"newsroom," ed 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 forum called "the front page of the internet." plus "crazy rich asians" directed bid a bay area native with an all asian cast is hoping to bre barriers in hollywood and beyond. hello, and welcomy i'm tvu. we begwi politics. in sacramento, state lawmakers and governorrr brown have two weeks to decide the fate of a thousand bills before the end of the session. 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 revoked the security clearance of former cia director john brennaneqho hasuently criticized the president. a dozen former security officials including leon panetta signed a let condemning the decision saying it was done to stifle free speech.i joning me now to discuss the we k's political developments are kqed politics a government reporter pla ris sass lagos,l politiriter jill garofli and politicalea consultant walsh. marisa, i know you were at the state capitol. there's been a scramble this week to decide the fate of hundreds of bills. which onesade it through? >> the bail reform was the big week.f the this languished for the last year after a year of effort to get it through the legislature. both the governor and chief justice of the courtsesked for mime saying they wanted to compromise. what came out is maki everyone

a little happier who wanted to see something happen except for the bail agents who would lose passed.obs if this and some of the -- i would say libl liberties group like the aclu wanted to see mo independence in these decisions about release. under the bill now, judges have a lot ofor to decide if somebody was rated low or medium or high risk under the riskme assets counties would adopt. whether to release them. so if you were arrested under b thisll and had a misdemeanor charge, you would basically get auoutmatically in 12 hours which isn't that different than now. if you have a ifelony,s a question. we would see more pretentative detention and a l more people getting out. >> concerns about judicial bias creeping in. t. which is a conversation that's importa you know, if you want to get this bill through, they were going toave to make compromises. >> 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 sides claimed victory. we'll see what ha with that. two others around police records and body cameras didt make out. those have a much better chance politically. the fact that that prosecution bill isn't dead yet says something at least lawmakers and he governor 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 coalition of community groups saysout has e signatures to place the measure on the ballot that would eliminateta the benefit for commercial properties, residential home o wwnersl

still have the benefit. >> there will be huge. the challenge for people promoting th is to sa this is not about 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 tax revenue that is -- potentially available to them. it's going to be a huge fight. this is like some of the most -- one of 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 anther ballot measure i november that would sort of expand prop 13 for individu property owners and let you take the assessed value of your home if you bought another house in california no matter where you mov . it would bteresting if that passed to see the argument the proponents of this other one would make to say well, look,

we're protecting mom and pop. >> i'm sure seas notn board with this at all. >> look, this is going be the political armageddonb tle. california's unemployment rate is out today, 4.2%. the employment picture is not like it was when prop 13 was passed. we don't have large factory employers. most businesses are small or medium sized businesses. they will be disproportionate this.ffected by the reason why the labor unions put this out now is they were worried about the decision 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 a this is a battle royale. >> they'll be a much more friendly electorate in2020. >> i'm not sure there will be. when you look at the mom and pop bagel store in montclair or the coffop here in san francisco and their rates will go way up. t

it's goi get passed on consumers. >> don't they own their ilding? >> many do. >> if you have less than 50 employees, those folks will be exempt. >> there will be two years out. ee'll being a lot more about his. >> s. >> and whether it achieves any of the high rates home ownership it was designed to address. let's move onto t november midterm elections because we have nancy pelosi facing awi gr challenge really from within her own party. several dozen rnmocratic ds many of them younger are saying they won't vote for pelosi ifelected. we have the third ranking house democrat, jim clyburn saying he ll seek the speakership if pelosi struggles to get enough votes in november.n, s where do you see this going from >>here? it's not been a good week for nancy pelosi. the "new york tim" will an extension of piece will the growing revolution against her

in her own caucus. a lot of young folkso and a they said older folks are revolting against her. i don't know whos much older than nancy pelosi. member. is a ranking it's one of her lieutenants. for him to say that is reay remarkable. the other thing i would note too is the sacramento bee camethout week with an editorial beak saying she should step down becau it's too important in this election psych to not have democrats take control and that she is a tool that republicans aresing to campaign across at country. i believe that's the case. i do. but she's having a tough week. to her credit, she's all over the country toto raise money change this 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 i hgely unpopular not in san francisco where she keeps getting re-elected. that's important to note. the people that get to vote are her constituents in san francisco and the members in the house, not theun cy at large. but she has been an enormoly

ccessful fund-raiser, a very effective speaker. if you talk to obamapeople, they say obamacare wouldn't have happened and other huge initiatives. it's an interesting thing to see how she's trying to thread the needle but she's speaking very differently this week than a yearagoing about this. she's opened the path she could potentially step down depending what happens. of course, if democrats lose, d shefinitely out. >> she changed her tone about building bridges. >> her problem is her real problem right now is theo congresl black caucus and they're angry with her. she is notou aggressive going and attacked the president for what the lebron james issues and maxine waters and what they feel is thepresident'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, too. definitely not the future. pelosi will hear more and more

the republicans will start launching these pelosi ads. she stars in one out of every ur republican house ads in california in the next couple weeks. she's going to be facing the pressure turning up for . he >> also on the national front, a dozen former senior intelligence officials signed a letter basically supporting john reennan. they're callingdent trump's decision to strip him of security clearance basically political move to stifle free speech. sean, does thesi prnt's action amount to an unconstitutional abuse of power? >> clearly not unconstitutional. has theexecutive authority to decide who has clearances or not. some people think it's a brushback pitch against people in his current national security regime to say if you talk to ese peoplend they talk against us, we'll go after you. i think it is an intimidation tactic. he doesn't have the top secret clearance anymore. it's just secret clearance. steck communicate with other people about issues.

