Luis Lang vs. Pat Cisarano: Who deserves our help?

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Wednesday May 13, 2015 · 10:42 PM PDT

2015/05/13 · 22:42

I see that liberal outrage has managed paradoxically to save the bacon of Luis Lang, a conservative who refused to sign up for Obamacare and then complained that it was Obamacare's fault when he didn't have insurance to save his eyesight. So far visitors (mostly liberals) have visited his GoFundMe page and donated nearly $15,000 toward the medical treatments that he needs. They have done this while simultaneously excoriating him for his foolishness and hypocrisy in expecting help despite his own irresponsibility.

At first I was not going to donate anything to his cause, because I agree with many of the people who pointed out that Mr. Lang brought his problem on himself by refusing to purchase insurance when he could afford it and when he should have known that he would need insurance. I decided instead to make a small contribution after all because I believe in helping people, but also because I want to highlight the needs of a friend of mine who I believe is much more deserving of assistance than Mr. Lang is. Her name is Pat Cisarano, and she has been battling cancer since 2000. Here is her GoFundMe page: http://www.gofundme.com/...

Pat is a talented singer and a good friend, and although it was a struggle for her to afford insurance, she actually had the good sense (unlike Mr. Lang) to purchase insurance before she got sick. As a result, the insurance paid for her original cancer surgery and subsequent treatments. Even so, the consequences of her illness have been devastating, and she remains unable to work and earn a living for herself. She was recently evicted from her apartment and needs assistance so that she can have a place to live.

If people want to assist Mr. Lang, by all means please do so. He clearly needs help, and I imagine he has positive qualities as a human being that are not obvious if we only look at the way he has mishandled his health situation. If you do so, however, I hope you will also consider a contribution to my friend Pat, whose needs are even greater than his and who in my view is also more deserving morally of our support.

Fiddling with iTunes while the country burns

Sheldon Rampton

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Wednesday January 14, 2009 · 10:22 AM PST

2009/01/14 · 10:22

I've been following some of the recent writings of Patrick Ruffini, a former "eCampaign Director" for the Republican National Committee who is part of an effort to reinvent and reinvigorate the Republican Party in the United States. Ruffini is overall a fairly smart guy who is realistic enough to emphatically reject some of the more ridiculous conservative talking points. I've seen him write some astute analyses, particularly when writing about online political organizing.

I was struck, therefore, at the absence of all those positive qualities when Ruffini wrote a recent blog post that touched on topics related to what the government should actually do when it governs.

Sheldon Rampton

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Wednesday December 24, 2008 · 9:29 AM PST

2008/12/24 · 09:29

There's been a bit of recent flap about pictures of Barack Obama that were posted online, showing him in a bathing suit and looking remarkably fit during his vacation in Hawaii.

I remember that during the election campaign, Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is still famous for his past as a bodybuilder and actor, campaigned in support of John McCain by mocking Obama's physique.

Sheldon Rampton

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Thursday December 11, 2008 · 10:26 AM PST

2008/12/11 · 10:26

Crossposted from PR Watch:

There's nothing quite like a hotly contested election. The candidates have their devoted supporters and angry detractors. Then there are vigorous debates over the issues, while some people question the integrity of the entire process.

We speak, of course, of the Falsies Awards.

Part of the coveted Awards This year marks the Center for Media and Democracy's (CMD's) fifth annual Falsies Awards. The Falsies are our attempt to shine an unflattering light on those responsible for polluting the information environment over the past year. We're happy to report that more people -- nearly 1,450 -- voted in this year's Falsies survey than ever before! We're also bestowing special recognition on one of this year's "winners."

Sheldon Rampton

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Wednesday December 10, 2008 · 5:18 PM PST

2008/12/10 · 17:18

"There is a fierce battle going on over what kind of a CIA director Barack Obama should appoint, when he should close the prison camp at Guantanamo, and whether there should be a full scale investigation (and possible prosecution) of the torture advocates in the Bush administration," notes Charles Kaiser in the Columbia Journalism Review. Unfortunately, reporting on this issue in the New York Times and elsewhere has been flagrantly one-sided, from a position that falsifies the facts and defends torture.

Sheldon Rampton

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Tuesday December 09, 2008 · 12:40 PM PST

2008/12/09 · 12:40

These "Harry and Louise" ads by the insurance industry, combined with aggressive right-wing lobbying, helped kill health reform under Bill Clinton. Will they succeed in killing it again?

Michael F. Cannon, a pundit at the libertarian Cato Institute, has written a blog post that highlights the importance of what I believe will be one of the most important issues in play once Barack Obama assumes the U.S. presidency. "Blocking Obama's health plan," he writes, is "key to the GOP's survival."

Sheldon Rampton

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Tuesday December 02, 2008 · 9:24 AM PST

2008/12/02 · 09:24

As a former Mormon missionary and someone who studies the public relations industry, I've been following with interest the PR nightmare facing the Mormon Church as a result of the prominent role it played this year promoting Proposition 8 to ban same-sex marriage in California. At the urging of church leaders, Mormons spent about $20 million on the effort, which probably provided the margin that enabled the proposition to pass.

