tonight on kqed "newsroom," state lawmakers come closer to ending cash bail in california as they decide the fate of hundreds of bills. also, going in depth with an executive at reddit. the popular online forumalled "the front page of the internet." plus "crazy rich asians" directed bid a bay area native with an all asian cast is hoping to break barriers in hollywood and beyond. hello, and welcome. i'm thuy vu. we begin with politics. in sacramento, state lawmakers and governor jerry browtw have weeks to decide the fate of a thousand bills before the end of the session. on thursday, a measure that would end the practice of cash bail in califoia cleared a key committee. but hurdles lie ahead iclude

opposition from law enforcement. also thi week, president trump revoked the security clearance of former cia director john brennan who has frequently criticized the president. a dozen former security officials including leon panetta signed a letter condemning the decision saying it was done to stifle free speech. joining now to discuss the week's political developments t are kqed pos and government reporter pla ris sass lagos, political writer jill garofli and political consultant sean walsh. marisa, i kow you were at the state capitol. there's been abl scr this week to decide the fate of hundreds of bills. which ones made it through? >> the bail reform was the big news of the week. this languished for the last year after a year t of effo get it through the legislature. both the governor and chi justice of the courts asked for more time saying they wanted to compromise. what came out is making everyone

a little happier who wansod to seething happen except for the bail agents who would lose thei jobs if th passed. and some of the -- i would say libl liberties group like the aclu wanted to see more independen these decisions about release. under the bill now, judges have a lot of powerde to de if somebody was rated low or medium or high ri under t risk assessments counties would adopt. whether to release them. so i you were arrested under this bill and had a misdemeanor charge, you would basically get out automat2ally in hours which isn't that different than now. if you have a felony, it's a question. we would see more pretentative detention and a lot more people getting out. >> concerns about judicial bias creeping in. >> which a conversation that's important. you know, if you want to get this bill thugh, they were going to have to make es comprom >> there were three police accountability measures. what happened to those? >> right.

so the most controversial of those would making it easier tore prosecute officer who's kill a civilian. that got a weird move. they pulled it out of fiscal committee where it could have died back in rules. both sidesim c victory. we'll see what happens with that. two others around poce records and body cameras did make it out. those have a much beer chance politically. the fact that that prosecution bill isn't dead yet says something at least lawmakers and the governor want to talk about this, they don't want to be seen as killing it in the dark night. >> those are bills hoping to become law. talk about something that h be on the books for a long time, prop 13. thiis the 40 anniversary of proposition 13, limiting operty taxes incalifornia. now a coalition of community groups says it has enough signatures to place the measure on the ballot that would eliminate the tax benefit for commercial properties, residential home oowners will

still have the benefit. p there will be huge. the challenge foople promoting this is to say this is not about grandma's house. is is about making sure disneyland and chevronnd richmond pay their fair share. many of these commercial properties have never been reassessed. there's billions of dollars in potential t revenue that is -- potentially available to them. it's going to be a huge fight. this is like some of the most - on the most powerful interests in sacramento. >> the rate industry alone is a huge interest. they've run a lott lost there. i think we have to know there's another ballot measure in ovember that would sort of expand prop 13 for individual property owners and let you take the assessed value of your home if youought anotherouse in california no matter where you moved. it would be intereing if that passed to see the argument the proponents of this other one would make say well, look,

popre protecting mom and >> i'm sure sean's not on board with this at all. >> hilook, is going be the political armageddon battle.l ornia's unemployment rate is out today, 4.2%. the employment picture is nots like it when prop 13 was passed. we don't have large factory employers. most businesses are small or medium sized businesses. they will be disproportionate lit affected by this. orthe reason why the l unions ut this out now is they were worried about thcision from the supreme court and how much money they could throw at this. this is a big cta move, $10 billion at least, much higher and this is a battle royale. >> they'll be a much more friendly electorate in 2020. >> i'm not sure there will be. when you look at the momand pop bagel store in montclair or the coffee shopinere san francisco and their rates will go way up. it's going topa geted on

consumers. >> don't they own their building? >> many do. >> if youth have les 50 employees, those folks will be exempt. >> there will be two years out. we'll be hearingot a more about this. >> yes. >>nd whether it achieves any of the high rates of home ownership it was designed to address. et's move onto the november midtermctions because we have nancy pelosi facing a growing challenge really from within her ownparty. several dozen democratic karngsds many of them youngere saying they won't vote for pelosi if we have the third ranking house democrat, jim clyburn saying he will seek the speakership if pelosi struggles get enough votes in november. sean, where do you see this going from here? >> it'sbe not a good week for nancy pelosi. the "new york times" will an extension of piece will the growing revolution against h