ul he can be cod. >> it looks like dennis the menace, he's a grumpy old y yelling at another old guy. i'm not sure brannan is being as sympathetic as he is. the smart part mike more rel and the rest of the people doing the letter. a former colleague helped to marshall the issue. it hts the president by normal thinking americans. >> some of the officials who signed the lter did express discomfort with how harsh some of his brannan's comments have been against president trump. >> brannan is trying tohave it both ways. he makes allusions that he's trump is a puppet of putin. but then when he was asked point llank, do you know of any compromising materhat he has, and brannan said no, i wodon't. and hd 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 tech. imagine a free website where you can find more than 100,000 discussion forums on ptty much any topic welcome to reddit. since the launch in 2005, it has become the fourth most popular website in the u.s. each month hundreds of millions of visitors is comments on and post linksings to various topics known as sub reddits. with it comes challenges like facebook and other social media. it is grappling with how to protect free speech while fighting hate speech and online here is the general counsel and vice president of reddick, melissa. >> reddit is o of theost popular web sites in the world. it doesn't have e same name recognition as youtube or facebook. why? >> it's a couple things. company arted with the in 2015, we were about 60 people and now we're ber 400.

and so i think. >> hyper growth. >> a lot of growth but in comparison tour user growth, we're an incredibly small company. i think a lot of e things we tried to focus on is building out the core functions we need d in to grow and manage the platform the way we want to. also i thin t it's just nature of reddit. it's a collection of communies that are interested in a wide variety of topics. in terms of that, in terms of users being out there and the brand perception, some users are doing interesting tngsor the world and some want to maintain privacy and have >> as you've grown, you've had similar growing pains to companies can such as facebook and twitter. how do ymoderate for hate speech online? it's been a t ckyissue. how do you balance reddit users' rig to free speech while monitoring and shutting down hate speech? >> i think we're having a great conversosion today on t

questions. i think for reddit, we're focusing on a couple things. part of our growth is growing the company and the functions ate need to have for the company to 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 enforceal we have the anti-evil engineering team. >> ebolaengineering team. >> current name. so the team that they are helping us build the tools. i have a partner in our ctoand we talk about as we're thinking about policy issues, he'snk thng about the technological issues how do we scale it wen we have that number you have users. >> do you have reviewers and flag users? >> for us, we have what we like to talk about as a federat system. we have reddit, ith. and trust and safety team.

we have a community moderator team that go into the communities that work with the moderators and ensuring they're growing healthy communities. then we have the moderate areas themselves. we have over 100,000 communities. each of those are moderated and they have their own additional rule so as an example, you erow, are communities where cats and sometimes you can only talk about cats if you post a pofture dog, they will enforce that rule. >> they kind of self-censure. >> each community has their different rules what they want community. >> speaking of rules and potential censorship, this week twitter temporarily suspended alex jones the founder of the far right news site info wars. some critics say they should have banned him outright as facebook and apple and other companies have ne. what is your take on that? >> i don't know the differen policies. i think all of the tech companies are suggling with where we are 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 years. >> why is that? they took themselves off or you shut them down. >>r people using it for spam and things of that nature t's not a prevalent website on our community. it'smportant to think about the policy you want to have as a company. all companies are different and have different goals and ensure we can enforce them. i think a lot of pushback is the ublic doesn't understand what the policies are and how do you enforce them and whyhey 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 online bullying. how big of a problem is that and how do you fight that? >> we focus on sort of the

thhaviors of users we think add to s. one of the things that i did when we -- when i heme to company in 2015 was to start to look at some of the policies we had and d they go far enough as we talked about harassment and things of that nature.er he course of 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 rough, ishis harassment? is this not harassment? what happe when it's bilateral versus unilateral. asking hard questions and then making your ownio dec i think the site has come a long toleratesms of how it harassment and getting on top of it. a lot of what the trust and safetyiseam does when they have the rules, they can build mechanisms which they can get some of this at scale. we're not waiting for one to one reporting for somebody to say this has happened. it's aproblem. we're actively looking for those interactions to make sure n they' happening. > talking about silicon valley's diversity gap. s yont eight years as an

attorney at google. so you've been able to breug thr the ranks. you're a rarity. studies sh 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 vehat? and m more women and people of color noor positions of tech leadership? >> you know, it's definitely a tech.em in tech is starting to realize that. as a black female executive, you knyw, one of the v few, i think a couple of things are really important. number one, it's important that you have the conversation at the executive level. so you know i started the company, steve huffman is our c ceo anme probably a month or two after i did. it's a conversation we've had a very open and honest conversation about diversity and the importance of it. you have to acknowledge the

issue and take steps to address it. for us as an executive team, our diversity.cts therefore our reports reflect diversity. it's not shking as a minority executive i have three out of leads.omen who are my it's not shocking that the muchsity of my own team is more intuitive because i'm looking for different things, different perspectives. we try and talk how other teams can think differentl you can't just certainly on linked in or search ior need someone who has exactly done this. you have to think outside the b and do it in different ways. i think it's a problem that's never nding. d something you have to continually work at. >> one step at a tie. ma lis saw tid well, thank you for being with us. >> thank you. >> we turn our attention now to hollywood and race. wednesday, crazy rischn ass" opened across the nation. the comedy is based on the best

