tonight california lawmakers propose new laws at a repeat of the college admissions scandal that has roots in the golden state. reveal new polls widespread discontent among bay area residents around housing and traffic and what they're willing to do about it. zbliechlt also, the emotional lives of animals. a new book by aps renowned ychologist says their emotions are just as rich and complex as humans. hello. yesterday several california lawmakers propose measures aimed at reformingow college admissions are done. they include requing that three administrators sign off on special admissions. meanwhile, in a surprise move w thk the trump

administration decided to back a judge's decision to invalidate the entire act. it has sparked criticism and concern from democrats and house republicans, including. re >> they a leading to new leslation over vaccinations. here now with this week's politics roundup are kqed senior ditor of politics and government scott schaffer. hoover institution fellow andni jo us via skype from sacramento is alexeye, reporter from "the san francisco chronicle." welcome you, to you all. let's tal about the new colle admissions legislatin. aside from reforms, what are ome of the other changes lawmakers want? >> well, the biggest one would nt tying pell g which is he state financial aid program to admission standards where any

college, public or private, that to get pell grant money couldn't use legacy admissions, students who are tied to donors or alumni. that's going to be difficult to enforce but it's really laying down a clear marker saying that we don't agree that there should be a preference to students who have a connection, their families have a connection to the university. there are some others, including trying to register private college admissions counsellors and probably in the most direct sort of poke at the individuals whon participateis scandal. they would not be able to write off those fake charitablee d ags that they gave to william singer's fake charity as bribesl >> so of ripple effects from this. they also went to public university admissions.

phase out college admission tests. is there a risk here, thoug of going too far? >> i mean, look, this is difficult to enforce, i think, as alexeye was sayin the challenge is that alumni preference isomething that the time and notion that particularly alumni who investi university. the universities are not going to want the source of income to be cut off, and so there are a whole host of qwhestions about her it does go too far, but fundamentally the idea of having to register people who advisec n lege admissions, that seems like a reasonable step, and there are others that are reasonable steps, but i think -- this is really a marker that's being laid d trying to get the process under control. >> and there's always unintended consequencen,of any legislat no matter how well intended it is. i think there's a concern that the standardsto could become own russ. they may be deserving students, even though they also have parents who are alumni, andco get screened out.h those sorts ofgs. this is really in some ways a po itician's driem.

>> ihink the people that have -- that have more privilege to get their k idso these kooids schools, and so i think you're going to see similar investigations. my guess is there may be other investigations underway alrdy by th department of justice based on things that they've heard just in his first round. >> i do want to move to health care as well because there's a lot to discuss there. a lot is at stake to dismantle the affordable care act. millions ofmicans could lose health care if that happens. why is the president doing this now wh he had signalled earlier that he would be okay with justhipping away parts of the aca. now the administration is taking the position that the entirety of the law ought to be

invalidated. it's a relatively dubious legal argument. pi think if you talk ple who follow this closely, why is the administration doing it? best as i can tell, it provides them with an opportunity to signal their continued opposition to the affordable tre act. this is somethit plays well with the president's base going into an election year, inking about ways of continuing to signal to that base opposing the aca is something that is a winner with his base. >> although, you know, in this last midterm lections, democrats were successful in picking up 40 seats largely health they focused o care as time goes by, more and more peopl affected by it. when the law passed, it was maybe the benefits of it weren't as apparent asthey are now. also in terms of the potential political ripples, which is why kevin mccarthy, you know, was reallyes advising the ent not to get into this.

they lost seven seats in californca. not just bse of health care, but partly. >> not only that, but kevin mccarthy also. > he has done that time and time again where economic news comes out. jobs reports. he goes off in some other irection and makes this other more controversial partisang the news and the story. >> what are democrats doing at this point in response to this. >> it allows them to shut the focus off the mueller report which has turned on the not to be a beener fwor thej. pelosi is going to try to keep the caucus focused on those things, and the difficulty of sang we're going to get rof the aca is always, okay, what are you going to replace it with, and what are yougoing to replace it with that can get through congress? >> the democrats have their own chalhenge, which is that

