What the Democrats will do now that GOP pulled healthcare vote, chances are high that Oakland's NFL team will play in Vegas and an LA improv class for veterans
Can California Democrats work with President Trump on health care? Or anything?
By now everyone is familiar with Friday's failed attempt by the GOP to repeal and replace Obamacare.
Faced with opposition from moderates and conservatives, Speaker Paul Ryan and President Trump reluctantly pulled the Republican health care bill at the last moment. But if a Republican President, and a House and Senate both controlled by Republicans can't unite around a health care bill, what does that mean going forward?
Well, President Trump suggested last week, maybe Democrats would be willing to play ball. "If they got together with us and get a real health care bill, I'd be totally open to it and I think that's going to happen," he said.
But that might be kind of hard when the Democrats' leader in the House, California's Nancy Pelosi, reveled in the Republicans' failure last week. "Today is a great day for our country. It's a victory - what happened on the floor was a victory for the American people," she said.
To explore what's in the Democrats' court and the sway they may have in the future of the health care debate, A Martinez spoke to Scott Shafer, senior editor of the California politccs and government desk at public broadcasting's KQED in San Francisco.
To hear the full interview with Scott Shafer, click on the blue media player above
NFL owners approve Raiders' move to Las Vegas
You've heard the saying, "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas." Well, big time pro sports will be happening and staying in Vegas.
The National Hockey League will debut the Vegas Golden Knights later this year. And it looks like they will be joined by the Silver and Black.
National Football League owners approved the Oakland Raiders' move to Las Vegas at the league meetings on Monday, according to the Associated Press.
For years Las Vegas' biggest sports attraction was the UNLV Runnin' Rebels basketball team, but now the sports landscape is getting crowded.
Rick Velotta, the gaming and tourism reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, told Take Two ahead of the vote that approval was all but certain.
Still, it doesn't look like they'll be taking the field in Vegas for a little while longer. Their first season likely won't be until 2020. "They still have a lease for the Oakland Coliseum for another couple of years," Velotta said. "What happens in 2019 is now kind of a little up in the air."
When they do show up in Vegas, the Raiders are expected to play in a brand new stadium. According to Velotta, it's somewhere that's being built with a prime location in mind.
"The Raiders have an option to purchase some property on a parcel just across from Interstate 15 by Mandalay bay," Velotta said. "It'll be on the left side of the highway as you're coming in from California.
"There are still a couple of sites under consideration, but that's the one I think that the Raiders are looking for. Primarily because it has such a fantastic view of the Las Vegas strip from that place and they want it to be an iconic feature of the strip."
Between the Raiders' move and the Golden Knights joining the city, Las Vegas is enjoying something of a pro sports renaissance after years of being viewed as a toxic environment for teams.
"I think that a lot of the reason was because of the gambling aspect that Las Vegas represented," Velotta said. "For a long time, Las Vegas was the center of the gaming universe. That's no longer the case. There are casinos in most states in the United States right now. Gaming has kind of gone main stream."
To hear the full conversation, click the blue player above.
This story has been updated.
On the Lot: Families still go to the movies, will writers actually strike?
Disney's Beauty and the Beast had a great second weekend. The live-action version of the classic fairy tale is on track to join the half-billion dollar club, as it is also performing well internationally.
It puts to rest a concern that families don't get together and go to the movies anymore. And this week's second place box office winner accentuates that notion. Power Rangers is aimed at kids, and it drew a lot of them, but also benefited from 20 and 30-somethings who grew up with the TV series.
Meanwhile, a rumbling of labor action from the Writers Guild. The guild's leaders have asked the membership to approve a strike vote, citing poor progress in their contract negotiations with producers. That request to the members doesn't mean there will be a strike, but it does give negotiators the ability to use the threat in their bargaining. Writers last went out on strike in late 2007, and settled early in 2008.
