tonight on kqed "newsroom," state melawmakers c closer to ending cash bail in california as they decide the fate ofs hundrf bills. also, going in depth with an executive at reddit. the popular online forum called" e 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 olitics. in sacramento, state lawmakers and governor jerry brown have two 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 california cleared a key

committee. but hurdles lie ahead include opposition from law enforcement. also this week, president trump security clearance of former cia director john brennan who has frequently riticized the president. a dozen former security officials including leon panetta signed a letterem condning the decision saying it was done to stifle free speech. joining me now discusshe week's political developments are ked politics and government reporter pla ris sass lagos, political writer jill garofli and political consultant sean walsh. marisa, i know you were at the state capitol. b thereen a scramble this week to decide the fate of biundreds of ls. which ones made it through? >> the bail reform was the big news of the week. this languished for the last year after a year of get it through the legislature. both the governor and chiefth justice o courts asked for more time saying they wanted to

compromise. what came out is making everyonh a littleppier who wanted to see something happen except for the bailgents w would lose their jobs if this passed. and some of the -- i would say libl liberties group like the aclu wanted to see more indendence in these decisions about release. under the bill now, judges have a lot of power to decide if somebody was rated low or medium or high risk under the risk assessments counties would adopt. whether to release them. so if you were arrested under this bill h and a misdemeanor charge, you would basically get out automatically in 12ours which isn't that different than now. if you have a felony, it's a question. we would see more pretentative ople tion and a lot more getting out. >> concerns about judicial bias creeping in. >> which is a conversation that's important. you kw, if youant to get this bill through, they were going to have to make compromises. >> there were three police accountability measurh.

whapened to those? >> right. so the most controversial of those would making it easier tore prosecute officer who's kill a civilian. that got air move. they pulled it out of fiscal committee where it could have died back in rules. both sides claimed victory. we'll see what happens with that. two others around police records and body cameras did make it out. those have a much better chance politically t the fact tht prosecution bill isn't dead yet says something at least lawmakers ang tvernor want to talk about this, they don't want to be seen as killing it in the dark of night. >> those are bills hoping to become law. talk about something that has been on the books for a long time, prop 13. this is the 40th anniversary of proposition 13, limiting property taxes in california. now a coaliti of community groups says it has enough signatures to place the measure on the ballo that wou eliminate the tax benefit for commercial properties,

residential home oowners will still have the benefit. >> there will be huge. the challenge for people promoting this is to say this it not ab grandma's house. this is about making sure disneyland and chevron and richmond pay their fair share. many of these commercial properties have never been reassessed. there's billions of dollars in potential taxevue that is -- potentially available to them. it's going to be a he fight. this is like some of the most -- one of the most powerful inrests in sacramento. >> the rate industry alone is a huge interest. they've run a lott lost there. i think we have k tow there's another ballot measure in november that would sort of expand prop 13 for individual property owners aou let take the assessed value of your home if you bought a other house california no matter where you moved. it would be interesting if that passed to see the argument the proponents of this other one

would mak to say well, look, we're protecting mom and pop. >> i'm sure sean's not on bo d with thi all. >> look, this is going be the potical armageddon battle. california's unemployment rate is out today, 4.2%. the employment picture is not ke it was when pr 13 was passed. we don't have large factory empmoyers. businesses are small or medium sized businesses. they will be disproportionate lit affected by this. the reason why the labor unions put this outow i they were worried about the decision from the supreme court and how much money th could throw at this. this is a big cta move, $10 billion at least, much higher and this is a battle >> they'll be a much more friendly electorate in 2020. >> i'm not sure there will be. when you look at the mom and pop bagel store in montclair or the coffee shop here in san francisco and their rates willa

go up. it's going to get passed on consumers.ow >> don't they their building? >> many do. >> if you hve less than 50 mployees, those folks will be exempt. >> there will be two years out. we'll be hearing a lot more about this. >> yes. >> and whether it achieves any of the high rates of home ownership it was designed to ovdress. let's onto the november midterm elections because we have nancy pelosi facing a growing challenge really from within her own rt several dozen democratic inrngsds many of them younger are s they won't vote for pelosi if elecved. we hhe third ranking house democrat, jim clyburn saying he will seek thepeakership if pelosi struggles to get enough votes in november. sean, where do you see thi going from here? >> it's not been a good week for nancy the "new york times" will an extension of piece will the

