The Golden LEAF Foundation announces $15 million in funding to launch a rapid recovery loan program in response to economic losses related to coronavirus. 

For those who live or work in Jackson County, these answers to common questions provided by the county's public information officer might clear some of the muddier waters. 

A part-time Jackson County resident that tested positive for coronavirus (COVID-19) is being monitored by health officials.

As of March 20, North Carolina Environmental Health closes all restaurant seating areas, including outdoor seating, immediately.

A coalition of regional funders has come together to support an Emergency and Disaster Response Fund activated and administered at The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina (CFWNC).

Gov. Roy Cooper has announced that 2-1-1 is the number to call for assistance and resources related to the COVID-19 coronavirus. NC 2-1-1 is an information and referral service, operated by United Way of North Carolina, where families and individuals can obtain free and confidential information on health and human service resources within their community 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Resources are available in most languages.

With the health and safety of patients, families, employees and community in mind, Haywood Regional Medical Center will temporarily suspended all visitation effective at noon today, March 20.

By Bob Scott, Mayor of Franklin

I woke up this morning with the feeling I was in a murky, alternate universe. Things just didn’t seem right. Franklin is on lockdown with the rest of the nation due to a virus labeled Corvid-19.

Concerns about COVID-19 are negatively impacting blood donations, according to The Blood Connection and the American Red Cross.

Whether you’re planning for a hurricane, a blizzard or to be quarantined for a pandemic it doesn’t hurt to have some emergency food supplies on hand that can easily be turned into meals. 

Youth groups in sixth through 12th grade from Haywood and Haywood-adjacent counties are invited to experience a Lake Junaluska Summer Youth Event at a special program-only price for local commuters.

Now in its second year, Critter Camp at the Cashiers-Highlands Humane Society is a win for kids and critters alike.

Prescribed burns are planned for the Pisgah-Nantahala National Forest over the coming months, aiming to create healthier, more diverse and more resilient forests that better support wildlife. 

Nominations are wanted for three seats on the Nongame Wildlife Advisory Committee to the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission. 

The local community rallied to clean up Lake Junaluska during the annual Lake Cleanup Day Saturday, March 7, collecting 184 bags of trash. 

Nantahala Outdoor Center will mark the 2020 season by opening a new Ocoee location complete with a brand new outpost building. 

Is your business prepared for the Coronavirus? Southwestern Community College will be hosting a webinar on that topic from 2-3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 25. Experts from the business continuity, supply chain and healthcare industries will address questions and concerns of small business owners during this Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

To the Editor:

Is it possible Donald Trump and the Republican Party he seems to have successfully hijacked have (together) made corruption the political norm in the United States? I’m asking for a friend.

Joel Stein (Los Angeles Times) asked a similar question. “Why did President Trump pardon a rogue’s gallery of white-collar criminals?” Stein went on to state: “… many people assume he commuted former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s sentence and pardoned junk bond king Michael Milken, tax cheat Bernard Kerik, and others, simply because they were friends or because he owed them a favor.”

In Trump’s world view (which we Americans have witnessed with our own eyes and ears), cheating is neither here nor there, it’s irrelevant and these white-collar crooks he pardoned had been unfairly persecuted for doing what everybody else does, it’s no big deal.

Blagojevich is calling himself a “political prisoner” even though he was caught, among other crimes, demanding that the CEO of a children’s hospital give his campaign $50,000 or see its public funding cut off.

Stein states succinctly in layman’s terms, “it’s clear who benefits from accepting corruption as normal and inevitable — the strongmen trampling democracy around the globe.”

Clearly Donald Trump fits that genre; in fact, it’s not only characteristic of Trump, he excels at it. In Trump’s world (and that of those he surrounds himself), truth is inconsequential, totally unimportant. Conversely Trump seems to take extraordinary pride in his own lies, the number and severity of which are legend.

It was a severe blow to our system of checks and balances that Trump remained in office following his impeachment, dodging justice by disregarding the Constitution and refusing to comply with subpoenas.

Our government’s inability to oversee the executive branch coupled with Trump’s distain for truth and justice has substantially crippled our government and contributed significantly to making corruption normal and acceptable. This is a severe threat to our most fundamental institutions and to the very foundations of our democracy.

By remaining silent, or by supporting Donald Trump in any way, shape or form, we become (either knowingly or unwittingly) accomplices, co-conspirators in the devaluing and ultimate death of America’s most cherished and treasured moral standards and guiding principles. Are you willing to let that happen? God help us.

