By Steve Kubby

As a Libertarian, I respect the First Amendment and people’s right to express their opinion, no matter how harsh, especially if I choose to write something and others choose to criticize what I have written. However, I have a serious problem when someone ignores the facts and attacks me personally and that someone carries a badge and a gun.

I find it even more disturbing to find out that a Douglas County sheriff’s deputy and former campaign manager for a newly elected member of the South Lake Tahoe City Council has organized a smear campaign to defeat me in the recent election. Judging from the small number of votes that I lost by, it may be possible that this smear campaign prevented me from winning.

This attack and others by Deputy JT Davis and his alias “Cowboy25” appears to be a part of a smear campaign he organized as campaign manager for his father, Councilman Tom Davis. This smear campaign is every bit as offensive as racial slurs or ethnic attack on me, characterizing me as a lazy stoner in some sort of perpetual haze and a threat to the community.

The knowledge that a Douglas County deputy sheriff believes I am a threat to the community and that I don’t belong in SLT is something that should make anyone uncomfortable and concerned about their safety, especially if that deputy pulls a bona fide California patient over and decides to make legal problems for them. In fact, this action by Deputy Davis underscores the dangers that medical marijuana patients must face each day from the very people who are paid to protect them.

Nevada law enforcement does not respect the legal rights of California medical marijuana patients and it is very easy for a deputy to wreck a medical marijuana patient’s life, just by pulling them over and demanding a blood test. If such a test were to show that I have metabolites from marijuana in my blood, even if those metabolites are a month old, I could be arrested and prosecuted in Nevada. Under such circumstances, the fact that I have a perfect driving record, without any tickets or accidents whatsoever, would mean nothing and I could be convicted under Nevada state law for DUI, despite being cold sober.

Below, is a recent public comment by Douglas County Deputy JT Davis, about an opinion article that I wrote for Lake Tahoe News regarding the dangers to patients of a proposed cultivation ordinance. It does not mention one word about what I have written and is solely a personal attack. Furthermore, it is an attack by a member of law enforcement, using his real name and presumably someone people look up to as an authority figure:

“Kubby must have smoked his usual 12 joints a day before he wrote this article. Everyone is sick and tired of listening to you rant and rave about this issue and it has proven time and time again to be a losing issue for you and your pals. Prop 19 lost and last I checked, you got creamed in the City Council race. You yourself got so caught up in your stump speech, that you admitted you support legalizing marijuana and that Pop 215, was just the starting point to a bigger agenda, trying to make marijuana legal. [sic] Kubby, take your show to some other city, becasue the citizens of Tahoe are soooooooooo tired of you and your pot.”

Several other attacks, under the name of Cowboy25 were also published during my campaign for City Council, nearly all of them starting with the same incriminating sentence, “Kubby must have smoked his usual 12 joints a day before he….” You’d think a member of law enforcement would be more careful than to change his posting to his real name and then continue using the same inflammatory introductory sentence, but Deputy Davis is probably so convinced he is right that he has thrown caution to the wind. As a result, he appears to be engaging in conduct unbecoming an officer of the law.

Judging from my personal contacts with JT Davis during the campaign, I believe that he is probably a dedicated and hardworking deputy.Under other circumstances, JT Davis and I might be good friends. But not today. For now and the immediate future, our lives seem ruled by a misguided and misinformed wall of intolerance that, for lack of a better term, I call the Politics of Pot.

Steve Kubby is a resident of South Lake Tahoe, having run of City Council in November 2010.

Monday Night Writing Workshop: A fun supportive and committed writing group that meets for six Monday nights from 6:30-8pm in downtown Truckee.

Generate new material, explore craft techniques to develop work, provide feedback, learn ways to inspire ourselves to write consistently and playfully, and write a lot.

This workshop will help you develop work in progress as well as create new work. Productive for all levels of experience and any genre. $90.

Next six-week session is Jan. 10-Feb. 14.

For more info and to sign up, contact Karen Terrey at tangledrootswriting@gmail.com or call (530) 386.3901.

Northern Nevada farmers have discovered that hoop houses can extend the growing season and increase profitability for their operations. However, little training has been available locally for this innovative method.