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

end up together all in two hours. in many ways the movie is considered ground breaking. how so. >> it's a typical romantic comedy with an asian-american lead actor and ctress involved with each other. so to have a couple of asian-americans is pretty rare both as lead kashlgs. and an asian man as romantic lead is even more rare. it's directed by an asian-american director. >> phil, in what ways do you find the movie ground breaking. >> >> the story is as old as stories have been toldbu the fact that it's top to bottom wall to wall all asi s andld in a very specific way you know, and told with cues and little hallmarks that are very specific to our community, it maiaes it really sp to see that reflected on the screen. >> you've seen is the movie five times. there was a real. >> six times. >> six times. >> thank you for the correction. and i've heard the director talk

about there movie. he made a real effort to cast the net wide. ahese are asian actors and actresses that 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? >> it's rare when y get see a movie like this, right? ant's not for atlantic talent. there are so many really plentedformers across the globe, in this country and hollywood who just never get a shot and get a story like tore. so see them -- they -- the casting is probably the strongest thing the movie. to see them fire on all cylinders and show their stuff it makes for an entertaining product. >> that getto something else want to talk about, which is hollywood has gotten increasing iticism for a practice called whitewashing, casting white akers in roles envisioned as asians. for example, tilda swintton selected for the role of the

asian man the ancient one in dr. strange. emma stone played a par asian woman in the smeeb aloha." how much influence do you think this movie will have on future casting decisions inwould. >> i think it's huge because part of the catch 22 of asian-american actors not getting lead roles is producers in hollywood willth saye are nor asian actor who's can open a field, famous enough to open a film. 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 ute and you just want to squeeze her. right? >> there was a annenberg study that showed only 5% of the haracters with speaking roles in the top100 films last year were asian. what do you think about that statistic? >> it's pretty low. 58% of the speaking roles, that's prut low especially since

they're 5% of the population in the u.s. we should have more lead roles, brings the guy who delivery food. and the nail salon lady. >> and phil, there's a localti connn here, as well. director john chu is from palo alto. his father lawrence owns the famous chef chu's restaunt in los altos. a lot of celebrities have been there over the years. do you think the movie do an adequate job of depicting the nuances 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 film to capture sort of the diversity of our ommunity which is there are so many nuances. i think the film does an add nishl job of catching thatf dynamic asian-american person going to asia andlnderstanding e feeling like a fish out of water. i think a lot of us c relate

to that. not asian enough and made to feel notri an enough when you're here. >> there are also some deprotectederotetractors 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 definily worthwhile to have that conversation about the way even within asian communities you know the diversity, whetherr not that's covered. whether people are represented. you know, but if you look at the movie, it is very specific in the group that it is focused on. singapore's top 1%. so truthfully that is a certain class, a 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 gr up. koreans are different from vietnamese from, chinese. and it reallyo ointse need for more story so that more people can tell their>> stories t's really unfair for one romantic comedy to shoulder the en of all representation of all of asians around the world. it's best to look at this movie forria it is, yes, it is important and it is revolutionary in a lot of wa in terms of representation but still just one film. hopefly the start of many. >> are there parallels here tween crazy risch asians" and "black phther" wh featured a cast of all black actors and actresses? >> where you can draw the parallels are people getting excited about movies that are popular genres but normally led by mostly white casts. so to see aic roman comedy, one of hollywood's most tried and true genres and getting to see wall to wall asian-americhans ad

ng fun and falling in love and having a beautiful spectacle, that is really something special. people are getting excited about it. >> there he been comparisons to "joy luck club." at came out 25 years ago. it did well at the box office. happened. it was another 25 years before another movie this time "crazy rich asians"" with an all asian cast. how much do you thinkt can lead to future changes in hollywood? >> part of it is demographics. there'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 of indie films maded in that time that i am have been building audience and making people realize that is ah we want to see asian-american stories on the screen told by asian-americans. >> do you thinkmuhere's s buzz around this movie will help those with other projects in thg pipeli green lied? >> i think money talks in

hollywood. the fact that peoplere lining up around the block to see this movie at theatres, it's a pretty strong statement for a place like hollywood which is real business driven. >> valerie so with san franciscs state uniy and phil yu joining us from los angeles. thank you both for being here. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> and that willdo it for us. as always you can coverage at kqed.com/newsroom. i'm thuy vu. thank you for joining us.

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