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“Obama’s Taylor Swift Strategy: Shake It Off (Remy
Remix)” was originally released on October 20, 2014. The original
write-up is below:

The Obama administration puts its own special spin on the Taylor
Swift hit.

Approximately 2:15 minutes.

Written and performed by Remy. Music tracks and background
vocals by Ben Karlstrom.  Additional background vocals by Geri
Karlstrom. Video produced and edited by Meredith Bragg.

Scroll down for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason TV’s YouTube channel
to get automatic notifications when new material goes live. 
You can follow Reason on Twitter at @reason and follow Remy on Twitter
at @goremy and on
YouTube here.

To see more Remy/Reason TV videos, go here.

LYRICS:

They say
you’re tapping all the phones
They say you
use too many drones
That’s what people say, Mm-mm
That’s what people say, Mm-mm

They say you gave the
cartels guns
That terrorists ain’t on
the run
That’s what people say
and they got groped at
TSA

But I keep trying
Can’t stop
won’t stop lying
It’s like we’re just denying
the reality saying it’s gonna be alright

Because the
vets are gonna wait
and the hard
drives gonna break
baby we’re just gonna shake
shake it off, shake it off

When things don’t go
away
we’re gonna
blame it on a tape
baby we’re just gonna shake
shake it off, shake it off

They say that nothing is secure
That you don’t know the
cure
I assure you that ain’t right

this dude just came in with a knife

See we keep trying
Can’t stop won’t stop lying
It’s like we’re just denying
the reality saying it’s gonna be alright

Cuz the vets are gonna wait
and the hard drives gonna break
baby we’re just gonna shake
shake it off, shake it off

Your emails are getting saved
and your junk is on
display
baby we’re just gonna shake
shake it off, shake it off

AP phone records we take
our opponents gonna pay
baby we’re just gonna shake
shake it off, shake it off

Laws we’re gonna break
concern we’re gonna fake
then it’s off to a fundraiser to
shake it off, shake it off

Muriel Bowser will almost certainly be the next mayor of
Washington, DC. She specializes in moist banalities and tinny
nothing progressive promises. Historically, such talk has
substituted for real reform, enabling the city’s entrenched
bureaucracy to keep failing large swaths of DC’s population. In a
new essay, Rob Montz dissects Bowser’s politics and offers up an
alternative vision for the country’s capital city.

View this article.

When Barack Obama first took office, social media was just then
exploding into mainstream popularity. The administration began to
use sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr to reshape public
perceptions of the president. Images of Obama hobnobbing with
George Clooney, Bruce Springsteen, Robert De Niro, Bono, and
Beyonce began appearing on White House social media pages.
Photographers on the presidential payroll depicted Obama as a
larger-than-life figure, respected by leaders abroad and BFFs with
celebrities at home.

As the White House gained more control over the creation and
distribution of its own images, the less inclined it was to allow
the independent press to photograph the president, writes Reason
TV’s Todd Krainin. And it’s not just Obama. All over the world,
leaders are producing idealized versions of their own identities on
social media. From the White House on YouTube to 10 Downing Street
on Flickr and even Bashar al-Assad’s Instagram page, we may never
see our politicians in the same way again.

(Check out Krainin’s previous work on the
President Obama “reality show” here.) 

View this article.

“The Hard-Won Beauty of Entrepreneurship” was originally
released on October 23, 2014. The original write-up is
below:

Starting a business involves massive emotional and financial
risks. Why do it?

“It’s all about writing your own script, controlling your
destiny,” says Chris Viligante, owner and founder of Vigilante
Coffee, a roasting house and wholesale bean business based in
Maryland. Reason TV reached out to Chris and a few other local
millenial-aged entrepeneurs to figure out what motivates them.

The answer we got was different from those offered in popular
politics. For these entrepeneurs, their job is a vital source of
spiritual satisfaction. They’ve aligned what they love doing with
what the world is willing to pay for. And they’re authoring their
own lives. As Nick Wiseman, owner of DGS Delicatessen,
puts it: “This is my opportunity to actually make an imprint and do
something that’s my own.”

Watch the full video above, or click below for downloadable
versions. And subscribe to Reason TV’s YouTube channel for daily
content like this.

Run time: About 4 minutes.

Directed and hosted by Rob Montz.
Camera by Todd Krainin.

Former CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson has a
new book out,
Stonewalled, that details the battles that ultimately led
to her parting ways with the Tiffany Network. Attkisson was
instrumental in breaking the “Fast and Furious” gun-walking scandal
and she also uncovered all sorts of official dissembling about
Benghazi.

In
an extensive review, The New York Post‘s Kyle Smith
notes that Attkisson considers herself “politically agnostic” and a
reporter who follows wherever the story leads. That inevitably led
to trouble when the story cast a bad light on the Obama
administration.

One of the things that’s particularly interesting is the way
Attkisson sees bias playing out. It’s not necessarily ideological
(or at least not in a way that is commonly conceived). Smith
explains:

Reporters on the ground aren’t necessarily ideological,
Attkisson says, but the major network news decisions get made by a
handful of New York execs who read the same papers and think the
same thoughts.

Often they dream up stories beforehand and turn the reporters
into “casting agents,” told “we need to find someone who will say .
. .” that a given policy is good or bad. “We’re asked to create a
reality that fits their New York image of what they believe,” she
writes.

Smith continues:

Attkisson mischievously cites what she calls the “Substitution
Game”: She likes to imagine how a story about today’s
administration would have been handled if it made Republicans look
bad.

In green energy, for instance: “Imagine a parallel scenario in
which President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney personally
appeared at groundbreakings for, and used billions of tax dollars
to support, multiple giant corporate ventures whose investors were
sometimes major campaign bundlers, only to have one (or two, or
three) go bankrupt . . . when they knew in advance the companies’
credit ratings were junk.”

