A look at the battle for delegates in the California primary, some new and big changes in parental leave, rental housing in SoCal is about to get MORE expensive.
Republican Candidates pull out all the stops to win California
With a substantial 172 delegates at stake, California is sure to count.... which is why Republican candidates are doing everything they can to win big here.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump wants to earn enough delegates to clinch the majority and the likely nomination for his party.
Ted Cruz and John Kasich are looking to bring as many delegates to their campaigns as possible to force a contested election.
With that much at stake, there's a lot of money and a lot organization that's going into the play before the voting starts in June.
For more on the economic arms race headed our way, Take Two's Alex Cohen turn now to Politico's Shane Goldmacher.
To hear the full conversation, click the blue play button above.
Paul Ryan's policy campaign raises questions about a presidential bid
Paul Ryan will hold a press conference later today to clear up rumors of a White House bid.
Rumors spurred in no small part by something he's calling the "Confident America" campaign.
New York Times congressional correspondent Jennifer Steinhauer has been looking into Ryan's initiative and she spoke to host Alex Cohen about what Paul Ryan has previously said about a potential presidential run.
Is Zika worse than initially thought?
The health crisis brewing around the world, the Zika virus.
That's Dr. Anne Schuchat principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control speaking with reporters yesterday.
She said the mosquito-borne virus has been linked to a broader array of birth defects
For more on the latest developments, Dr. Karin Nielsen, pediatrician and infectious diseases specialist at UCLA, joined the show to discuss.
To hear the full interview, click the blue play button above.
The Brood: The state of paid family leave in the US
Yesterday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed off on a bill expanding the state's paid family leave benefits.
As of now, Californians can take up to six weeks off of work to bond with a new child or care for sick family members. While doing so, they can receive 55 percent of their usual wages.
Come 2018, that amount will go up to 60 percent of income for higher-wage workers. Those making less will receive 70 percent of their pay.
California Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez (D-Echo Park) says he wrote the bill after finding that many of the lowest-income workers were not utilizing California's existing paid leave program.
"It was really because the program says it's 55 percent wage replacement for six weeks of leave," Gomez told KPCC. "But if you've ever made minimum wage, or even just struggled to get by, if you're living paycheck-to-paycheck on 100 percent of your salary, what makes anybody think they can take off six weeks at half their wage?"
The boost to paid family leave benefits in California comes on the heels of two big developments on the paid leave front last week.
In San Francisco, the Board of County Supervisors unanimously approved full pay during family leave. And in New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a family leave law that gives workers up to 12 weeks of paid leave, twice as long as any other state.
Brigid Schulte, author of the book "Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time," says the U.S. still lags far behind other countries when it comes to parental leave.
"It's pretty clear, looking at the data, we are at the bottom of the barrel," Schulte says. "The United States is the only advanced economy that has no national paid parental leave program."
The U.S. does have a federal law that offers 12 weeks of unpaid family leave, but it only applies to workers who have worked for a company for more than a year, and who work full-time at companies with 50 or more employees.
"That means that 40 percent of the work force doesn't even have unpaid family leave," Schulte says. "And when it comes to paid family leave only 13 percent of the civilian work force has access to any kind of paid leave at all."
But, Schulte says, paid parental leave is finally becoming part of the national conversation in the U.S., state and local laws are changing, and "this is the first time ever that you have presidential candidates actually talking about paid parental leave."
Assemblyman Gomez says he's seen the conversation around paid family leave change in the 14 years since California became the first state in the nation to guarantee workers some form of paid leave.
"It took a long time," Gomez says, "we passed this program in 2002, but now there's this national debate... about paid family leave and making sure that people don't have to struggle when these life changes occur."
No place in SoCal is immune from rising rents: USC report
No neighborhood is safe from the rising costs of housing in Southern California.
That's the new finding in the new 2016 Casden Multifamily Forecast report by USC's Lusk Center for Real Estate.
