The classic Empire set-up is a board meeting at which Lucious tells people to do something, only for the door to crash open and there's Cookie, hip cocked, telling them to do the opposite, flame-throwing quippy threats if they demur.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, Tett stepped out of her chair role's impartiality momentarily to demur at that.
Not surprisingly, protesters demur.
If Mr Duhalde accepts, he would at least retain his grip on the local legislature, though his national standing would be reduced.Mr Duhalde might yet demur, and nominate his own wife, Hilda, for the Senate race.
Johnson & Johnson's handling of the Tylenol crisis (when an unidentified attacker poisoned some bottles of the painkiller) is the gold standard of crisis management because the company simply recalled all Tylenol without hesitation or demur.
But as European Union leaders prepared for an emergency summit this week, Mrs Merkel did not demur from Mr Steinmeier's views.
Indeed, Mr Blair gave the unfortunate impression of swallowing without too much demur a new consensus that central banks should concern themselves with jobs as well as inflation and that governments should create new jobs by means of large infrastructure investments.
Their momentum is scaring Labour MPs, who made Mr Brown their leader without demur, into distancing themselves from him or embracing outright defeatism a panicked fickleness that serves only to dig their collective hole deeper.Can Mr Brown reverse the dynamics?
"The reformists are upset", says one conservative, "that we can do things that they cannot".Only on Mr Bush's third demand, that Iran become more pluralistic, are the conservatives likely to demur.
Unfortunately, Germany did not understand that Britain did not have a lien on the whole world, and that (British interests apart) the views of other powers had to be taken into account, so that the desired territorial concessions could not be slipped into Germany's pocket without demur.
You can read this argument any day in the NRA's house magazine, "America's 1st Freedom", and I doubt you could find a Republican politician who would demur.
