It also illustrates how potential candidates willing to be creative with the nation's Rube Goldberg-like campaign finance system can manipulate it to their greatest benefit — and Mr. Romney has been by far the most assertive in this approach among those believed to be weighing bids for the Republican nomination.
Mr. Bush was most assertive in trying to rebut what some strategists in both parties said could be a potent line of attack against him, the charge that he skipped out on some of his National Guard duties not long after Mr. Kerry served heroically in Vietnam.
The price of oil, currently about $45 per barrel, has risen this year, but it is nowhere near the levels of $100 or more it reached when Shell was most assertive in pursuing the Arctic.
Vietnam has fortified several islands it controls in the South China Sea with mobile rocket launchers able to strike Chinese military bases in the region, one of the most assertive moves in decades.
She has been able to do what Thompson has not -- deliver her most assertive performances in the most crucial races.
And the pianist Orrin Evans, from Philadelphia, does some of his most assertive work in a trio format, as on his most recent album, "Flip the Script" (Posi-Tone).
Yet according to a poll of the eight Arctic countries released last month, the most assertive nation in the region when it comes to ownership of resources and border issues is Canada.
The payroll will rise from last season, when it was $108 million, and though the rest of the A.L. East has improved, the Red Sox and the Yankees may be the most assertive teams in the majors.
In the 1960s, Carthy and the Watersons were at the heart of the original English folk revival - so it's not surprising that Eliza, now 29, has become one of the clearest, most assertive voices in promoting, defining and defending the English song tradition.
Louisiana, one of the most assertive players in the subsidy game, wound up covering that outsize piece of the nearly $167 million budget of Mr. Pitt's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" — the state's biggest movie payout to date — when producers for Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers qualified the coming movie, a special-effects drama, under an incentive that has since been tightened.
Addressing Chomsky at the gates of the Miraflores presidential palace, Chávez continued with the love-fest and remarked that his guest was "one of the most assertive intellectuals in the struggle against the elite which governs the United States".