David L. Snell  

Franklin

To the Editor:

In September 2019, I attended a meeting “Nuclear Disarmament Now: What can we do?” Prior to this meeting, this issue was not at the top of my agenda. However, after hearing the speakers and reviewing the information provided, I became aware of the urgency of taking action and informing others about an impending crisis that impacts us as individuals and our earth. 

In January 2017, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists reset the hands of the Doomsday clock to two minutes to midnight. “The danger cannot be overstated,” said the scientists.  A growing number of military and policy experts including those from the far right are calling for the United States to take concrete steps toward complete nuclear disarmament. They are saying our nuclear arsenal makes us less secure, not more secure.

On July 7, 2017, on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly, 122 nations voted to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The treaty bans the use, threatened use, possession, development, production, testing deployment or transfer of nuclear weapons under international law. It will enter into legal force once 50 nations have signed and ratified it. As of November 2019, 80 nations have signed the treaty and 34 have ratified it. The United States has not signed the treaty.

While many think North Korea (or maybe Iran in view of recent events) may be the most imminent nuclear threat to us, the greatest threat to our security is our nuclear weapons, which we use to threaten others and they use to justify their own nuclear ambitions. 

Recent legislation that has been introduced includes a  resolution “Embracing the Goals and Provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons” (HR 302) calls on the president to align U.S. policy with the goals of the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and make nuclear disarmament the centerpiece of national security policy. 

“Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2019” (HR 669 and SB 200) would require a declaration of war from Congress in order to launch a nuclear first strike. The requirement would not apply in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States or its allies. HR 921 and SB 272 would establish U.S. policy to not use nuclear weapons first.   For more information, contact Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (www.ananuclear.org) or Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (www.orepa.org).

Please contact your legislators in Congress asking whether they support any of the proposed legislation and urge others to do the same. Now is the time; we must stand up to be heard. Our future demands an end to nuclear armament now.  

Mary A. Herr

Cherokee 

All Fontana Regional Library locations in Macon, Jackson, and Swain counties will be closed to the public through March 31, although phone calls will be answered.

The underground issues at a slide location in the Nantahala Gorge are evolving.

A New York resident that tested positive for COVID-19 is being monitored and following isolation orders in Macon County. The test, conducted by the North Carolina State Laboratory of Public Health, is presumptively positive and will be confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Frontier Communications is preparing to file for bankruptcy soon, according to Bloomberg News.

How much added sugar should I be consuming per day?

Prescribed burns are planned for the Pisgah-Nantahala National Forest over the coming months, aiming to create healthier, more diverse and more resilient forests that better support wildlife. 

The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission voted last month to adopt all 44 rule changes for wildlife management, fisheries, game lands and law enforcements presented at public hearings in January, though several rules were modified before adoption. 

Lately, I’ve been writing a lot about birds. I guess I have them on my mind, in part, because the spring migration season is underway. I heard my first Louisiana waterthrush (a warbler) of the year this past Sunday morning. But then again, birds are always on my mind summer, fall, and winter, too. And I’m not alone. Each week that I write about birds, I receive at least 10 emails from readers who share their bird observations and insights with me. Here we go again.     

You often hear that North Carolina’s public universities are the “crown jewel” of the state. While this is indeed true, the deadlock in Raleigh over funding for a new budget continues to hamstring our state’s public institutions. Some of the most urgent needs can be found at Western Carolina University, where the lack of funding is beginning to negatively affect students and faculty.

By Mark Jamison • Guest Columnist | One of the defenses I have heard most often offered for support for Mr. Trump is his defense of unborn life, a term that seems oxymoronic or possibly contradictory but can at least be appreciated when offered with sincere spiritual commitment.

The contradiction, I sense, attaches less to the term itself than in its rather narrow application. This, combined with a worshipful elevation of Mr. Trump to a pedestal his life and words almost certainly don’t support and which seems almost blasphemous when accompanied by tortured explications of scripture and motivated reasoning that stands in for solid theology.

N.C. Department of Transportation crews from three counties worked from sunrise to sunset over four days to clear a rockslide on N.C. 28 about two miles south of U.S. 74 in Swain County.

University of North Carolina System Interim President Bill Roper joined Chancellor Kelli R. Brown to tour the campus of Western Carolina University in Cullowhee on Thursday, March 5,  to highlight the critical needs facing the university as a result of the current state budget stalemate. 

My doctor has said that I need to buy low-sodium or no salt added food. What should I be looking for?