In response, Western Nevada College Specialty Crop Institute will offer a low-cost hoop house construction workshop. The daylong event is Jan. 14 from 9am-5pm at 171 Campbell Lane, at the Yerington Paiute Indian Reservation.

Cost is $35 if registered by Jan. 7 or $45 if registered after Jan. 7.Lunch is included, and seating is limited.

A hoop house. Photo/Provided

The workshop will feature classroom instruction and physical construction of a hoop house, using a popular design developed by Utah State University Extension. The USU hoop house, also known as a high tunnel, is constructed primarily of PVC tubing, precut rebar, greenhouse plastic and 2-by-4s.

Featured speaker is Dan Drost, USU Extension vegetable specialist and a leading researcher/educator on high tunnel production. He co-authored the construction manual for the USU hoop house and has built dozens of hoop houses at workshops in Utah and other western states.

The Yerington Paiute Tribe will host the workshop and provide construction materials for the structure, which will be used as a pilot project to show farmers and residents how hoop houses extend the growing season and protect crops. Cooperative Extension Indian Programs will provide resources and follow-up assistance on hoop house production as needed.

For workshop registration or details, contact Ann Louhela at (775) 351.2551 or email louhelaa@wnc.edu.

By Jessie Marchesseau

In any given hour at Sierra House Elementary School in South Lake Tahoe, half a dozen kids are in and out of the nurse’s office. Illnesses, injuries, bloody noses and burns are among the ailments.

A young girl wearing purple jeans and a bright orange bow in her hair wanders into the office looking right at home. She pulls out a lunch menu and starts perusing the choices for the day. This is Maritza Torres. She is 10 years old and she has diabetes.

Torres, happily sucking on a candy cane, explains how she thinks having diabetes is easy, but she still does not like it.

“I have to get a shot all the time and if I want to play soccer or something, I have to check my blood sugar all the time,” she says.

Everyday Torres and the school nurse decide what she is going to eat for lunch, calculate the carbohydrates, test her blood sugar and administer the proper amount of insulin.

Kelsey Buckley, 8, Makenzie McMillen, 10, and McKenna Brewer, 10, are used to having medical kits with them at all times. Photos/Jessie Marchesseau

This might not seem to take up a great deal of time in the school nurse’s day, but Torres is not alone in this battle. Nine other students in the four other schools within Lake Tahoe Unified School District also suffer from diabetes, and all vie for the nurses’ time.

Having 10 diabetic students in LTUSD is a significant increase from a decade ago when Rand Norberg was the only one.

His mother, Loreen, a second-grade teacher for LTUSD, remembers being “scared to death” when she found out her son had Type I diabetes. He was in third grade.

“At that time, I had so much faith in our school nurses, and just kept saying, ‘they know more than I do,’” she said.

Loreen Norberg refers to the nurses as “a god-send” and credits Margaret McKean, a school nurse for LTUSD, with teaching her some of the most important aspects of helping her son deal with diabetes.

Without the school nurses and staff available to help Rand manage his blood sugar and administer insulin daily, Norberg said she would likely have had to quit her job in order to monitor her son. This is a consequence not uncommon among families with a diabetic child.

Rand, like Maritza Torres, received an insulin injection everyday at lunch and any other time he ate.

“A lot of times it fell in the hands of the school secretary,” Norberg said. “I was fine with that. As long as he got his shot, I didn’t care who did it.”

However, administering insulin shots is now restricted to the school nurse, the child or a relative. This means LTUSD nurses need to be available to assist all 10 diabetic students every day.

McKean says there are too many students with diabetes in different places, and she cannot be in two places at once. The additional care needed for these students prompted the district to hire two additional part-time nurses this fall, bringing the total to two full-time and three part-time nurses.

“I think the school district is really going above and beyond in the budget crunch,” McKean said.

The number of students needing and using school medical services may make it somewhat hard to believe that having a school nurse in California is not all that common. The state does not provide funding for nurses, so it is up to individual districts to decide to have a nurse on staff.

“We’ve made it our priority in our district: our kids with diabetes and our kids with food allergies,” McKean said. “It’s a life or death situation.”

