Today we recall the Rwandan genocide, which began 30 years ago this week. It’s a heartbreaking story.

Ethnic division was central to the conflict. Hutus had an 85-percent majority, but Tutsis often enjoyed favored status under colonial rule. In 1990, a Tutsi rebel group began assaults on the Hutu-led country. Hutus took power after Belgian colonialization ended in 1962 and discriminated against the Tutsis. After the attacks, Hutu leadership began a propaganda campaign to create hatred toward the Tutsis.

As Human Rights Watch explained, “For centuries they had shared a single language, a common history, the same ideas and cultural practices.” There was much intermarriage. Nevertheless, the government campaign successfully demonized the minority.

Then in 1994, after the downing of President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane, all hell literally broke loose. Although the two ethnic groups were so intertwined, Rwandan law registered citizens based on their ethnicity, as instituted by the Belgians. It was listed on their ID cards.

Millions fled. Other governments, including our own, and the United Nations did nothing throughout the 100 days of slaughter. Rwanda has undergone decades of soul-searching and reconciliation. The current government is disturbingly authoritarian, but the country’s economy is growing and is remarkably stable. Some observers even view Rwanda as an inspiration for making a comeback after the unthinkable.

What can the rest of us learn? There are myriad lessons involving colonialism and international peacekeeping. But mainly, it reminds us to eschew ethnic-based politics and to create institutions that treat all citizens as individuals.

The Rwandan genocide also points to the fragility of civilization – and to the unspeakable evils human beings are capable of perpetrating.

In 2020, Torres trounced Cargile with nearly 70% of the vote. In 2022, the results narrowed a bit, with Torres receiving over 57% of the vote. Things are unlikely to be much different this time, though in the latest primary Torres had to fend off a challenge from her left.

As of this writing, Torres received a little over 48% of the vote, compared to 39.5% of the vote going to Cargile and the rest going to the remaining candidates.

What is most unfortunate about this particular race is the fact that Mike Cargile is no ordinary Republican.

“The United States is being run by a satanic cabal of human traffickers and pedophile predators, working in conjunction other world leaders, to establish a one world order. I will do everything within my power to oppose this,” he told Grid News (since purchased by The Messenger) in 2022.

Yes, Mike Cargile is a full-on QAnoner.

As reported by Los Angeles Magazine in 2020, Cargile’s social media has also included more explicit links to the QAnon conspiracy, including featuring hashtags like #WWG1WGA used by believers in the conspiracy theory.

That someone with completely wacko ideas is the representative of the Republican Party on the ballot anywhere is bad enough. It reflects the shallow pool of candidates the GOP has to work with in California.

But it also puts conservative voters who probably don’t share in Cargile’s conspiratorial worldview in a position where many give tacit approval to Cargile as a candidate simply because he has an “R” next to his name on the ballot.

Candidates like Cargile are representative of the weakened, and cheapened, state of California’s civic culture.

As this editorial board has recommended in the past, voters in the district must reject Cargile and demand better from the conservative movement.

Prop. 28 promised additional funding to every public school for arts and music instruction and programs. The measure required the state to provide an extra amount equal to 1% of the total Proposition 98 funding (typically around 40% of General Fund revenues) that K-12 schools received in the prior year. For the 2023-24 school year, the Prop. 28 funding was $938 million.

In January, this editorial board met with LAUSD school board member Tanya Ortiz-Franklin and asked her if there were any success stories in the nation’s second largest school district as a result of Proposition 28 providing almost a billion dollars statewide for arts and music education.

She couldn’t point to one. Ortiz-Franklin said there was “supplanting” of funding happening, though no one really wanted to call it “supplanting.”

But now Prop. 28 proponent Austin Beutner is calling it exactly that. In a March 25 letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and legislative leaders, Beutner wrote that “some school districts in California are willfully violating the law by using the new funds provided by Prop. 28 to replace existing spending for arts education at schools.”

Instead of “hiring about 15,000 additional teachers and aides,” Beutner wrote, “the funds would instead be used to pay for existing programs. This means millions of children will miss out on the arts education voters promised them.”

Prop. 28 required local educational agencies to certify annually that the funds are used “to increase funding of arts education and not to supplant existing funding for those programs.”

Beutner’s letter asked state leaders to order school districts to submit to the California Department of Education, within 30 days, a certification that Prop. 28 funds have not been used to supplant existing spending, and a list of additional arts and music teachers employed in the current school year compared to the prior year.

The letter was also signed by officials of the powerful unions representing teachers as well as a Teamsters local.

We’ll see how that goes.

