To the commmunity,

The Tahoe Community Church Food Pantry would like to say thank you for the support from this community.

Thank you to the Kiwanis Club of Lake Tahoe for their very generous donation of $1,000. Thank you to the Girl Scout Troop No. 238 for their donation of non-perishable food. Thank you to the Key Club at George Whittell High School and the parents of the Tahoe Douglas Christian Preschool for the donation of gifts for the children, who might not have received any gifts this Christmas if not for their generosity.

Thank you to the anonymous donors and all those who have generously given cash donations that support the Food Pantry at Tahoe Community Church. You help make it possible for us to help those in need in our community.

Kathy Pavich

By JT Davis

Steve Kubby recently posted an op-ed piece, personally attacking me and my father. I am here to set the record straight once and for all. First, I have never made any threats to Kubby or his safety as a resident of Lake Tahoe. Second, just because I choose to work in a particular profession, I was writing my opinions as a concerned citizen of Lake Tahoe.

Last I checked Lake Tahoe is as much my town as Kubby’s. I was born and raised in the community, own a home, pay taxes and am raising my family in this community.

JT Davis

I am very concerned with what Kubby’s agenda is for Lake Tahoe. I do not want Lake Tahoe becoming the Marijuana Mecca and I am very uncomfortable with my children growing up and believing that getting high, smoking marijuana or engaging in the use of controlled substances is either acceptable or responsible.

I never made any comments regarding my profession and never targeted Kubby legally, yet he decided to write in his piece that he is very concerned because of the particular job that I do. Kubby also stated he was very concerned because the comments I made are accusations and have somehow mounted to a racial or ethical slander. Mr. Kubby, I am not a racist and think it’s very low and disgusting that you made such a claim. I guess the truth and facts hurt when they are not what you want exposed. You claim I made incriminating and inflammatory comments about you smoking 12 joints a day. Yet you admitted in your You Tube video entitled “The Steve Kubby Story Part 1” “there it is, 1.3 grams, the standard Kubby joint.” In addition to that, the article piece stated that you smoke up to one dozen [12] joints each day. You smile and brag about how your favorite strain of marijuana is a special blend from Ecuador.

Like I said I guess using your own facts and words are used against you, it’s too much to handle. But so the readers and you see that I’m not making anything up, and simply using your own words.  The comments are made at 3minutes and 18 seconds into the clip.

Kubby says he supports the First Amendment and doesn’t support personal attacks, yet he has turned around and personally attacked me knowing very little to nothing about who I am or what I do.

Mr. Kubby, discourse is a two-way street and it now seems that you support the First Amendment only when it benefits or paints you in a positive light.

My father and I never slandered or smeared you during the campaign. Last I checked our campaign focused on why Tom (Davis) was the right leader to lead on the City Council, we focused on his credentials, experience and vision for the community. Also you came in seventh or eighth out of 11 candidates, and lost by more than a small number of votes, so your conspiracy theory that we somehow ran a smear campaign against you can’t be further from the truth.

As I recall, it was Steve Kubby that continued to bring the marijuana issue up during the campaign and at the forums and linked every issue to marijuana.

Finally, you really don’t understand the law like you think that you do. First, it is still illegal in all 50 states to drive under the influence of alcohol, Rx drugs, marijuana and other controlled substances. Many of those who are medical marijuana patients feel that their status gives them the right to do what they want and even drive while intoxicated. Three in five DUIs are now marijuana and not alcohol related. Additionally, to prove a DUI, impairment must be observed and proven, simply having aged marijuana metabolites in your system will not prove DUI.

I take my profession very seriously and am very professional in what I do. If you lived in my jurisdiction and I was called to your residence to handle an issue or crime, I would treat you with the respect that all citizens deserve and would be thorough and professional in conducting my job.

Being a marijuana patient doesn’t give anyone the right to think they are above the law. Marijuana is illegal in Nevada and many other states and it is illegal to be in possession and to use the substance. As a libertarian your position should be to protect and respect states’ rights.