have disagreements about how to handle health care going forward. you have some percentage of thg who are saywe ought to have payerre for all, a single system. pelosi's position is, let's have the aca, and let's improve upon this. how is she going to moderate the effects of those in the paert t who want to g the left, and the presidential ca iaign now ths beginning, you have a number of key candidates, including pamela harris and others who say we want medicar for all that's a discussion worth watching in the democratic party as well. >> are there any proposal prosecutes state lawmakers that would protect californians if the aca goes away? >> absolutely. there's actually quite a bit moving its way through the legislature right now,blncluding pro the biggest thing which would be a state mandate similar to the one that was repealed at the national level, r uiring every californian to have health insurance. that's something that gvin newsome actually introduced on his first day as january.n he said he wants to do it as a way to use themoney from fees

on those who decline health insurance to pay for expanding subsites to those who ca afford it. he is trying to create his own sort of replacement version here in california, and there's t ks of othds of proposals as well, including expanding healt care to undocumented immigrants. california has been ll in on the affordable care acts from day one and has really seen the uninsured rates. >> california is taking a big controversy.measles this week new york's rockland county barred children who aren't vaccinated fromes meas from public places and then you've got the situation in santa clara county now whe there wa infected tourists who visited a number of places, and that had to that led county health officials to issue a warning about that. so we haveew legislation now from richard pan, scte senator rd pan on this. what would that law do? what would the bill do? >> so thiss afollow-up to a

pretty controversial law that california passed aboutou years ago that required every private orpublic school student to be vaccinated, and that left in place medical exemption for students which certain individuals who are opposed to vaccinating their children seem toasbe taking advantage of a loophole to that law. richard pan's w bill would put re restrictions on the medical exempti exemption. >> selling them for $100 perxe ption. providing the oversight by the state health offi

>> the bay area is actually one of theas areas that the wiggest issues with medical s, exempti particularly in the east bay or the north baymm and nities like sonoma county and berkeley. you see some schools where more than half of kindergarten gardeners are coming in with medical exemptions.at ide it's less than 1%, soin some really off there. >> what kind of pushback are we likely to see from conservative groups and anti-vaccine groups on this? because the whole-vancine mooumt has really taken off. it >> on social media.a. that's exactly right. the challenge here is when does the right of an individual to exercise certain preferences nsn up ag a public health problem? i think we're seeing that in spad with this issue.

the question will become, you know, how much is the public health standard goingo outweigh the needs and desires of these folks. there's no question that more oversight is necessary. >> the existing law dide increae vaccination rate to 95%, which is really good. now they just have kond of shore up this loophole. i think that will help. california is also one oft thre s that don't have religious exemptions, so that's one loophole that's not available. >> all right. thank you all for being with us. >> thank you. thank you. turning now to some of the bay area's toughest challenges. two polls released this week found 65% of the voters surveyed feel the ality of life in the region has gotten worse in the last five years. 44% are considering leaving the area in e near future. among their top sources of frustration, homelessness, the high cost of living, and traffic congestion.

but they're also willing to dig into their wallets to help find solutions. joining me now to discuss what this means for the future of the bay area are kqed politics and government reporter cay, and bordino, prosecute ez and ceo of the silicon valley thadership group. great to have of you here. >> great to be here. >> carl krks your group conducted the polls. why do so many people nearly two-thirds of those surveyed think the bay area's quality of life haten worse? >> our silicon valley poll with thehe leadership group inay area news group was actually quite surprisedwith the findings that 65% of us say that the quality oflife has declined, and even more troubling, 44% say over the next several years they are likely to leave the bay area. nearly 3 strongly feeling they'll leave. what wason mostrning was that 6% said i'm packing. i'm leaving in 2019. ix of every 100 bay area

residents. >> what does this mean for the bay area? what are your biggest concerns resulting from the findings? >> well, we dug deeper into the why, and what f wend was 83% said the why is the high cost of hsing here. 81% their ongoing concern about our homelessness crisis kwsh 79 ter terz, the overall cost of living here. lthat do as the high cost of housing. 76% are that frustrated wth the crumbling conditions of our roads and bridges and the commutes that have grinded to a crawl. d, guy, let's dig deeper because if you look at o some o ther questions posed, the poll also reveals that 83% of t voters vie cost of housing as an extremely or very serious problem that covers everything from rter protections to dense

