How California will be affected by a federal government shutdown, remembering the iconic LA artist Ed Moses, how California's homeschooling laws may change following Perris torture case.
CA Dems don't budge on DACA as shutdown looms
This week, on State of Affairs:
- House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi didn't mince words Thursday, likening a GOP stopgap to avert a government shutdown to a "bowl of doggy doo." The bill passed the House anyway, but its future in the Senate is unclear.
- With no DACA fix on the table, some lawmakers are threatening to block the bill, including Senator Kamala Harris.
- And an update on the #MeToo movement in Sacramento
Guests:
- Raphe Sonenshein, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute at Cal State LA
- Carla Marinucci, senior editor for Politico's California Playbook
Highlights
Rafe Sonenshein: This reminds me more of the Die Hard movies than it does of my political science classes, where someone's got a gun to the head of the hostage and you decide should you drop your gun, and the viewers in the audience are yelling, 'don't drop your gun, don't drop your gun.'
At the same time, both parties will take a big hit from this. Incumbents will take a big hit, and I would argue that would hurt Democrats in the Senate and Republicans in the House, where the incumbents are more vulnerable in each party in those two houses.
A lot of bad things could happen if there's a shutdown. But for people like Senator Kamala Harris, who might be eyeing the presidency in 2020, is there a political opportunity here? Could she be seen as the person who stands up for DACA recipients?
Rafe Sonenshein: There's a difference between being known as standing up for the DACA recipients and wanting a shutdown.
Unlike when Newt Gingrich started this whole thing back in 1995, he was the only one who ever really wanted a shutdown — and Ted Cruz later on. Nobody actually wants a shutdown, but everybody wants to be known for standing up to the people who support their base.
There's no benefit to anybody from a shutdown, but there's a lot of benefit to having fought the other side to a draw, so that in the next 12 hours, a reasonable deal is made — which, by the way, I think has a very decent chance of happening.
Note: A Take Two listener pointed out after airtime that Newt Gingrich did not start government shutdowns:
@taketwo Newt Gingrich didn't start government shutdowns as your guest just said. More info from @washingtonpost https://t.co/nDQiTO4e3x
— Rora M (@SoCalRora) January 19, 2018
Sonenshein clarified his statement later to Take Two producers:
There were definitely earlier shutdowns. I think it’s widely seen though that Gingrich pioneered the shutdown as a political tool.
What to watch for from the Sundance Film Festival
The Sundance Film Festival is underway in Utah featuring 110 independent films from 29 countries. John Horn, host of KPCC's The Frame, is in Utah to cover the festival and he gave Take Two the inside scoop on what to look for this year.
How the #MeToo movement and the recent sexual assault allegations in Hollywood are impacting Sundance
Harvey Weinstein was historically an influential producer at the festival, Horn explained. Weinstein faced numerous sexual assault allegations from women starting in October, 2017. Some of the alleged incidents actually took place at Sundance in past years, so Horn said that the festival is now trying to distance itself from Weinstein.
Horn said when he picked up his credentials for the festival there was something included that he'd never seen at Sundance before.
"Stuck into every credential, filmmaker, producer, media member was this: We value your safety. Sundance Institute is committed to allowing attendees to experience the Sundance Film Festival free of harassment, discrimination, sexism and threatening or disrespectful behavior."
Horn also said there are documentaries about the lack of representation for women behind the camera.
How Sundance is handling diversity
One of the opening films for the festival was Blindspotting, directed by Carlos López Estrada, who is a Latino director. The film stars and is co-written by Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs. Diggs is known for winning a Tony for his performance in the musical, Hamilton. The film tells the story of Oakland and racial violence, Horn said.
"[It] definitely suggested that this is going to be a festival where underrepresented voices are making films, and the stories that people are going to see are about people that they don't encounter in typical Hollywood productions."
When the average movie-goer can see these films
Very few films at Sundance will actually get wide distribution at movie theaters across the country, Horn said, so having a way for lots of people to see them is actually a big issue.
"There are a lot of movies that if you don't see it at Sundance, you might never see it at all. Or it might be on some tiny streaming service that you've never heard of."
However, Horn said one film he'd just seen at Sundance, Private Life, written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, was a Netflix film. So it will be available for all Netflix users to stream soon.
Artist Ed Moses 'knew that LA was the place for him'
Abstract painter Ed Moses died Wednesday at age 91. Moses was one of L.A.'s most prolific artists, and is one of the reasons Angelenos have a thriving art scene today.
Leslie Jones curated the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibit of Moses' drawings from the '60s and '70s that was held in 2015.
Jones said Moses was passionate about his art and was working right up to the end of his life. She also said he had a lot of respect in the art world for bucking trends and following his own path with his work.