Lastly, I will not be censured as you emailed my dad and asked him to censure me. I respect and support the Constitution and the laws of the land, but I will point out and enforce the loopholes that people use to their advantage, or those that people abuse and/or take advantage of.

My dad is both very disappointed and upset regarding your comments. Yet, my dad has some other serious concerns with you but he is willing to sit down and discuss with you personally.

Now I hope the record is set straight.

JT Davis was campaign manager for his father, Tom Davis, who successfully ran for South Lake Tahoe City Council in November 2010.

To the community,

Bread & Broth would like to express its heartfelt gratitude to Heavenly Mountain Resort for recently adopting a Day of Nourishment.

Employees of the resort were on hand last month to help serve more than 120 meals. The generous donation of their time and money is greatly appreciated. Nora Jones, Bread & Broth volunteer coordinator, said the Heavenly team was a “great crew! They were so helpful and willing to do anything and everything asked of them. We really appreciated their positive spirit and smiling faces.”

Karen Foster, Andrew Strain, Russ Mortellaro and Les Marsh help at Bread & Broth. Photo/Provided

Bread & Broth is able to continue its mission of feeding the hungry of South Lake Tahoe in large part because of the generosity of the local community. A $250 sponsorship covers the cost of food and beverages for the approximately 100 people who visit each Monday evening.

To find out how your family or business can adopt a Day of Nourishment, contact Connie Blue at midwest2tahoe@yahoo.com or (530) 544.4945.

Bread & Broth team

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.

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

A new day, a new month, a new year, a new decade. Welcome to 2011.

Resolutions so often fall flat. Either the conviction to make them happen wanes or their unrealistic nature renders them unachievable.

What if we started small with our resolutions for the coming year? Whether you call it paying it forward or random acts of kindness or following the golden rule – let’s start by first being more focused on family and friends.

What would your home life be like if you turned off the television a little more often and played a game or talked to each other? Start with doing it once a month. Fond memories are not created in front of the TV.

Look at how you define family. It doesn’t have to involve blood relations. Families come in many forms.

What would your street or neighborhood be like if you helped each other shovel or blow the driveway? Maybe you would learn that person’s name instead of just waving. Maybe it would all get done faster because of the camaraderie involved instead of the drudgery of doing it alone.

What about a neighborhood block party when it warms up?

What about a few households bonding over a barter club where you do work for each other? Think of the skill set involved with a group compared to doing it solo or as a couple.

Slowly, that sense of community begins to build at the most local of all levels – in your home, on your street.

Imagine this spreading.

What if you take this sense of togetherness and bring it to work? Would the phrase “hostile work environment” disappear? It’s time for bosses to spare an employee to leave his or her desk to shovel the sidewalk or go do it themselves. It’s time to take pride in what buildings look like, what the landscaping looks like, the cleanliness of the parking lot.

It’s time to have a sense of pride in your community. Government is not the answer. People are the answer.

It’s time to look in the mirror to see who is responsible for making South Lake Tahoe, the South Shore, the Lake Tahoe Basin, California, Nevada and the United States of America all better places to live, work and play.

Lake Tahoe News would like to publish your stories in 2011 about how you are making your slice of the world a better place. Maybe what you are doing will trigger others to do the same or come up with a different idea. Send your stories, with your name (yes, it will be published), and phone number (it will not be published) to info@LakeTahoeNews.net.

Happy New Year from Lake Tahoe News.

Publisher’s note: This editorial is from the Dec. 26, 2010, Sacramento Bee.

As it turned out, the recently concluded lame-duck session of Congress wasn’t as lame as many had predicted.

In fact, it turned out to be one of the most productive in years, even decades.

Picking up on one of the messages sent by voters in November, legislators (with some exceptions) put aside the rancor, gamesmanship and obstruction that characterized the last two years. Both parties seemed to recognize their fortunes could be enhanced by finding common ground.