housing around trance it. why is that. >> when you ask voters about at, they might hear one specific thing. renter protection, rent caps or maybe an idea have more dense housing around transit and say, no, i'm against that. realistical realistically, thouno, casa is going to go before the ball ballot. a transit track. casa is a bunch of different ideas that are really going to play out, and i think the question that really specific, here's the housing solution on the ballot. >> casa itself is controversial. >> absolutely. just individual pieces of casa are insiedibly controvel. this idea of getting rid of real density limits arou transi very controversial. rent control, we saw how divisive that was on the ballot last year. just putting -- casa is definitely a group of ideas that it will have an uphill climb to get past. i think comparing it one on one

with transit -- >> i think we should be proud of the work. >> the number of -- tryingto figure out a way to lve it. >> that kind of boldness is part of what we ed to address the housing crisis. >> it's still when it comes down individual types of proposals, right, it's hard to get everybody o to comeer and agree on this. let's take, for example, state senator scott weiner's bill. this is getting a lot of attention. it will boost housing.

sarnd major transit hubs and employers. it's facing opposition from a number of supervisors in senator wener's own hometown of san francisco. could thatype of opposition undercut this bill and what he is trying t do? >> this is an incredibly type of legislation. we saw last year it didn't even on the politiot, he hasn a lot of endorsement from labor groups, the chamber of commerce, the leadership group on board with this bill, and one thing, the housing committee, which on tuesday, will take up this piece of legislati o. the chair the housesing committee is senator scott weiner. a bit of a home court vaeng there. >> what is your group? the sill von valley leadership group stand on it? >> we spport what the sno are

is trying to do. we support senate bill 50. here's why. we are 3.5 million homes short in california. it calls for within a half mile radius of a fixed rail transit stationhe ideally we should be building around bart, cal train, sf, smart, ace, andvta's light rail system 250 stations and opportunities. that's where we should be making these investments to get people out of their cars on to railcars, helping with the housing crisis and our coute and traffic crisis. gthere are other citiesnst the senate bill, including the

mayors of palo alto, ls although yoes, and beverly hills. tloofs a second quote that your group did that reveals what voters are willing to do in terms of trying to support highway improvemen and transit. what are they willing to do? >> what's wonderful about this , ar and i'll quote the english author samuel johnson. my friend, rid yourself of the word "cannot." in this region we don't just see problems to whine about. we lok for winning solutions. one of those is recognizing we're a regional economy here in the nine-county bay area. we have regional traffic patterns, and we need regional bolutions. when we asked the concept of let's build a world class integrated seamless transit syem, would you reach into your own wallet instead of your neighbor's with a 1 cent sales tax. 71%id yes. >> that's a big number. >> yes. >> and,guy, i 2016 los angeles

did something similar. it passed a permanentt 1 c sales tax to fund transit. how has it been working out in l.a., and isth that song that could be a model for the bay area? >> well, i think it absolutely is the model here, and, in fact, 71% of voters in los angel approved that tax back in 2016. i think here's another room for ism regionally. on that 2016 los angeles ballot, you had an increased sales tax. you aan increased parcel tax and a homeless bon that all passed with more than two-thirds of the vote. i think it showed that regionally there is a for getting multiple things done on the ballot in a single year. i think that' definitethe mogds that a potential transportation pack in the bay area would build off of. >> okay. optimism. people are unhappy about what's going on in the bay area, but they're also willing t step up and tax themselves to do something about it. >> yes. >> all right. carl with the silicon vall leadership group and guy with kqed, thank you, both. >> thank you. >>. now to the emotional life of animals. for more than 40 years dutch

scientist has been studying primatelike chimps, our closest biological relatives. he has tracked and do you meaned their cial behavior from acts of cooperation to fierce power struggles between rivals. it was a moving embrace shared between his mentor and an elderly chimp named mama that inspired him to write about emotions in the animal ash he s s it's not justmans who are capable of joy, guilt, and other complex emotio. >> proerch, thank you so much for coming in. >> you center this book around a chimpanzee named mama., specifical mama's's goo-bye with smebody who had studied her for a very long time. can you talk about why you chose mama specifically and why you use this interaction? >> well, mama has a sense thati

colony a very large colony on an island, and she was a sort of central figure who kept the group together, and actually, you're noticin now she has died two years ago under some turmoil in the group as a result of her absence. she was the mediator. she was very powerful. she was not necessarily physically domant over the males, but she was a very powerful figure. when she died, she was so important toeveryone. my professor who was 80 at the time, and she was 59, which is also very old for a chimpanzee. he decided to go into h cage to visit her. it's a dangerous thing to do, but she was so weakened, and he had known her for 40 years. he went in, and she had a very emotional exchange with him, and she embraced him and all of that. ause this was b shown on dutch national tv and all of this, how surprised people were.