growing revolution against her her own caucus. a lot of young folks and also theyaid olderolks are revolting against her. i don't know who is muchlr than nancy pelosi. clyburn is a ranking member. it's one of her lieutenants. for him to say that is really remarkable. toe other thing i would note too is the sacrambee came out this week with an editorial beak saying she should step down because it's too important in this election psych to not have emocrats take control and that she is a tool that republicans are using to campaign acro at country. i believe that's the case. i do. but she's having a tough week. to her credit, she's ll over the country to raise money to change this election and take back the house. this is the thanks s getting from her own caucus. >> i think speaks to the duality here. she is hugely unpopular not in saneerancisco where she getting re-elected. that's important to note. the people that get to vote a her constituents in san francisco and the members in the house, not the country atlarge. but she has been an enormously

successful fund-raiser, a very effective speaker. if you talk to obama people, they say obamacare wouldn't ha ppened and other huge initiatives. it's an interesting thing to s how she's trying to thread the needle but she's speaking very differently this week than a year agoing about this. she's opened the pathshe could potentially step down depending what happens. of course, if democrats lose, she's definitely out. >> she changed her tone about building bridges. >> her problem is her real problem right now is the congressional black caucus and they're angry with her. she is not aggressive going out and attacked the president for what thees lebron j issues and maxine waters and what they feel is the president's racist issues. > they want jim clyburn, an african-american. >> perhaps they do. he's not the future of the party. >> he's 76 years old, to definitely not the future.

pelosi will hear more and more the republicans s willart launching these pelosi ads. she stars in oneut o every four republican house ads in california in the next couple weeks. shing to be facing the pressure turning up for her. >> also on e national front, a dozen former senior intelligence officials signed a letter basically supporting john brennan. they're calling president trump's decision to strip him curity clearance basically a political move to stifle free speech. sean, does the president's action amount to an unconstitutional abuse of power? >> clearly not unconstitutional. he has the executive autrity to decide who has clearances or not. some people think it's a brushback pitch against people in his current national securiti to say if you talk to these people and they talk against us, we'll go after you. i think it is an intimidation tactic. he t doesn't ha top secret clearance anymore. it's just secret clearance. steck communicte with oth

people about issues. >> he can be consulted. >> itke looks l dennis the menace, he's a grumpy old guy yelling atnother old guy. i'm not sure brannan is being as sympathetas he is. the smart part mike more rel and the roit of the people the letter. a former coeague helped to rshall the issue. it hurts the president by normal thinking americans. >> some of the officialsho signed the letter did express discomfort with how harsh some of his brannan commentshave been against president trump. >> brannan is trying to have it oth ways. he makes allusions that he's trump is a puppet of putin. but then when he was asked point blank, do you know of any compromising material that he has, andrannan said no, i don't. and he would know supposedly as head of the cia. >> joe, sean walsh, political

consultant and ma ris sass th lagos,nk you all. >> thank you. moving now to tech. imagine a free website whereou can find more than 100,000 discussion forums on pretty much any topic imaginable. welcome toreddit. since the launch in 2005, it has become the foulah most po website in the u.s. each month hundreds of millions of visitors comments on and post linksings to various topics known as sub reddits. with itllcomes cges like facebook and other social media. it is grappling with how to protect free speech while fighting hate speech and online bullying. here is the general counsel and vice president of reddick, >> reddit is one of the most popular web sites in the world. it doesn't have the same name rognition a youtube or facebook. why? >> it's a couple things. whe i started with the company peop15, we were about 60

and now we're ber 400. and so i think. >> hyper >>growth. lot of growth but in growth, on to our user we're an incredibly small company. onthink a lot of the things we tried to focus is building out the core functions we need in order to grow and manage the platform the way we want to. also i think it's just the nature of reddit. it's a coection of communities that are interested in a wide variety of topis. in terms of that, in terms of users being out there and the brandperception, some users are doing interesting things for thn world some want to maintain privacy and have na. >> asu' y grown, you've had similar growing pains to companies can such as facebook andi er. how do you moderate for hate speech online? it's been a tricky issue. how do you balance reddit users' right to free speech while monitoring and shutting down ate speech? >> i think we're having a great

conversation today on those n quest i think for reddit, we're focusing on a couple things. part of our growth is growing the companynd the functions that we need to have for the company to be succes for us that means we have a policy team that thinks about these things from a big perspective. trust and safety team whichth insure can enforce scale. we have the anti-evil engim.eering t >> ebola engineering team. >> current name. so the team that they are helping us build the tools. ierave a par in our cto and we talk about as we're thinking about policy issues, he's thinking about t technological 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 we liket to talk a as a federated system. we have reddit, inc. and the trust and safety team.