Some pundits had forecast the lame-duck session – so named because it included lawmakers voted out of office – would be a waste of time and an exercise in bloviation. Yet Americans have a right to expect lawmakers to work right up until the end of their terms. That is the contract they signed with voters.

President Barack Obama’s deal with Republicans extending tax cuts and unemployment benefits, in retrospect, proved to be a blast that released the logjam. And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s masterful work kept the bills moving.

Where Republicans had been delaying and blocking everything, bills now made it to the floor – and garnered significant bipartisan support.

Read the whole story

Publisher’s note: This editorial is from the Dec. 29, 2010, Reno Gazette-Journal.

The four-year term of Jim Gibbons as governor of Nevada started quietly and out of the view of the public early on New Year’s Day in 2007 — for security purposes and to ensure that the state wouldn’t be without a chief executive, Gibbons explained.

Perhaps it was a foreshadowing of what was to come. The longtime member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Reno never quite seemed to get comfortable in the Governor’s Mansion and offer the leadership that Nevada needed after his narrow victory over Democrat Dina Titus in 2006.

The transition from working as a policymaker outside of the spotlight in Congress — one of 435 members in the House — to managing one of the fastest growing states in the union can’t be an easy one. And for a man who spent most of his career as a pilot — a skilled, highly disciplined profession in which decisions are only rarely second-guessed — it was particularly difficult to have to deal with the state’s entrenched bureaucracy and undisciplined Legislature.

It often seemed as though, having won the office he’d long sought, he wondered why he ever wanted it.

Read the whole story

By Gary Arant

As people focus their attention on water supply issues and rates, I often hear this question: “Why are there so many water agencies?” As with the issue of “we conserve and you raise rates,” this is a complex issue involving a little geography and history.

Most of the state’s water occurs naturally in northern California. In the mid-1800s, this abundance led communities in Northern and Central California to build local storage and irrigation systems. Meanwhile, the sleepy villages of Los Angeles and San Diego existed off of local intermittent stream flows and groundwater.

Completion of the Union and Southern Pacific Railroads in 1860s made the West Coast accessible to the rest of the nation. Land speculators used Southern California’s greatest resource, its climate, to promote the sale of vast tracts of undeveloped land.

As a result, Los Angeles’ population grew rapidly. In 1908, city fathers authorized the construction of the Owens Valley system to bring water from the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada 233 miles south to L.A.

No sooner had the Owens system been completed in 1913, there was concern that even more imported water would be needed. In 1928, 13 cities formed the Metropolitan Water District to build a 242-mile long aqueduct system to import water from the Colorado River.

As the nation mounted World War II’s Pacific campaign, San Diego County, with its military bases and aircraft industry, was thrust into a critical war role. As a result, from 1940-43 the county’s population doubled to more than 400,000 people.

Gary Arant is general manager of the Valley Center Municipal Water District.

Read the whole story

To the community,

St. Theresa’s 5th Annual Community Christmas Dinner was a heartwarming success thanks to all of the wonderful volunteers who came out to plan, organize, decorate, set-up, shop, cook, greet, serve, entertain and clean up; far too many to name, but you all know who you are. In all, about 200 meals were served on Christmas Day in Grace Hall and Santa Claus passed out gifts and candy canes during a brief stop.

Special thanks to our “secret Santa” who has donated the prime rib for this special dinner each and every year. And thanks to Safeway for selling it at a discount. Mega thanks to Jeanette and her crew at the El Dorado County Jail who provided all of the baked goodies and helped prepare some of the side dishes, too. And thanks to all those who contributed money, food and gifts for the occasion.

Peace and blessings to all who made Christmas a special celebration for many who wouldn’t have otherwise had one. You’re the greatest.

Fondest Regards,

Vicki Raucci Gonzales, Sue Jackson and Tiffany Davis Kostelnik