To the Editor:

Imagine a world without your local newspaper. Imagine a world without any newspapers. Where would you get your news about upcoming elections or about what the DOT and county commissioners plan to do with that stretch of road near your house? Would you turn to Facebook? Twitter? Platforms that have been reprimanded repeatedly for allowing the dissemination of false stories meant to manipulate and mislead readers? Speaking of Facebook, founder Mark Zuckerberg made it very clear that he has no intentions of stopping the spread of fake news across his platform. Why should he halt it? He’s making money either way. 

A couple of weeks ago McClatchy Publishers, parent company of the Miami Herald and Kansas City Star announced a filing of chapter 11 bankruptcy. The plan, according to McClatchy’s creditors, is to reorganize in order to offload massive debt totaling $700 million across the 30 newspaper titles they own — including our state’s two largest papers, The Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer. Reorganize is a fancy way of saying trimming the fat, which is a colloquial way of saying putting journalists out of work. 

If you haven’t noticed, this trend of newspapers going belly up, whether shuttering entirely or restructuring at the expense of journalistic integrity, has been a steady occurrence for several years. According to PEN America, 20 percent of all U.S. newspapers have closed since 2004. Dwindling advertising dollars combined with the onslaught of digital takeover by Google and Facebook, has absolutely crushed print media. Today, 225 counties across the U.S. are without a newspaper and of the newspapers still operating, a sizeable number are so broke they can only afford to publish what comes down the wire from the Associated Press. This means no local news for the people living in those communities. 

The thought of not having a local newspaper may not strike others as something worth fretting over, but for me, the thought is terrifying. It should be terrifying for anyone who gives it consideration. Newspaper journalists are the eyes and ears of what’s happening in your community. They are the first on the scene and the ones who literally do the legwork, often thanklessly, of gathering facts and information to share. In fact, 90 percent of the commentary you see on television news and read online comes from the labor and work of newspaper reporters. Your favorite talking heads would be silent bobbing heads if it weren’t for the efforts of journalists. Or worse, your talking heads would simply be spokespersons for the biggest spenders in advertising. 

So why care? Because news matters. An absence of press and the disappearance of local news outlets is an invitation for the growth of misinformation, misunderstanding and propagation of false narratives. It’s handing over the voice of your community to whichever power has the strongest grip (and deepest wallet). The loss of free press is the unraveling of the foundation of our society. As journalist Richard Kluger once said, “Every time a newspaper dies, even a bad one, the country moves a little closer to authoritarianism; when a great one goes, history itself is denied a devoted witness.”

 Amanda Singletary

Waynesville

To the Editor:

At the recent Waynesville Town Board meeting on Feb. 11, there was a motion to support Medicaid expansion under House Bill 655. I appreciated the input of law enforcement, medical professionals, and community members to endorse this expansion. However, I take issue with the work requirements put forth in the bill. 

I am personally able to afford health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, though by a shoestring. I have a $7,000 deductible and, beyond the cost of my premium, I spend around 200 additional dollars each month for mental health care. It is not a stretch for me to imagine that others in our community struggle to access healthcare at all. Haywood County has a 16.6 percent poverty rate, or almost 10,000 people. The wage gap that prevents our neighbors from accessing healthcare is between $6,000 and $16,000. 

Work requirements do not solve the problem of access to healthcare. Sixty percent of those with Medicaid coverage already work, and those who don’t are unable because of disabilities, caregiving, or inability to find full-time work. They are the ones in need of healthcare, in order to be well enough to work in the first place. Not to mention, work requirements cost taxpayers more money, due to the cost of bureaucratic paperwork to enforce the work requirements. 

Haywood County faces a current crisis, linked between the issues of homelessness, mental health, addiction, and poverty. Work requirements will not properly address these issues. I support HB5/SB2 to close the Medicaid coverage gap. I demand that our town council members do the same as we move forward with this issue. 

Abigail Ahlberg, DownHomeNC

Waynesville

A race scheduled for April 4 honoring hometown hero Riley Howell has been postponed due to coronavirus concerns. 

N.C. Department of Transportation officials recently awarded a $450,000 contract to increase the stability of a hill beside U.S. 19/74 in the Nantahala Gorge that has suffered from recent slides.

It was another good year for community journalism in Western North Carolina, and writers from The Smoky Mountain News were a big part of it, taking home more editorial awards — 21 — than any other newspaper in its class. 