in her own caucus. a lot of young folks and also they said older folks are revolting against her. i don't know who is much older than nancy pelosi. clyburn is a ranking member. it's one ofher lieutenants. for him to say that is really remarkable. the other thing i would note too is the sacramento bee came out this weekwith an editorial beak saying she should step down because it's too important in this election psych to not have democrats take control and that she is a tool that republicans are using campaign across at country. i believe that's the case. i do. but she's having a ugh week. to her credit, she's all over the country to raise money toth change election and take back the house. this is the thanks she's getting from her own caucus. >> i think speaks to the duality here. she is hugely unpopular not in w san francisre she keeps getting re-elected. that's important to note. the people thatget to vote are her constituents in san francisco and the members in the house, not the country at large. but she has been an enormously

successf fund-raiser, a very effective speaker. if you talk to obama people, they say obamacare wouldn't have happened and other huge itiatives. it's an interesting thing to see how she's trying to thread the needle but she'ser speaking differently this week than a year agoing about this. she's opened the path she could potentially step down depending what happens. of coue, if democrats lose, she's definiteou . >> she changed her tone about building bries. >> her problem is her real problem right now is the congressional blac caucus and ey're angry with her. she is not aggressive going out and attacked the president for what the lebron james issues and maxine waters and what they feel is the presidist's r issues. >> they want jim, clybun african-american. >> perhaps they do. he's t the future of the party. >> he's 76 years old, too. definitely not the future.e pelosi will more and more the republicans will start

launching these pelosi ads. she stars in one out of every four republican house ads in california in the next couple . week she's going to be facing the pressure turning up for her. >> also on theational front, a dozen former senior intelligence officials signed a letter basically supporting john brennan. they're calling president trump's decision to strip him of security clearance basically aa politove to stifle free speech. sean, does the president's action amount to an unconstitutional abuse of power? >> clearly not unconstitutional. he has the executve authority to decide who has clearances or not. some people think it's a brushback pitch against people in his curecnt nationality regime to say if you talk to these people and they talk against us, we'll go after you. iin think it is anmidation tactic. he doesn't have the top secret clearance anymore. it's just secret clearance. steck communicate wit other people about issues.

o> he can be consulted. >> its like dennis the menace, he's a grumpy old guy yelling at another old guy. i'm not sure brannan is being as sympathetic as he is.he smart part mike more rel and the rest of the people doing the letter. a former colleague helped to marshall the issue. it hurts the president by normal thinking americans. >> some othe officials who signed the letter did express discomfort with hsh ha some of his brannan's comments have been against president trump. >> brannan is trying to have it both ways. he makes allusions that he's trump is a puppet of putin. but then when he was asked point bla, do you know of any compromising material that he has, and brannan said no, i don't. and he would know supposedly as head of the cia. >> joe, sean walsh, political consultant and ma ris sass

lagos, thank you all. >> thank you. moving now to tec imagine a free website where you can find more than 100,000 discussion forums on pretty much any topic imaginable. wcome to reddit. since the launch in 2005, it has become the fourth mo popular website in the u.s. each month hundreds of millions of visitors is comments on and n post linksigs to various topics known as sub reddits. witht comes challenges like facebook and other social media. it isng grappli with how to protect free speech while fighting hate speechli and o bullying. here is the general counsel and vice president of reddick, lissa. >> reddit is one of the most popular web sites in the world. it doesn't have the same name recognition as youtube or facebook. why? >> it's a couple things. when i started with the company 2015, we were about 60 people and now we're ber 400.

and so i think. >> owper . >> a lot of growth but in comparison to our usergrowth we're an incredibly small company. i think a lot of the things wet d to focus on is building out the core functions we need in order to grow andanage the platform the way we want to. also i think it's just the nature of reddit. it's a collection of communities that are interested in a wide variety of topics. in terms of that, in terms of users being out there brand perception, some users are theg interesting things for world and some want to maintain privacy and have na. >>as you've grown, you've had similar growing pains toni com can such as facebook and twitter. how do you modera for ha speech online? it's been a tricky issue. how do you balance reddit users' right to free speech while monitoring and shutting down hate speech? >> i think we're having a great conversation today on those

questions. i think for reddit, we're thingng on a couple part of our growth is growing the company and the functions that we need to have for thean coto be successful. for us that means we have a policy team that thinks about these things from a big perspective. a trust and safety team which insure they can enforce scale. h e the anti-evil engineering team. >> ebola engineering team. >> current name. so the team that they are helping us build the tools. a i have partner in our cto and we talk about as we're thinking aboutolicy issues, he's thinking about theecological issues how do we scale it when we have that number you have users. >> do you have reviewers and flag users? >> for us, we have what welike talk about as a federated system. we have reddit, inc. and the trust and safety te we have a community moderator t