Among the issues this time - shoring up the union's health plan, winning better pay for writers who work in digital media, and reversing declines in earnings for both TV and film writers.
The current contract with producers expires May 1. In the past, when a writers strike loomed, producers scrambled to stockpile scripts, and networks loaded up on non-scripted reality shows that don't require writers. Expect a repeat of those precautions if the negotiations drag on through April.
For Vietnamese-American community, honoring personal history conflicts with free speech
It's not unusual to hear Vietnamese-Americans in Southern California express strong feelings against communism. After all, many came to the U.S. as refugees and veterans of the war against North Vietnam.
Earlier this month, there was a dramatic demonstration of this sentiment. California State Senator Janet Nguyen of Garden Grove was removed from chambers during a ceremony for the late Senator Tom Hayden. The uproar began when Nguyen spoke against Hayden's opposition to the Vietnam War. She alleged that Hayden had ties to the Communist regime, which caused the deaths of countless people.
That incident reignited a debate in SoCal's Vietnamese community that pits strongly held political beliefs against the concept of free speech.
Reporter Christine Mai-Duc has been writing about this for the LA Times. She joined Take Two's A Martinez.
How did the local Vietnamese community react to Senator Nguyen's remarks and subsequent removal from chambers?
I think there was a lot of outrage in the community. I think no matter what your views, Janet Nguyen is one of the most prominent elected officials in the Vietnamese-American community. She's widely respected.
And she was removed when she was trying to voice an opinion that many of them feel. Many of them share her views of anti-communism, of the experience that she had a refugee coming to this country, having to start over. And her family members were killed in the Vietnam War.
And so, the idea that she would be silenced for voicing a widely held belief in the Vietnamese American community and a perspective that is dear to many people in the community was really met with some disdain.
Has having ties or sympathies with the Communist Party been a longstanding topic of controversy within the Vietnamese-American community?
Just the fact that many of the Vietnamese-Americans who are in this country, who started lives and family here, came here because they were refugees of the Vietnam War. That really demonstrates how important his issue has been to the community in the past.
It's come up and bubbled up over time. I think the most visible example was in the late 90s, when a video store owner posted a Communist Vietnamese flag in his store window, and there were protests for weeks and weeks.
Some people who are of the older generation who came here as refugees — my parents came here as refugees as well — they're trying to explain that this is a very personal issue to them. It's very emotional. The number of family members that were lost, their lives that had to be uprooted, it's very important to them. I think that on the other side, there are those, especially perhaps in the younger community, who have become more Americanized, that have grown up in the country, starting to say that there are other issues that we should be looking at as well.
How historically important has it been to keep anti-Communist sentiment alive within the community?
I think it depends on who you talk to. I think that the hardliners, the older folks who lived through this — there are many Vietnamese-American civic society associations who really concentrate on anti-Communist views, or just fighting for liberty in current Vietnam and liberating their fellow countrymen — and I think that's a very important topic for them. Making sure that their voice is heard and making sure that there's expanded freedoms for people that are still in Vietnam. For younger generations who have built their lives here, I think that it's something that they understand is very important to the older generation, but they're starting to look elsewhere as well.
You cited a study from the late 1990s that said 58 percent polled within Orange County's Vietnamese community agreed that Communists should be denied freedom of speech. How has this view changed over the years?
That was definitely a long time ago. It was a snapshot at the time. That probably has started to shift among younger generations. What you really have to think about is, in any community, when you talk about free speech, there's going to be the extremes on either side.
When you're talking about the First Amendment in the United States, some people don't believe you have the right to burn the flag and that's an ongoing debate. That's one extreme. For example, Janet Nguyen said to me in an interview, if you want to wrap yourself in the Communist flag, you can't expect to be welcome in my home. And so that's how a lot of people really feel. This is their home. This is their community. Little Saigon is their community. I think that sometimes there are overtones of what is appropriate and what's respectful in terms of dishonoring the trauma that many in the community have gone through.