we have a community moderator team that gothe communities that work with the moderators and ensuring there growing healthy communities. then we have the moderate areas themselv we have over 100,000 communities. each of those are moderated and they have their own additional rules. so as an example, you know, there are communities whe ca and sometimes you can only talk about cats if you post a picture of a dog,hewill enforce that rule. self-censure. f >> 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 of the far right news site info war some critics say they should have bann h outright as facebook and apple and other companies have done. what is your on that? >> i don't know the different policies. i think all of the tech companies are struggling with

where w are in the world today and some of the things that have happened. for us, we're focused info wars hasn't be on our site for a number of years. >> why is that? they took themselves off or you shut them down. >> for people using it for spam and things of that nature. it's not aev ent website on our community. it's important to think about the policy you want to have as a company. all companies are different and have different goals andur e we can enforce them. i think a lot of pushback is the public doesn't undersolnd what theies are and how do 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 them and communities can going further than what we prescribed. >> talk about onlineuling. how big of a problem is that and how do you fight that?

>> we focus o sort of the behaviors of users we think add to this. one of the thingsat i did when we -- when i came to the com wny in 2015 to start to look at some of the policies we had and did theyo farnough as we talked about harassment and things of that nature. over the course o three years, we've iterated on a lot of our policies to get to some of the behavior to ensure that as we're seeing what's happening that we're thinking through, is thisr sment? is this not harassment? what happens when it's bilateral versus unilateral. asking hard questions and then making your own decision. i think h the site come a long way in terms of how it tolerates harassment andetting on top of it. a lot of what the trust and safety team does is when they have the rules, they can build mechanisms which they can get some of this at scale. we're not waiting for one one reporting for somebody to say this has happened. it's a problem. we're actively looking for those interactions to make sure they're not > talking about silicon valley's

diversity gap. you spent eight years as an attorney at google. so you've been able to break through the you're a rarity. studies show government 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 more men 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 ink a couple of things are really important. important that you have the conversation at the executive level. so you know, i started the company, steve hu oman is ceo and came probably a month or two after i did. it's a contion we've had a very open and honest conversationtybout divers and the importance of it.

youck have towledge the issue and take steps to address it. for us as an executive team, our team reflects diversity. therefore our reports reflect . diversi it's not shocking as a minority executive i have three out of four wom who are my leads. it's not shocking that the diversity of my o team is much more intuitive because i'm looking for different things, different perspetives. we trnd talk how other teams can think differently. you cat just certainly on linked in or search for i need someone who has exactly done this. t you havthink outside the box and do it in different ways. i think it's a problem never ending. and something you have to continually work at. >> one ste at time. th lis saw tid well, thank you for being us. >> thank you. >> we turn our attention now to hollywood and race. on wednesday,razyisch asians" opened across the nation. the comedy is based on the best

selling novel by kevin kwan. itlv re around rachel who discovers that her boyfriend nick hails from the richest family in singapore. ern. >> so your family is like rich? >> we're comfortable. >> that is exactly what a super rich person would say. >> but this is not your typ hollywood romantic comedy. "crazy rich asians"" is the first major studio film released in 25 years to feature an all asian cast drawn from around the world and it's sparked debate over race and representation in hollywood. here now with a closer look are valerie so, professor o asian-american studies at san francisco state university and joining us from los angelesing is korean american blogger phil yu. welcome to you both. valerie, this movie touches on very familiar romantic comedy themes. woman from a modest background falls in love with a man who is rich. they have a hurdlesong the way

ut end up together all in two hour in many ways the movie is considered ground breaking. how so. >> it's a typical romantic thcomedy w an asian-american lead actor and actress involved with eac other. so to have a couple of asian-americans is pretty rare both as lead kashlgs. ansi an man as a romantic lead is even more rare. is directed by an asian-american director. >> phil, in what ways do find the movie ground breaking. >> >> the story is as old as stories have been told. but theact that it's top to bottom wall to wall all asians and told iner a specific way you know, and told with cues and little hallmarks that are very specific to ourni comy, it makes it really special to see that reflected on the screen. >> you'veeen is the movie five times. there was a real. >> six tim. >> six times. >> thank you for the correction.