By Todd Vinyard • Contributing Writer | Western Carolina University basketball has been using the hashtag #ItsComing on social media this season to describe year two under head coach Mark Prosser. After a Catamount season featuring an improvement of eleven wins from seven to 18, maybe they might want to prepare for #ItsHere.

By Todd Vinyard • Contributing Writer | Alex Gary, a former student-athlete on the Western Carolina University baseball team who is currently serving as senior associate athletics director for development at Oregon State University, is the next director of the Catamount athletics program.

If someone has diabetes should they be buying sugar-free products?

After a month-long closure for tree removal operations, a portion of the Davidson River Campground in the Pisgah National Forest near Brevard reopened on Feb. 22. 

To the Editor:

I want to thank Scott McLeod for his encouragement to all of us in his “From the Publisher” portion of the Friday Xtra digital newsletter last Friday morning. With us not knowing what others are going through, it is a wonderful reminder to be kind and compassionate as well as always treating people like we want to be treated. Thanks again!

Sheriff Greg Christopher

Haywood County Sheriff

To the Editor:

One of the blessings or curses of too many philosophy classes at university is an appreciation for critical thinking skills. Many of these skills are becoming less and less prevalent in modern discourse. Applying those skills to politics is critical to making sound judgements in the voting booth.

Over the last several weeks I have noted political ads in the news and have been using them to help make my voting decisions. Specifically, three ads caught my attention. Two are Republican and one is Democratic. I am registered as unaffiliated. One ad is for the 11th Congressional District race, one ad is for the N.C. House and one ad is for District Court Judge. The first two are objective statements of qualifications for the office and clearly state who paid for the ad.

The third (for District Court judge), I consider to be deficient in that  it lacks objectivity (cherry picked topics with no supporting evidence) some of which to my mine are not really reasons to vote for or against a candidate. Example: “Was Not Always a Lawyer” says nothing as I imagine none of the three candidates was always a lawyer.  It does not carry a “paid for” statement. 

I intend to pay attention to ads that give real information about a candidate, their endorsements, and their positions and not ads that offer little or no helpful information. Such ads only inform my opinion about the candidate running the ad.

Richard Gould

Waynesville

To the Editor:

Just when I thought it was safe to be optimistic about the trajectory of our country, I came up from my crouch and took a double gut punch. That one-two punch left me reeling from what I’d just seen and felt.

When the Senate voted not to allow any witnesses or additional evidence to be admitted during their hurried impeachment proceedings, I dropped a tear of anger and loss. How can one even hope to find the truth and offer transparency without hearing from those directly involved on the front lines? Blocking testimony from the highest-ranking staffers in the field is the most blatant way to insure that the facts are never heard. 

This comes after weeks of the president specifically instructing government employees to ignore congressionally issued subpoenas to testify before recognized bipartisan committees, giving our Constitution a swift right hook, busting the collective lip of truthfulness. 

Even before the trial began, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed that he’d not only be in the President’s corner with the stool and a pep talk between rounds, but also with the assurance that he would fix the fight from the beginning with help from his complicit cohorts in the chamber to hamstring the opponent — transparency. The truth and any unbiased hearing would be buried under the canvas cover along with another piece of our democracy. 

Shock and disbelief fell across many American faces as our long-held faith and belief in the sacred process of fair and equal justice and our national character were thrown into the ropes with a little fancy footwork by those whose job it is to defend those very ideals. This is not how our systems of checks and balances and due process work, this is how thugs, gangs, dictators and mob bosses operate. The only thing missing here was the sound of kneecaps breaking.

I couldn’t watch any of the proceeding that followed, knowing that a complete sham and cover-up was taking place, and all the world had a ring-side seat, our Constitution reduced to bookies bet sheets and birdcage liner. The pre-arranged acquittal followed, not because of our unbiased, equally applied system of government, but in spite of it.

An emboldened lightweight emerged, eager to retaliate against his critics, knowing that his spineless backers in the Senate, including our own Sen. Tom Tillis, were giving him the green light and freeing him from any accountability going forward, regardless of rules, law or sense of decency. 

He celebrated by throwing Purple Heart recipient Lt. Col.Vindman and his fellow soldier brother, along with world-respected US Ambassadors Gordon Sondland (EU) and Marie Yovanovitch (Ukraine) out on their asses for providing information and testimony as requested by investigators, and required by law (incidentally!).

 In the meantime, he disgraces previous recipients of the Medal of Freedom by awarding it to his ass-kissing, bigoted pal Rush Limbaugh with a bare-knuckled jab into American honor. He followed with his appointed lapdog Attorney General William Barr directed to intervene in a presiding judge’s sentence for his long-time dirtbag buddy Roger Stone in yet another flagrant abuse of power, usurping the distinct separation between the judicial and executive branches of government. 