Christensen also expressed concern that a downturn in the economy might mean cuts to arts and music programs if the Legislature thought Prop. 28 funds could fill the gap. As lawmakers wrestle with a severe budget deficit, that warning may have been prescient.

But even without a downturn, Christensen argued, Prop. 28 would be just one more state mandate “to handcuff school districts.” It sure didn’t take the school districts long to pick the locks and escape.

We’ve seen myriad reports about people who illegally occupy vacant homes, often in upscale neighborhoods. They move into homes that are listed for sale or are second homes. In some cases, they book a stay at a vacation rental and then refuse to leave. In Oakland, it’s become a political cause after a group of squatting homeless women grabbed media attention, some of it celebratory.

Property owners often find themselves facing long and costly court battles to retake their own properties. Californians shouldn’t have to worry that if they leave their homes they might not be able to get back inside. Squatters rarely are poor, downtrodden folks. Alleged squatters reportedly turned a Beverly Hills mansion into a party house. It’s become such a plague that a man known as “The Squatter Hunter” has started a business helping owners reoccupy their homes.

In a recent article, The Washington Post quotes “experts” who claim that there’s no real squatter problem and claim it’s a creation of “right-wing” media. Well, squatting might be rare in the scheme of things, but it’s a serious problem that has been covered extensively even in mainstream media publications.

It’s time for the Legislature to act before this relatively small problem becomes yet another example of California dysfunction.

In a massively expansive way, such a belief goes to the heart of our nation’s theory of governance. Under federalism, it is not, no, the federal government that does all of the governing, but rather the 50 states, each a little bit different than the others, with different needs and different attitudes toward regulations.

So why not, within states, take that down to the city level as well? Los Angeles is very different from San Francisco, which is very different from Carmel-by-the-Sea.

And we do take it down there, with city councils in our incorporated cities big and small able to pass their own local laws and regulations.

The reach may be lesser,  but local tyranny isn’t fundamentally better than state tyranny. Local governments using their power to ban or restrict personal or economic freedom are, at the end of the day, infringing on personal and economic freedom.

There’s also a point at which over-regulation within one city or some cities in California creates a burden on the rest of us. While that point is impossible to define in a general sense — though courts are usually happy to try — many involved Californians who believe in the greater good know it when they see it when it comes to particular city laws.

Regulations on development within one municipality is one area that clearly affects the rest of us. If, like some tony suburban cities in our state do, local politicians mandate a minimum lot size of one acre for single-family residences, well, that creates more of a squeeze for limited land elsewhere.

Real estate — they’re not making any more of it, as the old saw goes.

Or the leaders of leafy Woodside in the Bay Area tried to get around state mandates to build at least some denser, somewhat affordable multi-family housing by saying that they had to stick to their old zoning because they are home to endangered mountain lions.

Well, guess what, Woodside — Irvine and Pasadena and L.A.’s Hollywood Hills are mountain lion habitats, too. While we ought to provide more wildlife corridors to enable them to get around, we’re all in this together.

And one clear way to get past California’s daunting housing affordability crisis now that seemingly the entire human population wants to live in our state is to build more, not less, housing.

That’s one big reason we were pleased to see that a particularly NIMBYish constitutional amendment initiative that backers had hoped to put before state voters failed to get enough signatures to go onto the ballot.

The measure that proponents hoped would limit “State’s ability to set statewide land-use and housing policy” will not be something we will have to debate and vote on. If passed, it would have provided   “that local laws automatically override conflicting state land-use and zoning laws (including affordable housing laws) … Prohibits state from changing, granting, or denying funding to local governments based on their implementation of this measure. Repeals Article XXXIV of the California Constitution, which requires local voter approval for publicly funded low-rent housing projects.”

Cities are different, and they should be. Those who can afford the (increasingly sky-high) price to live in one of our hundreds of cities throughout the state can and will do so. But creating a governmentally mandated reduction on the supply of housing in California only serves to raise the cost of that housing for us all.

In the full language of the initiative, backers noted that ‘“One size does not fit all, and recent statewide land use and zoning laws will do great harm without significant input and participation from local communities.” That is certainly true. But every California city can still be different from the rest under the status quo. They just can’t put up a wall against the rest of us.

That’s where the cops — or FBI, or states’ attorneys, or whomever — have a better chance to catch the crooks at their game.

Given what we can now see plainly was an 18-month cover-up by the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department after the tragic shooting death at the hands of law enforcement of Savannah Graziano, a 15-year-old girl abducted by her father in September 2022 even as she followed a deputy’s instructions to walk toward them after a chase on Hesperia-area highways, what’s the reason for the almost criminal delay?