teaat go into the communities that work with the moderators andnsuring they're growing healthy communities. then we have the moderate areas themselves. we have over 100,000 communities. each of those are moderated and theyave their own additional rules. so as an example, you know, there are communities where cats and sometimes you can only talk abo cats if you post a picture of a dog, they will enforce that rule. >> they kind of lf-censure. >> each community has their different rules what they want in that community. >> speaking of rules and potential censorship, this week twitter temporarily suspended alex jones the founder far right news site info wars. someritics say they should have banned him outright as facebook and apple and other companies have done.s whatour take on that? >> i don't know the different policies. i think all of the tech rempanies are struggling with where we in the world today

and some of the things that have happened. for us, we're focused info wars hasn't been on our site for a number of year >> why i that? they took themselves off or you shut them down. >> for people using it for spam and things of that nature. it's not a prevalent website on our community. it's important to think p about thicy you want to have as a company. all companies are different and ha g differentls and ensure we can enforce them. i think a lot of pushback is the public doesn't understand what the policies are and howdo you enforce them and why they are what they are. we communicate with our users a lot. and our posts about why we're changing policies, what that means for themo andunities can going further than what we prescribed. >> talk about online bullying. how big of a problem is that and how do you fight that? >> we focus on sort of the behaviors of urs we think add

to this. one of the things that i did when we -- when i came to the company i2015 was to start to look at some of the policies we had and did they gor enough as we talked about harassment and things of that nature. over the course of three years, we've iterated on a lot of our policies to get o to some the behavior to ensure that as we're seeing what's happening'r that thinking through, is this harassment? is this not harassment? what happens when it's bilateral versus unilateral. asking hard questions and then making your own decision. i think the site has come a long way in terms of how it tolerates onharassment and getting top of it. a lot of what the trust and safety team does is when th have the rules, they can build mechanisms which they can get some of this atscale. we're not waiting for one to one reporting for somebody to this has happened. it's a problem. we're actively looking for those interactions to make sure they're not happening. > talking about silicon valley's diversity gap. you spent eht years a an

attorney at google. so you've been able to break through the.ran you're a rarity. studies showovernment figures show that he in tech companies the executive level is 84% white. it's nearly 70% men. what can you do to changing that? and move mo women and people of color noor positions of tech leadership? >> you know, it's definitely a problem in tech. tech is starting to realize that. as a black female executive, you know, one of the very few, i think a couple of things are really important. number one, i it'sortant that you have the conversation at the executive level. so you know, i started the company, steve huffman is our ceo and came probably a month or two after i did. it's a conversation we've had a very open and honest conversation about ity and the importance of it. you have acknowledge the

issue and take steps to address it. for us ascu an eve team, our team reflects diversity. herefore oureports reflect diversity. it's not shocking as a minority executive i have three out of four women who are my leads. 's not shocking that the diversity of my own team is much more intuitive because i'm looking for diffent things, different perspectives. we try and talk how other teams cn think differently. you can't jutainly on linked in or search for i need someone who has exactly done this. you have to think outside the box and do it i different ways. i think it's a problem that's never ending. and so ything have to continually work at. >> one step at a time. ma lis saw tid well, thankrou being with us. >> thank you. >> we turn our attention now to ollywood and race. on wednesday, crazy risch asians" opened across the nation. the comedy is based on the best

sel novel by kevin kwan. it revolves around rachel whoha discovers her boyfriend nick hails from the richest family in singapore. ern. >> so your faly is like rich? >> we're mrtable. >> that is exactly what a super rich person would say. >> but this is not your typical hollywood romantic comedy. i"crazy rich asians""s the first major studio film released in 25 years to feature an all asian cast drawn from around the wo id andt's sparked debate over race and representation in hollywood. re now with closer look are valerie so, professor of asian-american studies at san francisco state university and joining us fr los angelesing is korean american blogger phil yu. welcome to youboth. valerie, this movie touches on very familiar romantic comedy woman from a modest background falls in love with a man who is rich. they have hurdles along the way all in two ogether

hours. in many ways the movie is considered ground breaking. how tso. >> a typical romantic comedy with an asian-american lead actor and actress involved with each other. so to haveup a of asian-americans is pretty rare both as lead kashlgs. and an asian man as a romantic lead is even more rare. it's directed by an asian-american director. >> phil, in what way do you find the movie ground breaking. >> >> theol story is aas stories have been told. but the fact that it's top to boom wall to wall all asians and told in a very specific way know, and told with cues and little hallmarks that are very specifito our community, it makes it really special to see that reflected on the screen. you've seen is the movie five times. there was a real. >> six >> six times. >> thank you for the correction. and i'veeard the director talk