"Historically there have been pockets of affordability," says co-author Raphael Bostic, "so that there were places people could go where they weren't going to have to pay rents that would be affordable for higher income people but not everybody else."
But those pockets are starting to shrink everywhere across the region.
The average rent in Los Angeles County increased 4.8 percent in 2015, while apartment prices in Orange County jumped 5.4 percent.
Even areas like the Inland Empire, which is traditionally more affordable, saw rents climbing 5.2 percent over the course of last year.
"Riverside and the Inland Empire have always been an escape hatch for people who were looking for something more affordable and willing to travel the difference," says Bostic, "but even those places are starting to see pressure."
It's a clear shift from the Lusk's Center's past Casden report in 2014 when neighborhoods like South L.A. and Long Beach saw dips in rents.
But this time around, every single area studied saw a jump in cost.
California remains popular investment for Chinese Investors
While rent is high in Southern California, there is always the option to BUY
That's not a cheap choice either, of course, but that hasn't stopped Chinese investors.
They've been quite busy buying up properties and businesses.
Last year, Chinese investments in the US hit 15 Billion dollars -- California was one of the top destinations...
And the trend set to continue
For more, we're joined by Jim Puzzanghera of the Los Angeles Times.
To hear the full conversation, click the blue player above.
The family myth and falling into the 'nostalgia trap' 24 years later
Evergreen State college professor Stephanie Coontz has made a career out of examining the American notion of marriage and family.
She's researched the topic for years... she's published articles and several books.
Including one which came out in 1992 called "The Way we NEVER Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap".
In it, Coontz explained why the Leave it to Beaver model - the happy, breadwinning dad, the mom content to stay at home baking and looking after the kids - was never really a workable one.
She made several predictions about where the future of the American family was headed.
Then, years later, she did what few authors do - she went back and revisited some of those prognostications.
A new and updated version of The way we NEVER were is out now, and Stephanie Coontz joined the show to talk about it.
Interview Highlights
On getting how she became interested in the field:
"I was very interested in social history and in the late 1960's and early 70's we began to discover that a lot of groups were left out of history: minorities, women...so I began to look at women. And I also began to realize that women and men were in interaction in one fundamental place that was never talked about in history books and that was in the family. So I started researching family history back in 1975 and it really was not yet a respectable field..."
On American culture back in 1992:
"They were predicting in 1992, democrats and republicans alike, were predicting a wave of super predators that would take over the streets of America all because of the breakdown of this so-called traditional family. Well, it turns out that they were absolutely dead wrong. Since 1994 juvenile crime rates have plummetted by more than 60 percent despite the decrease in unwed motherhood...And yet politicians kept grabbing on to the excuse that if we could just go back to these largely mythical 1950's T.V. families, we wouldn't have to adjust our economic and political programs to the realities of the 21st century. "
On the future:
"So when you want to ask, what's going to happen to families in 25 years? I would say it depends on what we do right now. This is not the weather that's going to happen whether you take an umbrella or not. This is, are we going to start supporting families in all their diversity? Understand that they need new support systems such as family leave policies and affordable childcare like every other industrial nation in the world has developed? Or are we going to allow this economic inequality and insecurity to mount and continue to dismantle our social safety nets and that is going to decide what families are like in 25 years."
To hear the full interview, click the blue button above.
Tuesday Reviewsday: Quantic, Terrence Martin, Bibio and more
Music supervisor Morgan Rhodes join A Martinez in the studio for Take Two's weekly new music installment - Tuesday Reviewsday.
Below are her picks for what you should be listening to.
1 - Quantic
Album: 1000 Watts feat. Flowering Inferno
Song: A Life Worth Living (feat. Flowering Inferno, U-Roy and Alice Russell)
2 - Artist: Terrace Martin
Album: Velvet Portraits
Song: Think of You (feat. Kamasi Washington & Rose Gold)
3 -Artist: Bibio
Album: A Mineral Love
Song: Why So Serious feat. Olivier Day Soul
4 - Artist: Monique Bingham
Album: Gets You Off EP
Song: Gets You Off