The real work begins the day after the election
By Rob Schofield
This year, those who care about preserving and expanding the common good in North Carolina would do well to treat Wednesday, Nov. 8, as less a day of celebration or mourning and more as the day on which they renew their commitment to studying and articulating a policy agenda that will help to build a modern, moral and progressive state.
What the health care system needs now
Do the rules of our health care system work anymore? That is the question posed in this column two weeks ago.
Front-row Kid dreams of riding once again
“Riding the range once more
Toting my old 44
Where you sleep out every night
Where the only law is right
I’m back in the saddle again.”
— Gene Autry (and others)
Backpacking Fifth Avenue style in Hazel Creek
By Al Smith • Guest Columnist
Hazel Creek Trail in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park is located in the middle of the most extensive roadless area in the eastern United States.
The horrifying beauty of Halloween made simple
“Excuse me, miss, but did you happen to see a princess and a small cow come through here a minute ago?”
The value of endorsements
Come Nov. 7, voters will choose candidates based on many different factors. In almost all cases, those choices will be their own, as they should. But newspaper endorsements continue to serve a useful purpose for voters.
Voters need to look closely at the Good Governance Legion
By Lee Shelton
As the Nov. 7 election date approaches, the “Good Governance Legion” is, again, “banging their noise makers” in Haywood County.
Using development to save mountain farms
Not too long ago there occurred an unlikely meeting of the minds. Sylva developer John Beckman and Whittier farmer William Shelton sat down in the back of Sylva’s Spring Street Café with maps and blueprints to talk about the issue of disappearing farmland in the mountains of Western North Carolina.
A survival guide for direct-to-consumer ads
By Mark Jaben
In the 1970s, a book written about a doctor’s internship experience, The House of God, reached near cult status for its reasonably accurate — if not cynical — portrayal of one intern’s experience surviving medical training.
Finding ways to help the innocent
Over the last two decades, the number of drug-affected infants has been growing. It is estimated that as many as one in 10 babies born in this country has suffered some degree of drug exposure. Due to the short time mothers spent in the hospital after giving birth, many of the infant’s symptoms are less likely to be recognized
— From the state Guardian Ad Litem Web site
When the 30th Judicial District Guardian Ad Litem program holds a workshop this week addressing the issues of substance abuse and social risk factors in infants, chances are good that too few professionals will show up. That’s a shame, because abuse of unborn children remains a major problem in this country, one that gets too little attention.