There is some irony in the fact that Mormon pollster Gary Lawrence, who led the Proposition 8 grassroots campaign for the church in California, has a gay son, Matthew, who publicly resigned from the church to protest its anti-gay campaign. Matthew says that after his father's participation in "two anti-gay initiatives in eight years, it's impossible not to feel attacked."

Sheldon Rampton

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Thursday October 16, 2008 · 10:10 AM PDT

2008/10/16 · 10:10

For the media pundits, John McCain's best moment in Wednesday's debate was when he said, "Sen. Obama, I am not President Bush." The line drew favorable ratings for McCain in CNN's instant polling, but its repetition may actually do more damage to McCain's already-suffering campaign than anything else that was said last night.

McCain's statement was a classic example of admission by negation. It is the sort of thing that George Lakoff refers to in his book, "Don't Think of an Elephant!" When you ask people not to think of an elephant, of course that is exactly the image that pops into their head. A statement of negation inevitably conjures up the very idea that it seeks to repress. This is something that Freud observed in 1925 when he explained that "we never discover a 'no' in the unconscious." This is why Nixon's famous declaration that "I am not a crook" actually helped persuade the nation that he was one. Similarly, when McCain claims that he is not President Bush, at the subconscious level he is telling us that he is Bush.

Sheldon Rampton

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Thursday October 18, 2007 · 1:28 PM PDT

2007/10/18 · 13:28

I received a request recently from a university professor who teaches a course about media literacy. She was wondering if I could help her find videos of the "Shared Values" television ads that the U.S. Department of State produced to improve the image of the United States in Muslim countries shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, so she could show them to her students.

Twenty or fifty years from now, scholars wishing to understanding the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world will certainly be interested in studying the "Shared Values" campaign. As my professor friend wrote back after finding the videos, "The ads are a great teaching tool about propaganda." Like most propaganda, they tell us a great deal about how the propagandists see themselves as well as how they want to be perceived by others.

Sheldon Rampton

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Wednesday October 11, 2006 · 2:59 AM PDT

2006/10/11 · 02:59

The Bush administration's use of the term "cut and run" to caricature opponents of the war in Iraq is yet another example of the attention that America's war party pays to rhetorical repetition and linguistic framing at the expense of realistic discourse and analysis. Bush himself has taken to using this catchprase repeatedly. At a recent speech in Birmingham, Alabama, he declared that "The party of FDR, the party of Harry Truman, has become the party of cut-and-run." He repeated the charge a few days later, at a political fundraising breakfast for California Congressman Richard Pombo. "The Democrats are the party of cut and run," he said. "Ours is a party that has got a clear vision and says we will give our commanders and troops the support necessary to achieve that victory in Iraq."
Read More

Foley Sex Scandal: Even More Disturbing

Sheldon Rampton

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Friday September 29, 2006 · 10:37 PM PDT

2006/09/29 · 22:37

There's something I find even more disturbing than the emerging news that Republican Congressional leaders knew about some of Mark Foley's inappropriate emails to teenage boys and did nothing about it for a year.

Even after Foley's resignation in disgrace, Florida Republican politicians acted like it was no big deal that he had sexually explicit interactions with minors. His hometown newspaper, the Southwest Florida News-Press, quotes a number of Foley supporters such as Ruth McCarthy, who said, "All I can say is it's a shame he was indiscreet." Read More

The Bush Team's "Willie Horton" Strategy for This Year's Elections

Sheldon Rampton

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Friday September 15, 2006 · 8:59 AM PDT

2006/09/15 · 08:59

John Brown, a retired career diplomat now affiliated with the University of Southern California and Georgetown University, has written a blunt critique of this week's USA Today editorial by Bush administration confidante Karen Hughes. It was Hughes who helped mastermind Bush's ascension to the White House as well as the White House campaign to sell the war in Iraq to the American people. As Brown amply demonstrates, her editorial demonstrates that she is more interested in election-season posturing to energize the Bush administration's evangelical Christian base than she is in doing anything that could contribute to improving America's reputation overseas or making this country safer.

Brown calls Hughes' rhetoric a "foreign variation" of the "Willie Horton" ads that Bush's father used to defeat Dukakis in the 1988 presidential elections. Her editorial deliberately plays to anti-Muslim sentiments and is bound to further alienate people in Arab and Muslim countries — and this is coming from the woman who is supposedly in charge of listening to people in foreign countries and proving to them that we are not their enemy.
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Luis Lang vs. Pat Cisarano: Who deserves our help?

Fiddling with iTunes while the country burns

The Obama-Schwarzenegger Workout

The 2008 Falsies Awards: In memory of the first casualty

Reporters Help CIA Torture the Truth

Let's destroy your health to save the GOP

Mormon homophobia: up close and personal

McCain's mistake in saying, "I'm not Bush"

Shared Values revisited: a case study in the limits of propaganda

Zigging and Zagging on Cutting and Running

Foley Sex Scandal: Even More Disturbing

The Bush Team's "Willie Horton" Strategy for This Year's Elections