George Osborne, the architect of Britain's austerity policies, has just done an about face (without, of course, admitting it).
Heads usually roll when management executes an about-face of this kind.
The about-face of Morris Chafetz, a doctor who served on the commission that recommended increasing the drinking-age to 21, has also raised eyebrows.
More startling still was the abrupt about-face of the Rev. Rick Warren, the hugely popular megachurch leader whose endorsement last year of Proposition 8, California's same-sex marriage ban, had roiled his appearance at the Obama inaugural.
At the end of the summer, at the annual eagle festival, she and her eagle triumph, and the parade of bigots reappears, pulling an idiotic 180-degree about-face: "Of course it helps that she's a girl!" It doesn't at all, but she can't win with these myopic old fools.
Particularly damaging to Ms. Brown's case, said her lawyer, Reginald McKamie, was the apparent about-face of a passenger, Barbara Shedden, who altered her story on the stand on Wednesday and denied having ever seen Ms. Osteen touch the flight attendant.
The shifts and about-faces of Ken Price's extraordinary career in ceramics are the precedent.
The shifting tone in Congress — most recently and most notably the about-face of Senator Dianne Feinstein on the subject of the NSA — has been matched by a stiffly unshifting tone from the spy agencies themselves.
This, however, would be a stark about-face of U.S. policy.
The biggest about-face of them all: Whitney now says that she never meant that all those defaults would occur over one year, but something that will occur over the "course of the cycle".
The about-face of the Australian entrepreneur who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, is the latest embarrassing controversy for a virtual currency that has become increasingly popular among serious techies and financiers.