about there movie. he made a real effort to cast the net wide. these are asian actors and actresses that came from london, the u.s., britain, australia, malaysia. and to see that kind of representation on screen, how did you feel and what did you think of the peeb? 's rare when you get to see a movie like this, right? and it's not for atlantic there are so many really talented performers across the globe, in this country and hollywooo just never get a shot and get a story like there. so to see them -- they -- the casting is probably the strongest thing about the movie. to see them fire on all cylinders and show their stuff it makes for an entertaining product. >> that gets to something else i want to talk about, which is holywood hasen increasing criticism for a practice calleda whitewashing,ing white akers in roles envisioned as asian for example, tilda swintton selected for the role of the asian man the aient one in

dr. strange. asian one played a part woman in the smeeb aloha." how much influence do you think this movie will have on future casting decisions in woul >> i think it's huge because part of the catch 22 of asian-american actors not getting lead roles is producers in hollywood will say there ares norn actor who's can open a field, famous enough to open a but if you never cast them, how are they ever going to get famous enough. so constance wu got buzz from "fresh off the boat." >> playing the female romantic lead. >> she is so cute and you just want to squeeze her. right? >> there was a annenberg studyt showed only 5% of the characters with speaking roles in the top 100 films last year werea a what do you think about that statistic? >> it's pretty low.% the speaking roles, that's prut low especially since they're of the population in

the u.s. we should have more lead roles, not just t guy who brings delivery food. and the nail salon lady. >> and phil, there's a local hunnection here, as well. director john is from palo alto. his father lawrence owns the famous chef chu's restaurant in los altos. a lot of celebrities have been there over e years. do you think the movie does an adequate job of depictinge t nuances of the asian experience, asian-american versus those who live in asia and the two groups don't necessarily identify with one another. >> first of all, it's impossible for any one film to capture sort of the diversity of our community which is there are so nuances. i think the film does an add nishl job ofat catching t dynamic of asian-american person goingto asia and understanding like feeling like a fish out of water. i think lot of us can relate

to that. nn asiangh and made to feel not american enough when you're her a >> there ao some er deprodeprotectractors of the movie. that it focuses on the dominan chinese authority ander. pettates the underrepresentation of ethnic asian minorities. what are your feelings about that. >> those are validconcerns. it's definitely worthwhile to have that conversation about the way even whin asian communities you know the diversity, whether or not that's whether people are represented. you know, but if you look at th movie, very specific in the group that it is focused on. singapore's 1%. so truthfully that is a certaina clas certain look and a certain ethnicity. >> that's where they highlight the point that no one movie can represent all the groups because

asian is not a monolith i can group. koreans are different from sevietnamese from, chi and it really points to the need for more story so that more people can tell their stories >> it's really unfair for one romantic comedy to shoulder the burden of all representation of all of asians around the world. it's best to look at this movie forria it is, yes,rt it is imnt and it is revolutionary in a lot of ways in terms of representation but till just one film. hopefully the start of many. >> are there parallels here between crazy risch asians" and "black panther" which featured a cast of al black actors and actresses? >> where you can draw the parallels arpeople gettin excited about movies that are popular genres but nmally led by mostly white casts. so to see a romantic comedy, one of hollywood's most tried and true genres and getting to see wall to wall asian-americans and having fu andfalling in love

and having a beautiful spectacle, that is really ng special. people are getting excited about it. >> there have been comparisons to "joy luck club." that came out 25ears ag it did well at the box office. nothing happened. was another 25 years before another movie this time "anazy rich a" with an all asian cast. tw much do you think it can lead future changes in hollywood? >> part of it is demographics.ma there's s more living in america than 25 years ago.-a asirican filmmakers have been pushing this for a long time. there's tons of indie films maded in that time that i am have been building audience and king people realize that is yeah, we want to see asian-american stories on the screen told by asian-americans. >> do you think there's so much buzz around this movie will help those with oth projects in the pipeline get green lied? > i think money talks

hollywood. the fact that people are lining up around the block to see this movie at theatres, it's a pretty strong statement for a placewo like hol which is really business driven. >> valerie so wit san francisco state university and phil yu os angeles.from thank you both for being here. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> and that will do it for us. as always you can find more coverage at kqed.com/newsroom. i'm thuy vu. thank you for joining us.

robert: presidentrump retaliates. he lashes out, alarms intellence leaders, and rattles some republicans. i'm robert costa. welcome to "washington week." >> mr. brennan's recent conduct is inconsisten with access to closely held secrets. robert: predent trump at war with his critics. he revokes john brennan's security clearance, citing his link to the russia probe. >> i've got tremendous response from having done that. robert: some republicans support the move. >>nn mr. b has gone way over the line in my view and i think restricting his clearance makes sense. robe others disagree. >> i thought it was just kind of a banana republic thing.