Jones said that being in Los Angeles gave Moses the freedom to do what he wanted with his art.
"[He] just came home basically to L.A., to Venice because still there's this image of the wild west a little bit out here and the land of opportunity."
Compared to places like New York, Los Angeles is much less conventional, Jones said.
"Ed was not a rule follower so I think he knew that L.A. was the place for him."
After Perris, Assemblywoman Susan Eggman wants to better regulate home schools
Earlier this week, news broke that a couple in Perris, Calif., allegedly chained, beat and starved their 13 children. David and Louise Turpin have since been charged with torture and multiple other crimes. Both have pled not guilty.
Part of the reason they were able to remain undetected is because of their home's status as a private school. Now, attention is being focused on how to better regulate California's home schools.
"We have one of the least regulated home school programs in the country," said Assemblywoman Susan Eggman. Eggman is responsible for the 13th district of San Joaquin Valley. She's been a longtime advocate for tightening up rules to protect children who are schooled at home.
"The laws we have in place are not adequate," Eggman said.
How the home school system could be better regulated
At least some kind of annual home inspection. Then it comes to who's going to do it, right? Should it be Social Services? Should it be the Department of Education? Should it be public health? ... And, of course, who pays for that? There's all kinds of questions we still need to answer. But I think what we do know is that we need to do better.
High school cybersecurity team cracks code for competition and fun
As the new semester gets underway, a lot of high school kids are looking for clubs and organizations to join. There's soccer, the debate club and, if you go to Magnolia Science Academy in Santa Ana, the cybersecurity team.
"They are basically treated like new IT professionals," said Tugba Adanur, MSA-Santa Ana math teacher and coach of the cybersecurity team.
The team has a big event coming up January 20th. It's called the Cyberpatriot competition.
"There can be backdoors placed on computers," said Yasemin Turkkan, one of the members of the cybersecurity team. "Our task during the Cyberpatriot competition is to find those and eliminate those from the computer to make it safe."
Turkkan helped found the club after Adanur helped enroll her in cybersecurity classes at local community colleges.
"I'm a teacher that's looking for ways to challenge her students," Adanur said. After a series of lessons, Turkkan was hooked. Adanur knew she had to help foster Turkkans passion. "I asked Yasemin if she wanted to start the [cybersecurity] club, and she was happy to do that. Then we created the team together."
The thrill of competition is what helps the club become a team. Each member is focused on a variety of points to complete the task at hand.
"It's a very team-focused activity," Turkkan said. "There has to be communication. We're always Googling things for each other. We're asking what the code for this thing was. So we have to communicate."
But they never let the competition distract them from what's most important in a high school club: having fun.
"A lot of people, [when] you show them coding and you say, 'This is what we're doing,'" Turkkan said. "But in reality, it's so much more than that. It's active problem solving. I look at it as trying to solve a puzzle with a million different pieces that's always changing. It's something that we're really passionate about."
Transforming historical figures into Heroes of Color
Comic books and superhero stories have changed from a few years ago. It used to be that if you were a fan, looking for a character, comic or an action figure about a superhero of color, you didn't have a ton of choices.
But now there are a few more options. Characters of color have pretty important supportive roles in Marvel's Falcon and War Machine and DC's Cyborg. This week “
” debuted on the CW network. And the highly anticipated film, “ Black Panther,” is set for release in February.
But this weekend at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, a different type of hero will be featured. Local artist and animator David Heredia is screening his Heroes of Color series. It's a series of educational videos about the contributions of underrepresented historical figures.
The first in the series was about the famed military unit known as the Harlem Hellfighters.
And Gaspar Yanga, known as one of the first black liberators in the Americas by leading one of the most successful slave rebellions during the early period of Spanish colonial rule.
Take Two's A Martinez went to Heredia's Santa Clarita home studio to talk to him about it. And we asked him where he got the idea for the series. Itt began with a trip to a local comic book shop for his son.
I walked into the store with my son, and we were searching for Black superheroes, and this was before the buzz of the Black Panther, so there wasn't a lot of interest in showcasing Black superheroes ... so I think I found one or two. So what I decided to do, when we left the store and when I went home I started searching online to see if I could find some superheroes of color, and when I googled that, what came back were real people ... and that was what sort of started the whole Heroes of Color series.
Heredia's work has received a lot of positive attention, and he says that he's working hard to produce more animated shorts, which he hopes will get picked up by streaming services such as Netflix or Hulu, or even better, become part of an educational system for schools across the nation.
But even if it doesn't happen, he said that he feels pride in what he's created, because it's so important to tell these kinds of stories.
It's our moral responsibility as creators to tell these stories and to get these stories out there, because for too long we've been lacking in this representation ...