McKean has been a school nurse for 28 years and has seen the number of diabetic students increase greatly in recent years. More and more children are being diagnosed with Type I diabetes, and the medical community has not yet figured out why.

She explained how what is usually in the news is Type II diabetes. It is often caused by being overweight and can be reversed over time. Type I, however, is not a result of weight issues. Type I is what most of the LTUSD students suffer from. It can never be eliminated. They will live with it for the rest of their lives, and it can be deadly if not properly managed.

Susie Brumbach, school nurse for the Douglas County schools at the lake, said she has not seen the same increase LTUSD has. Brumbach said she is aware of one student with Type I diabetes at her schools and has not had a diabetic student at the elementary level in more than 10 years.

LTUSD, however, has not been so fortunate. Seven of the 10 diabetic students are at the elementary or middle school level. Many of them are relatively independent and either wear insulin pumps or administer their own injections, but they still require a nurse’s supervision.

Each of these students has their own manual of sorts in the nurse’s office with all relevant information regarding their condition. There are also diabetes protocols and insulin calculation formulas posted on the walls.

Even though 10-year-old Maritza Torres says having diabetes is easy, Loreen Norberg has a different opinion. She knows the seriousness of the disease and says she wishes the school district would have shown greater concern and hired more nurses before the school year started. She felt so strongly about it that she appeared before the school board at the beginning of the school year to tell them why.

“When somebody has a disability, it needs to be taken care of from day one,” she said. “They hired extra nurses, but not soon enough.”

Her son Rand is 20 now. He graduated from the LTUSD system and went away to college. Norberg said she still worries about him being on his own and dealing with diabetes. But tears come to her eyes when she says how proud she is of him mentoring children who are newly diagnosed with diabetes.

This mix of emotions about being the parent of a diabetic child does not appear to be unique to Loreen Norberg.

When asked how her mom feels about her having diabetes, Maritza responded: “She’s happy that I’m OK, and sad that I have it.”

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By Lynda V. Mapes, Seattle Times

Horse people hope the new year will bring a solution to an old problem: too many horses.

A horse summit planned for the first week of the year is expected to draw to Las Vegas representatives from Northwest tribes, federal agencies and conservation groups, as well as wildlife advocates, and horse people vexed by too many horses with no market to cull the herds.

“Its bad and getting worse,” said Sue Wallis, a Wyoming legislator and member of United Horsemen, a Wyoming-based nonprofit organizing the summit. She backs development of a plant in Wyoming where horses can be slaughtered for human consumption — a solution she says is the humane and ethical solution to the problem.

“We are not just some meat-industry schmucks,” she said of slaughter supporters. “What we need is humane and regulated horse processing in the U.S. where we can control it, and we can set really high standards. We are horse people concerned about the well being of the horse.”

Read the whole story

By Rob Sabo, Northern Nevada Business Weekly

After 21 consecutive months of declining revenues from taxes on hotel occupancy, the Reno-Sparks market saw gains for six of 10 months at the start of this year, leading to optimism that the worst might be over.

The declines in hotel room tax began in March of 2008 and continued through November of 2009. But with many months in 2010 trending up from the same period a year earlier, hoteliers and tourism officials head into the new year measured optimism.

“Hopefully we are past the worst of it and the bottom is behind us,” says Ellen Oppenheimer, president and chief executive officer of the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority. “It appears that we are seeing some ups and downs and a little more general positive findings as we look ahead in the economy.”

Still, the RSCVA planned conservatively for the current fiscal year, Oppenheimer says. Two of the region’s primary markets for tourism — Nevada and California — have the highest and third-highest unemployment rates in the nation.

“Those are key feeder markets for leisure travel to Reno-Tahoe,” Oppenheimer says. “People still want to travel and take getaways, but they are staying fewer nights and trending down in spending. But the good news is that there are still people out there traveling. People feel they are entitled to a getaway or vacation, and when they can afford it and make the time they are going.”

Bill Hughes, director of marketing operations for the Peppermill Resort, Spa Casino, says the property and others in the region appear to see light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. Large-scale upgrades completed in recent years at the Peppermill, such as the Tuscany Tower, new convention space, and an executive boardroom have helped the property draw new convention business and fill rooms, Hughes says.

