Word: jerk
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Roosevelt was enormously popular (hence the fourth term), and later administrations have tried to associate themselves with his early success. "Jerk out every damn little bill you can," President Lyndon Johnson reportedly commanded his strategist Larry O'Brien in 1965. "Put out that propaganda ... that [we've] done more than they did in Roosevelt's hundred days." Propaganda or not, Johnson actually had a very effective 100-day run: after being sworn in as Kennedy's sudden and unexpected successor, he advanced the passage of the Civil Rights Bill, established the Warren Commission to investigate J.F.K.'s assassination...
...swine flu. There hasn't been a flu pandemic for more than a generation, and there hasn't been a truly virulent pandemic since long before the arrival of mass air transit. We're in terra incognito here. Panic would be counterproductive - especially if it results in knee-jerk reactions like closing international borders, which would only complicate the public-health response. But neither should we downplay our very real vulnerabilities. As Napolitano put it: "This will be a marathon, not a sprint." Be prepared...
Talk about this experiment that you did a few years back which demonstrated just how ingrained and knee jerk these beliefs...
...hour into the movie, as you're settling in to the impression that Ronnie is rotten, Hill pulls out the disease card. Not to sound like Michael Savage, but these days every bad attitude is rationalized by being given its own disease. Ronnie, you see, is not a violent jerk; he's suffering from "just a little bipolar disorder," and he has the prescription medication to prove it. The film drops its Taxi Driver reverberations and heads for My Left Foot territory...
...this knee-jerk response ignores the role that faith plays in the lives of many Americans—including intellectuals at institutions such as Notre Dame. While many agnostics might be loath to admit it, intense religiosity is not entirely antithetical to intellectualism. It might be hard for the card-carrying pro-choice Democrat at Harvard to comprehend that a young, bright college student or university scholar would object to Obama as Notre Dame’s commencement speaker. It is nearly impossible for many Ivy League intellects to associate him with anything but progressivism, hope, change, and various other...