Now, officially above the law and given free rein to re-make our legal system to his benefit, the most recent series of punches that landed on America’s face make a mockery of our institutions and those who sacrificed and died to defend and protect them. 

My 2020 hope is that the nation can gather the collective courage and conviction to get up off the floor and come back swinging with the conjoined political punches of Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Leonard and Muhammed Ali. It’s imperative that voters deliver the needed knock-out blow to this blatant assault on our democracy. We want our nation back.

We don’t want to hear the ref count to three and await our democracy’s final bell sounding.

It’s up to us in November to land that massive punch, sending the dirty fighter and his backers to the locker room defeated, marking a win for America’s future as the real democracy champions.

John Beckman 

Cullowhee

By Steve Wall • Guest Columnist | There are over 200 cases of coronavirus that have appeared in Italy, with three deaths as of Feb. 21. It’s possible patient one had symptoms for five days before seeking help. 

Currently, there are over 500,000 people in North Carolina who have no medical insurance, and several thousand are here in the mountains. Careful health surveys by the Kaiser Family Foundation show that people with no medical insurance delay seeing a medical provider for financial reasons. Is it inconceivable that someone with a highly contagious disease could remain under the radar, and without knowing it, spread the infection, because a visit to the ER and lab test could cost them $300 or more out of pocket.

Nothing represents a community’s diversity better than its public schools. Each school is a cultural melting pot of ethnicities, identities, beliefs and social classes that intersect at a single location. The challenge for educators is ensuring an equitable learning environment for every student that is free of judgment based on perceptions and stereotypes. 

Dogwood Health Trust has awarded more than $3.7 million to a diverse range of 259 nonprofit and government agencies from every county and the Qualla Boundary in Western North Carolina through its Immediate Opportunities and Needs grant program. 

Yes, but the difference isn’t in the nutrition!

To the Editor:

During his State of the Union address to Congress, President Donald Trump repeated more than 20 of his more common lies according to fact checking organizations. To be clear, these are not misstatements. They are flat-out lies that have been debunked.

In my opinion, the most egregious was his contention that he and the Republicans are protecting the coverage for preexisting conditions. While Trump was making that statement his administration was in court suing to eliminate such protections.

Trump claimed that drug prices went down this year. However, there are reports that pharmaceutical companies had actually raised prices on a range of medications. Payments by third party payers did not show a decrease. Only if someone switched from a name brand medication to a generic would you expect a decrease in prices.

Then there is the Trump claim that this is the best economy ever – made more than 250 times before. But by a variety of measures this is false. The rate of growth is the same or maybe now a bit less than under Obama and lower than it was from 1997-1999 under Clinton. Unemployment was lower during Lyndon Johnson’s administration and was also lower in 1953. The gross domestic product rate of increase was more during the 1950s and 1960s than during Trump’s administration.

Trump keeps claiming that his tax cuts were the biggest in history. Reagan’s tax cuts were larger. But to slow the deficits those cuts created, Reagan also raised taxes a number of times. In Trump’s case his tax cut has increased the national debt by trillions of dollars without doing much, if anything, for the economy. The vast majority of the cuts benefited the top 5 percent. This week we find out that to pay for those tax cuts Trump proposes to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Trump claimed that the net worth of the bottom half of wage earners increased 47 percent. According to economists this is total BS. Nothing supports the claim. Even if there was some indication of a percent increase, it is likely to be largely a statistical illusion. Many low-wage earners have no net worth — they live paycheck to paycheck. Anything bigger than zero will look like a big percentage increase.

Trump repeatedly claims that he is investing $2.2 trillion to “rebuild” the military. The reality is that Trump is adding up the budgets for three years. The truth is his annual budgets for the military were no bigger than Obama’s.

 What about those 12,000 factories that Trump claimed America had gained? About 80 percent of those “factories” employ fewer than 6 people. If you run a bicycle shop that puts together custom bicycles, you are a “factory” under Trump’s definition. In reality the manufacturing sector of the economy is in a bit of a recession. Some companies may be starting new production, but others, like Harley Davidson have moved to other countries due to Trump’s trade war tariffs.

 Just about anything Trump claims needs to be considered a lie unless proved otherwise, because the odds are that he is lying. Look at what he actually does, not what he says.

Norman Hoffman

Waynesville