On the face of it, the Europeans have been making good on past promises of help.
At a conference last week, the United Nations reminded governments of past promises left unfulfilled.
Public-interest groups, hoping to hold the Louisianans and others to past promises, are dredging up newsclips in which the lawmakers are quoted as saying they will vote for McCain's bill.
It isn't only Germany's Europe of Rules that is restricting policy choice: Policy makers are also held back by fear of the financial markets and by their past promises, such as that Greece would be the last euro-zone government to restructure its debt.
But that sentiment, maybe polite skepticism is a better way to put it, is commonplace in the tiny coal towns where many of the jobs have disappeared, and whatever is said now is judged alongside the many past promises that help was on the way.
But clearly, the question mark associated with past unkept promises hung in the air over that firmly delivered assertion.
His assessment was that Mr Blair, "like his promises", was past their "use-by date" and that voters would not listen to a man who put "snake oil rather than milk on his cornflakes".
We have huge numbers of doctors who have been very busy delivering a service to patients who have seen in the past that promises around IT systems have not manifested themselves in delivery on the ground.
Well and good, but such promises have, in the past, too rarely been kept.
But whereas the show floor would've been dominated by an abundance of next-gen tablets at shows past, this year promises to be quieter.
The Bangalore-based carrier, which has struggled to pay salaries to employees for the past four months amid promises to do so as recently as April, has defaulted on tax payments and bills to its vendors.
What is important to remember is that we judge the Assad regime by its actions and not by their promises, because their promises have proven so frequently in the past to be empty.
Wherever Mr. Cuomo settles on the issue, there promises to be a stronger effort than in past years to get the legislation to the floor of the Assembly and Senate.
In the past, when Ukraine has broken its economic promises, Mr Kuchma has been able to blame left-wingers.
But in the past decade or so, as other sports followed up on promises to get rid of drug cheats, professional road cycling has lagged behind.
Jetpacks have become something of a pop-culture meme in the past decade, a hipster shorthand for science fiction's unfulfilled promises.
But all were sucked into the same economic abyss of the failed policies of the past -- the same policies, by the way, that Romney promises to repeat as president.
Although many of these promises are vague, they come on the heels of several other, voluntary, reforms over the past year.
Over the past four years, the U.S. has scaled down its presence, ambitions and promises overseas.
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