For a year and a half, journalists, led this time by incredibly intrepid independent investigator Joey Scott, have been trying to get the Sheriff’s Department to release the voluminous video and audio footage they knew the department had detailing every minute of the unfolding tragedy.

They blocked him at every turn.

As Scott wrote on Twitter a year ago, “For the fifth time, San Bernardino Sheriffs have delayed my records request for body camera and other recordings from their shooting of an abducted unarmed teenager and her father. They missed their March due date to fulfill by 10 days.”

That time, the department promised to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests by April 19, 2023. And then, they did not.

Scott began working with a senior investigative journalist at the British newspaper the Guardian. As the Guardian’s Sam Levin wrote on Twitter, the released information clarifies major falsehoods from the sheriff’s department: “Following the killing, Sheriff claimed: -Savannah may have been shot by her father. -deputies mistook her for her dad. -that she ‘ran’ at deputies. The footage, released 2 years later, cast doubts on those claims. And the sheriff now makes clear she was killed by deputy shots. … The CHP helicopter officer radioed: ‘Girl is out, the girl is out, guys. She’s out on the passenger side.’ The deputy closest to her said: ‘Come to me! Come, come, walk, walk..’ Gunfire continues as the deputy on the ground says: ‘Hey! Stop! Stop shooting her! He’s in the car!’”

It’s all an immeasurable tragedy for all concerned and a stain on the credibility of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.

The delay in releasing crucial information to the public and to Savannah’s family is not only not covering the Sheriff’s Department in glory. As with all cover-ups, it makes objective observers question the reasons for the clamp-down on the news.

San Bernardino County authorities, let’s do a better job in the future of communicating to the public through the journalists trying to do their own job if you’ve got problems accessing data.

And, bottom line, as Levin reports: “CJ Wyatt, Savannah’s uncle, told me: ‘There needs to be better training so that unarmed people aren’t killed. Hopefully this video can be used for training — something has to be done differently. She didn’t have to die.’”

According to the Police Scorecard, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department uses more force and deadly force per arrest than the average police department. More unarmed people are killed by the department per arrest as well. It’s imperative that county leaders better train deputies tasked with making life-and-death decisions.

One thing that didn’t add up was the main task of her job as controller: filing the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR) for the state government on time. Unlike a budget, which is a projection, a comprehensive financial report is a precise accounting of a government body’s finances. It’s crucial especially today as Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature grapple with a deficit as high as $73 billion as they write the budget for fiscal year 2024-25, which begins on July 1. 

Yee left office on January 2, 2023 with the ACFRs for 2020-21 and 2021-22 late and unfinished. On March 23, 2023 her successor, Malia Cohen, released the 2021-21 document. In her introductory letter, she blamed the tardiness on “transitioning to the Financial Information System of California (FI$CAL).” 

But the next ACFR, for 2021-22, finally was released on March 15, 2024 – last month. Cohen lamented it was “the fifth consecutive year” the document came out late. The report uncovered an unexpected $47 billion increase in the state’s unrestricted net deficit, a key number, despite the state’s general prosperity. If that had been known for last year’s budget negotiations, cuts could have been made to reduce the enormity of this year’s deficit. Even other fiscally challenged states such as New York and Illinois get their ACFRs finished on time. 

California needed a disciplined fiscal watchdog throughout Yee’s time as controller, especially during the pandemic period. Instead, during the pandemic, Yee made headlines for advising a politically-connected company how to get a $600 million no-bid contract from the state. Yee even advised one of the political consultants who stood to gain from the deal “to refrain from disclosing that Blue Flame would earn $134 million in profits on the contract, because the information could ‘become a matter of public record and make headlines.’”

Yee also repeatedly rebuffed efforts by OpentheBooks.com to open the state’s books to public scrutiny. While every other state made line-by-line expenditures available for public review, Yee fought efforts to open the books for years. Ultimately, OpentheBooks.com constructed a state “checkbook” itself using public records requests.

Contrast this record with the way she pitches herself to voters on her campaign website: “Accountable. Competent. Genuine. Caring. A truth-teller. A problem-solver. Former State Controller Betty Yee is a leader uniquely prepared to meet this challenging moment in California. “

This state suffers massive financial problems that only have festered under Newsom: structural budget deficits, overspending, the highest taxes in the country, big pension costs, and a worsening homelessness crisis despite remarkable amounts of spending. 

The state needs a chief executive who at least can file fiscal documents on time. Betty Yee has proven she can’t even do that.