and i've heard the director talk about there movie. he de a re effort to cast the net wide. these are asian actors and actresses that came from london, the u.s., britain,tr aia, malaysia. and to see that kinof representation on screen, how did you feel and what did you think of the peeb? >> it's rare when you get to see a movie like this, right? and it's notor atlantic talent. there are so many really talented performers across the globe, in this country and hollywood who just never get a shot and get a story like there. so to see them -- they -- the casting iobably 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 hollywood has gotten increasing criticism for a practi called whitewashing, casting white akers in roles envisioned as asians., for examptilda swintton selected for the role of the

asian man the ancient one in dr. strange. emma stone played a part asian woman in the smeeb how much influence do you think this movie will have on future casting decisions in would. >> 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 are nor asian actor who's can open a field, famous enough to open a fi. but if y 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 jus want to squeeze her. right? >> there was a annenberg study that showed only 5% of the eacharacters with sng roles in the top 100 films last year were what do you think about that statistic? ea it's pretty low. 58% of the sng roles, that's prut low especially since

they're 5% olathe poon in the u.s. we should have more lead roles, not just the guy who brings food.ery and the nail salon lady. >> and phil, there's a local connection here, as well. director john chu 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 the years. you think the movie does an adequate job of depictingnc the nus of the asian experience, asian-american versus those who live in asia and the two groups don't necessarily always 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 many nuances.in i the film does an add nishl job of cahing that dynamic of asian-american person going to asia and understanding like feelinglike a fis out of water. i think a lot of us can relate

that. not asian enough and made to feel not american enough when you're here. >>here are also some protecterdeprotectractors of the movie. that it focuses on the dominant chinese authority ander. pettates the underrepresentation of ethnic asian minorities. what are your feelings about that. >> those are valid concerns. it's definitely worthwhile to have that conversation about the way even within communities you know the diversity, whether or not that's coverop. whether p are represented. you know, but if you look at the mov, it is very specific in the group that it is focused on. singapore's top 1%. soll truth that is a certain class, a certart look and a in 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 vietnamese from, 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 tos look at t movie forria it is, yes, it is important and it is revolutionary in a lot of ways in terms of representation but still just one film. hopefully the start of many. >> are there parallels here between crazy risch asians" and "black panther" which featured a cast of all blackcrs and actresses? >> where you can draw the parallels are peopleetting excited about movies that are ed ular genres but normally by mostly white casts. so to see a romantic comedy, one of hollywood's most ied and true genres and getting to see wall wall asian-americans and

having fun and falling in love and having a beautiful spectacle, that is really something special.re people getting excited about it. >> there have been comparisons to "joy luck club." that came out 25 years it did well at the box office. nothing happened. it was another 25 years before another movie this time "crazy rich asians"" with an all asian . how much do you think it can lead to future changes in hollywood? >> part of it is demographics. the's so many more living in america than 25 years ago. asian-american filmmakers have been pushing this for a long time. there's tons ofie i films maded in that time that i am have been building audience and making people realize that is yeah, we want to s asian-american stories on the screen told by nsasian-americ >> do you think there's so much buzz around this movie will help those with other prects in the pipeline get green lied?

>> i think money talks in oo holl the fact that people are lining up around the block to see this mie at theatres, it's a pretty strong statement for a place like hollywood which is really business driven. >> valerie so with san francisco state university and phil yu joining us from los angeles. thank you both for being here. ha thank you. >> 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: president trump retaliates. he lashes out, alarms intelligence leaders, an rattles some republicans.ro i'rt costa. welcome to "washington week." >> mr.du brennan's recent c is inconsistent with access to closely held secrets. robert: president 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 ve. >> mr. brennan has gone way over the line in my view and i think restricting his clearance makes sense. robert: others disagree. >> i thought it was just kind of a banana republic thing.

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