the right parietal lobe as he walked down the sidewalk, he would still be better at spatial relations than any of the rest of us.
My guess is that she may lose some ability to articulate speech and express herself, but will understand just fine. So yes, way ahead of Rep. Gohmert.
Gabrielle Giffords, superwoman.
How strong is Gabby Giffords?
She is so strong that an unprecedented number of Wonketeers had the snark (temporarily) knocked right out of them just by reading this article.
Well, kind of.
Go, Gabby.
Thank you Wonketeers for putting this Christmas Miracle in proper perspective. I give golden showers of pee points to all of you!
Negative pee points!?!!?? Tough crowd today.
Well fine, I'm just going to delete my account and come back as a troll! Perhaps I will call myself… One True Closeted Recruiter?
Was anyone here alive when James Brady appeared in public for the first time?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_assassination...
I was and it was a sobering sight.
Yes I was around then too. Pretty memorable.
She's got a long road in front of her. Glad she's making progress.
Meanwhile, a Zune continues to slowly drain its battery on Jared Loughner's dresser.
For her trick tomorrow, Gabby will pull up the headline about Rush insulting the Chinese and give it a thumbs down.
"Recovering from a traumatic brain injury?
There's a synapse for that."
"into free ice cream for everyone."
If she can make this into jet-packs, she's got my vote.
Jesus christ do they not know that iPad 2 WILL PROBABLY BE ANNOUNCED IN A FEW WEEKS. I mean, really. Does that not just take the magic out of the whole anecdote.
BTW, relearning speech after a bullet tunnels through various cognitive centers? There's not an app for that.
Awesome. Giffords is already catching up on her furry porn.
It's just a matter of days before she starts quoting Mark Twain about exaggerated reports.
Giffords is fine. It's Steve Jobs who is comatose.
Woman survives brain trauma, press emphasizes asstronaut husband, snowbilly seeths with jealousy, yeah I think Murka is healing.
You know what I'm honestly dreading? When they are forced to tell her what happened. According to her husband, she doesn't yet know what happened. That will be heart-breaking.
Fucking trolls.
adjective or verb
He can play a recording of NPR declaring her dead first. It gets better after that.
"presumably"
You illustrate a liberal tactic – fabricate some tenuous scenario and criticize as if that fabrication is valid.
I see. So. Under what scenario would a "Bush-hater" want to go around shooting Democrats? I mean, I'm a Bush-hater and I haven't gone around shooting people. Was it revenge for Democrats not having fought Bush enough? I'm so confused. And since you oppose hypothetical fabrications, this means you have evidence to argue some as yet unpromulgated notion?
Who's fabricating what now?
Adjective or verb, Negro?
All of them, Katie. Eveyr single fuckin' one of them, you cad.
I'm less disappointed that "Blood Liberal" is a mindless troll, not worth the TonyTheTiger he's written on, and more disappointed that "Blood Liberal" is a great commenter name and that now it's been stolen by a douchebag.
Give it 20 minutes and it will move on to a different nick to troll under.
Sorry, Troll Union Local 217 has work rules about that.
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