The latest news is State Farm General Insurance Co., which provides 21 percent of state homeowner policies, announced it is non-renewing 30,000 home-insurance policies and getting out of the apartment business. In May, the company stopped writing new policies. Other property insurers have also stopped writing policies or are exiting California.

As a result, many California homeowners are struggling to find home insurance and the state’s insurer of last resort, the FAIR (Fair Access to Insurance Requirements) Plan, is so overburdened there’s talk of it failing. Climate change might exacerbate the conditions that require higher rates (wildfires, drought, flooding), but that’s not the reason for this crisis.

The state’s prior-approval insurance rules, imposed by voters in 1988’s Proposition 103, severely restrict the ability of insurers to adjust rates.

Given the hurdles of getting rate approvals, insurers are fleeing California rather than risking their financial reserves. Nevertheless, there’s plenty state officials can do to alleviate the situation within the initiative’s framework.

During a hearing at the Little Hoover Commission, California’s watchdog agency, former Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones said California is “marching steadily towards an uninsurable future.”

As the Sacramento Bee summarized, Jones believes “world leaders aren’t acting aggressively and fast enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom and current Commissioner Ricardo Lara have likewise pointed to climate change as the insurance culprit. But this isn’t an either/or problem. They have to deal with reality as it is and the reality is that state policies have distorted the insurance market in California.

They can and must address problems directly linked to climate change. They can and must also get real about the need to let insurers do their job.

Lara has promised reforms, but none have materialized and few remove regulatory logjams that restrict competition.

Insurers are perfectly capable of setting rates to match risks. Allowing them to do so is a far better strategy than blaming “world leaders” for not addressing climate change.

It’s time for Lara, Newsom and the Legislature to get busy and stop with the excuses.

Subway franchise owner Keith Miller told NBC 7 San Diego, “You keep kind of wondering when you’re going to break the camel’s back?”

“We’re having to get more efficient,” Michaela Mendelsohn, who manages 170 employees at El Pollo Loco, told NPR. “So really, what’s left is … to reduce labor hours. And I hate saying that.”

The wage increase is “unprecedented as far as I know,” Raymond Sfeir, director of the A. Gary Anderson Center for Economic Research at Chapman University, told us. He warned the increase will bring layoffs, higher prices for consumers, more use of technology such as automatic burger flippers and restaurant closures.

“The unfortunate part is that many franchisees are small operators and not owners of dozens if not hundreds of restaurants,” he warned. They’re the small capitalists who are the heart of a local economy, contributing to charities and sponsoring little-league times. 

We won’t know the overall effect for several months as the higher wage plays out. But the higher prices for consumers are on top of the overall inflation of the past four years. The Consumer Price Index for February jumped 3.2% from the year prior, still above the 2% considered reasonable. That’s on top of the sticker shock consumers still are suffering from prices rising 7% in 2021, 6.5% in 2022 and 3.4% in 2023. 

Costs are piling up like spoiled ketchup on a rancid burger patty.

Everyone knows the state is facing a budget gap. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office thinks the state budget deficit is as much as $73 billion, while Gov. Gavin Newsom has put the number at half that, around $38 billion.

As CalMatters columnist Dan Walters noted in a recent column, state lawmakers have  already tried their hand at moving money around, including a package of “solutions” which “consist largely of temporarily suspending some of the appropriations in the 2023-24 budget that was adopted last June, shifting some spending from the general fund into special funds, borrowing from various pots of money and tapping into reserves.”

But that will only buy the state some time. The fundamental budget problems are still there: the state is spending far faster than it is taking money in and the state has locked itself into generous contracts with the state’s public sector unions.

Given the one-party dominance of California state government and the prominent role of public sector unions in the Democratic Party’s coalition, the Legislature will no doubt try to do everything it can to work around those fundamental problems rather than confront them head-on.

But at the end of the day, cuts need to happen.

According to a recent estimate from the LAO, salaries and salary-driven benefits for state employees alone take up $40 billion of the state budget.

But even with major cuts to vacant positions, the savings won’t be much compared to the scope of the budget problem.

Unsurprisingly, according to the California Tax Foundation, state lawmakers have considered tax and fee hikes totaling over $193 billion in the first two months of the year. These include taxes on personal assets, pet food, candy, wine, and much more.

This isn’t necessarily unlike other years in California. State lawmakers are routinely pitching massive tax increases to fund some scheme or another. But in recent years legislators have been considering those tax hikes in the context of budget surpluses and so have been unable to justify passing them.

Now, with the pressure not to make too many devastating cuts, it will be interesting to see if the massive deficit prompts lawmakers to turn to taxpayers to make their jobs easier.