Word: jerk
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...after they have been charged. The government has promised to consult on the new law widely and seek consensus on its terms. Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the human-rights group Liberty, often critical of Blair's approach, praises the new government for "resisting party politics or a knee-jerk rush to the statute books." Bob Marshall-Andrews, a Labour M.P. and bleak critic of the Blair Administration, says, "There is a completely different spirit in Parliament, and everyone can feel it. The signs are that we are in for a much more liberal and less authoritarian period of government...
...voters, who are more concerned with their pocketbooks, and constitutional revision has barely figured as an issue in July's election. The violent reaction to Kyuma's relatively mild speech - more of an offense against political correctness than history - is a potent reminder that pacifism remains Japan's knee-jerk reaction to anything related to the military, and that domestic sensitivities trump the realities of geopolitics, where nuclear weapons are an unavoidable reality. Abe wanted to change the game of Japanese politics, but the old rules still apply - and so far, he's losing...
...campaign worked--so well that ABC picked it up as a sitcom for the fall. And the knee-jerk critical snarking began. Of course the show would be bad--it came from a commercial! What's next? scoffed the Philadelphia Daily News. A buddy sitcom for the Mac and PC guys...
...personas of most of today's funny guys could be said to flow from Steve Martin. As a stand-up comic in the '70s, he played the idiot with an utterly unwarranted belief in his coolness, while in his first hit movie, The Jerk, he played ... a jerk. The first type has bloomed in the strutting film personalities of Ferrell, Vaughn, Jack Black, Owen Wilson and many others; the second in Sandler, who teams this summer with another lout, TV's Kevin James, in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Lower on this fast-food chain are Rob Schneider...
...always ask for tap water, no matter how nice the restaurant is. It's my way of telling the waiter that, despite my choice of the $80 tasting menu, I'm not some self-important yuppie jerk. Other than the Saint Emilion and the truffles, I'm keeping it real. Now nice restaurants are coming around to my way of thinking. Alice Waters, citing environmental reasons, banned bottled water at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif. Several other high-end Bay Area spots have also gone tap-only, and soon Del Posto, Mario Batali's expensive Manhattan joint, will join them...