Attkisson continued her dogged reporting through the launch of
ObamaCare: She’s the reporter who brought the public’s attention to
the absurdly small number — six — who managed to sign up for it on
day one.

Read the whole piece here.

I interviewed Attkisson for Reason TV earlier this year, as new
revelations about Benghazi hit the front pages and she started
talking about her problems with CBS brass.

Among the many disturbing points she makes:

As one whistleblower put it to me: things have never been worse
for people who try to speak the truth inside the government about
illegalities and wrong doing. In their view, and I tend to agree,
every administration is more clamped down and closed than the one
before it. And the next one starts at the finishing point. It’s
very hard to make it go backwards. There are rules being
implemented now against journalists and the type of work that we do
that I think will be very hard to unwind.

It’s a really fascinating take on how the news gets made
(trigger warning: if you think politics is about sausage-making,
then don’t click below).

he election season is upon us, and we’re hearing
the usual political promises about raising wages. Democrats pledge
to raise the minimum wage and assure equal pay for equal work for
men and women. Republicans usually oppose those things, but their
explanations are typically lame. Some even endorse raising the
minimum wage because they think opposition will cost them
elections. When supporters of the free market declare their
opposition to minimum-wage or equal-pay-for-equal-work legislation,
writes Sheldon Richman, they must at the same time emphasize that
the reigning corporate state compromises the market process in
fundamental ways, usually to the detriment of workers.

View this article.

This past week, Reason TV released an investigative report about
a smoke shop in tiny Alpine, Texas that was repeatedly raided by
law enforcement, culminating in a disastrous DEA raid in May
2014.

The story hits a number of libertarian outrage buttons:
militarized police raids, an abusive prosecutor, disturbingly
subjective drug laws, First Amendment violations and intimidation
of journalists.

“Sex, Spice, and Small-Town Texas Justice: The Purple
Zone Raid.” About 10 minutes. Written
and Produced by Anthony L. Fisher. Camera by Todd Kranin.
Additional camera by Fisher. Additional graphics by Meredith
Bragg. 

Click the link below to view original
text. 

View this article.

Last summer, the Supreme Court ruled that Aereo was in
violation of copyright law, forcing the company to cancel its
subscription service, a crippling but not fatal outcome for the
internet television provider. 

Aereo continues to live to fight another day, as one of
their senior officers recently filed
to become a D.C. lobbyist in the hopes of educating legislators
on “issues pertaining to antennas, broadcast television and
television access online.” And despite the lack of income from
subscriptions, Aereo’s investors are sticking with the company and
continue to believe in its business model. 

Reason TV spoke with Aereo’s Founder and CEO Chet Kanojia,
shortly before the Supreme Court ruling came down. 

 “Aereo, the Supreme Court, and the
Future of TV” Produced by Meredith Bragg. Camera by
Bragg and Jim Epstein. About 6
minutes.

Original release date was June 1, 2014 and the original
writeup is below.

The Supreme Court will soon reach its decision on the
much-publicized American
Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo, a case many
believe will have a profound effect on the way we watch
television.

Aereo rents small
antennas and cloud storage to subscribers, allowing them to record
and playback over-the-air broadcasts through digitally enabled
devices. Broadcasters
feel Aereo is retransmitting copyrighted work to paying
customers and, based on current copyright law, should be subject to
the same retransmission fees cable and satellite companies
currently pay. Aereo
argues that it is simply a technology company that
empowers individuals and therefore isn’t engaged in the “public
performance” of copyrighted works subject to these fees.

April’s oral arguments gave little indication of which
way the Supreme Court will rule. The decision is expected any
day now.

But no matter the outcome, this case underlines just how
antiquated and unresponsive our regulatory and copyright framework
has become in an increasingly digital age.

“[This is] just an indication of how complex copyright law has
become,” says University of Maryland Professor of Law James Grimmelmann.
“[Novelist] Douglas
Coupland wonderfully called the computer the ‘every
animal’ machine because it is capable of acting like anything. That
is how the Internet works. It can act like a cable system. It can
act like a storage device. It’s TV. It’s radio. It’s telephone.
It’s telegraph.  It’s everything. That means that a
regulatory system that treats these different media differently is
going to throw up its hands in confusion when it hits the
Internet.”

“Whatever happens to Aereo the industry from now on is going to
be forced to move forward and innovate,” says Aereo
CEO Chet Kanojia. “[We] didn’t cause this change. The change
has been brewing since the Internet started moving bits
around.”

View this article.

For the last five years, the
press has been sounding alarms about high-frequency trading (HFT),
a practice in which investors use fast computers driven by secret
algorithms to rapidly trade securities.Time wondered in a 2012
headline whether the practice is “Wall Street’s Doomsday
Machine.” Mother Jones in 2013 worried it could “set off
a financial meltdown.” In March of this year, 60
Minutes aired an infomercial-toned segment promoting the new
Investor’s Exchange (IEX) trading venue, which, according to IEX’s
website, is “dedicated to institutionalizing fairness in the
markets” by slowing down trades. Now, writes Holly Bell, we
have Flash Boys, Michael Lewis’ highly lauded attempt to
explain the dark ways of Wall Street to the masses.

View this article.

Television permeates our culture and enters our
homes and lives in a way that would certainly horrify the early
self-appointed gatekeepers between electronic media and the
American public. That’s a good thing, writes J.D. Tuccille, because
the broad realm of video entertainment that we now call
“television” would be a hell of a lot less interesting if
innovators hadn’t put much of the medium beyond the gatekeepers’
grasp.

View this article.