Author Archives: Robert Tighe

What Ceiling?

As I write this it is May of 2023. A Democrat is president of the United States and the Republican Party has recently gained a narrow majority in the House of Representatives. Unsurprisingly, the odd situation called the debt ceiling … Continue reading

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Executive Risk

In the United States a great deal of the stability of the government is credited to what is commonly referred to as the balance of powers, the system in which each one of the three major functional divisions can put … Continue reading

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Poverty Memes

In the United States we are conflicted about poverty. When referring to poor people there are two over-generalizations that we use. On one side we have what might be called the concept of the “noble poor” such as the hero-protagonists … Continue reading

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Community Aid

The system of local irrigation in New Mexico contains a lengthy network of canals, most of them small and dirt-lined, maintained annually in a system that was developed over many centuries. In a few places there are larger government-maintained diversion … Continue reading

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Pragmatic States

The United States has a lengthy history of pragmatism in both philosophy and action, a long tradition that may have helped the nation grow but may also have inspired, or at least prefigured, the serious political conflicts of the second … Continue reading

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Just a Job

It was a job. It paid slightly above minimum wage and provided no other benefits. Its primary advantage, if you can call it that, was that it required no thought, no active personal involvement or commitment other than the repetitive … Continue reading

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Change Le Même

One of the most common tropes around the beginning of the twenty-first century is a phrase that has been used to describe virtually every major event from the attack on the world trade center to the election of Donald Trump … Continue reading

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CEO Government

In recent decades it has been common for political pundits and some candidates for office to denigrate the very title “politician” and to promote the idea that what the country needs is to populate our government with non-politicians. In truth, … Continue reading

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Ban Books and More

As I write this we are in the midst of a national effort to ban ideas. This isn’t anything new; our politicians and pundits have been involved in what has become known as the “culture wars” for years, and previous … Continue reading

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Real Magic

Arthur had come to the conclusion that even after years of dedicated effort, after all of those hours and hours of lonely practice, staring at himself in front of a mirror, watching attentively to micro-adjust his movements and his statements, … Continue reading

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