people were moved by it. i can understand everyone was moved by that video clip, but they were surprised homa like her expression was and her gestures, and i thought, well, we all know that chimps are our closest relatives, so why would you be surprised that they express their emotions in simi wr ways, and so that' i decided to take that as the beginning, sically. >> your thesis is this idea that animals have emotions so silar or the same as ours. it's actually very controversial in the scientific community. i'm curious sort of what the reaction has been to thi science we had a taboo on theemotions. you don't talk about emotions in animals. you talk about motivations - a >> i like that one. >> you translate everything. laughing becomes vocalized panting and all of that. i learned all of that. the neuroscntists, they have broken up to the box to some degree because theystudy, for

example, fear in the rat, and they say it is in -- it's activated. then they put humans in a scanner in a brain scanner, says and they show them pictures tha induce fear, and your -- is activated. the sneuroscientitarted to make all these connections between human emotions and animal otions, and that's where we are now. we are much more open about it, and yes, there will be resistance in the scientific community, but not in the unger skrrgs. the younger skrrgs of scientists is much more open. >> why do you think it matters? what does it tell us about w ourselves, ant do you hope to sort of bring to the world by making this argument? >> weunderestimate the amount of emotions we have. we like to present ourselves rationale beings. especially man -- that we want to be distant from our bodies and our iemotions. think one thing i do is making all these comparisons. it's to show how similar our otional life actually is to

that of other primates. also, i feel we need to look at nature as we are part of it. instead of this attitude we are outside of nature and w can control it and we are the last of nature, that has giveus a lot of trouble. also eco logical trouble in the world, and it's theng attitude, and i want to emphasize we are part of it and connected to other species. >> one of the really wonderful examples is of another female chimp at the same zoo who couldn't lactate. couldn't -- you had an interaction and taught her something that changed. can you tell us about that? >> -- she would try and noeat. i decided to at some point since we had a baby up for n,adopt baby chimp to teach her how to bottle feed it and for a chimp to hold the bottley and a b is really no big deal for them.

it's no big deal for humans. we taught hhighway to do that, and since that time because before she was obnoxious to me. from that time she rely loved me, and i'm part of the family, and she was grateful for the rest of h life. she also raised her own off string on the bottle because of this. >> it your oaks have run counter that. >> one of the things people think is that animals are slaves of theirot ns. they have to run after their emowings. that'not really true. animals control their emotions. if a cat would go after chipmunk as soon as it sees it, it will never catch the chipmunk. it has to control the impulses and sneak upon it, an as many examples, i don't know if you know the marshm aallow test where you give them one, and they have to wait, and then they get a second one. that same test has been done with apes and parrots, and

just the same emotional control that we have. this idea that they are the slaves of emotions doesn't really fit. >> i know sometimes we compare apes and primates to toddlers. it sounds like they've developed beyond sort of that stage of human emotion. >> i never liked those comparisons becausehe adultad -- at chimpanzee male is interested in power and sex. that's not very child-like, i would say, and the adult females are very intereed in the offspring and how to care for them, and so their interests are don't really fi i think the whole psychology is different from those of the kids who play around f andl around. >> so you've sort of built your life around this n work. whatt and what do you hope people are taking away from it? >> i think that the next phase is actually we do a lot more research on emotions. it's just started from the animals since we were not allowed to talk about it. in humans also -- human emotions are often studied verbally.

i think human emotions also need to be studied more and more foeked on the face than what we're doing now. >> professor, thank you so much in.coming >> you're welcome. >> and that will do it for us. as always, can you fi more of our coverage at kqed.org/newsroom. thank you for joining us.

>> the mueller report, coming soon. according to the attorney general. i'm robert costa. welcome to "washington week." >> total the collusion delusion is over! >> president trump claims vindication, as the attorney general prepares to release a redacted version of the mueller report. plus, the president revives the health care debate. alarming some republicans and uniting democrats. >> the president wants to go back to repeal and replace again. make our day! >> next. ♪[music] >> this is "washington week." funding is provided by... ♪[music]