Read the whole story

By Ray Hagar, Reno Gazette-Journal

As Nevada prepares for Monday’s inauguration of Brian Sandoval as governor, a sense of hope stirs among some state leaders.

They hope Sandoval’s tenure will be marked by cooperation and compromise and not the rancor that existed under the administration of Gov. Jim Gibbons.

“Everybody feels positive,” said Dan Klaich, chancellor of Nevada’s higher education system. “I think everyone has been exhausted by the confrontations over the past four years and wants to give the governor-elect every shot and opportunity to be successful.

“But that doesn’t make the problems go away,” said Klaich, referring to the state’s nation-leading unemployment, foreclosure crisis and a projected $1.1 billion budget deficit that Democrats say could rise to as high as $2.9 billion. “So, while everybody feels strongly about solving the problems, it still means that there are very large problems out there to solve.”

Sandoval said he was pleased to hear about the positive attitude as he prepares to be sworn-in as Nevada’s first Hispanic governor.

“I embrace that,” said Sandoval, 47. “I am glad people feel that way because they are going to get a governor, staff and an administration that is going to wake up every day and think about what they are going to do for the people of this state.”

Monday will be a day Sandoval said he’ll never forget.

It will be the crowning moment of a fast-rising political career that has seen Sandoval go from state assemblyman, Gaming Commission chairman, Nevada attorney general, federal judge and now governor in 16 years. It was just 30 years ago that Sandoval was the student-body president at Bishop Manogue High in Reno.

Read the whole story

Due to the winter weather advisory in effect through 10pm, expect some snow and wind on the slopes. Here is the ski report from Curtis Fong, the Guy from Tahoe.

By Judah Cohen

The earth continues to get warmer, yet it’s feeling a lot colder outside. Over the past few weeks, subzero temperatures in Poland claimed 66 lives; snow arrived in Seattle well before the winter solstice, and fell heavily enough in Minneapolis to make the roof of the Metrodome collapse; and last week blizzards closed Europe’s busiest airports in London and Frankfurt for days, stranding holiday travelers. The snow and record cold have invaded the Eastern United States, with more bad weather predicted.

All of this cold was met with perfect comic timing by the release of a World Meteorological Organization report showing that 2010 will probably be among the three warmest years on record, and 2001 through 2010 the warmest decade on record.

How can we reconcile this? The not-so-obvious short answer is that the overall warming of the atmosphere is actually creating cold-weather extremes. Last winter, too, was exceptionally snowy and cold across the Eastern United States and Eurasia, as were seven of the previous nine winters.

For a more detailed explanation, we must turn our attention to the snow in Siberia.

Annual cycles like El Niño/Southern Oscillation, solar variability and global ocean currents cannot account for recent winter cooling. And though it is well documented that the earth’s frozen areas are in retreat, evidence of thinning Arctic sea ice does not explain why the world’s major cities are having colder winters.

Judah Cohen is the director of seasonal forecasting at an atmospheric and environmental research firm.

Read the whole story

2011 will be the eighth year South Lake Tahoe will have a V-Day celebration.

This year our community has once again been granted the privilege of producing an Eve Ensler production. It’s especially exciting because after a two-year break, local organizers are bringing back “The Vagina Monologues”, after a successful two years of “A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and Prayer”. This community event raises money for local organizations: The South Lake Tahoe Women’s Center, Tahoe Youth & Family Services, and Court Appointed Special Advocates.

The fundraising is important, but even more so is the awareness and message that V-Day brings.

A casting call and volunteer meeting for all men and women interested in participating will be Jan. 7 at 6pm. For those who are interested, call or email nategoddess@yahoo.com or (775) 843.7142 for more information about the meeting location and details. V-Day is a worldwide organization spreading awareness, raising money for local organizations, and fighting violence against women and girls.

V-Day’s three core beliefs are:

Art has the power to reach, transform, and inspire to act.

Empowered women are unstoppable leaders and lasting social and cultural change is spread through their experience.

You cannot end violence against women without looking at the intersection of poverty, racism, the environment and war.

V-Day dreams of a world in which women and girls will be free to thrive, rather then merely survive.