circuitous sentences

The movie Goodfellas offers a great lesson on how to send forth a torrent of words without saying anything. Some politicians obviously have been watching attentively:

"He is one of the very few people who can sit in on anything he wants to sit in on" (Anita Dunn about Robert Gibbs).

"If all you do is get focused on what this does to this, and what this does to this, you will be so paralyzed that you will never make a decision. It's not easy. If you take the long view, you have to take it" (Robert Gibbs).

"To be a competitor, it will have to be able to compete" (Nancy Pelosi on the public option).

"I think if you were to look forward a year, I expect I will be where I am" (David Axelrod).

up and down, back and forth, in and out

“E-Books Explode” (Daily Finance.com) – duck and cover! – and Yahoo News asks if the ipad is “over-hyped,” creating sort of a hyperbolic tautology, not quite inappropriate after all the build-up to the release of this new tablet computer.
Since gadgets sell and "Online Ads Show Signs of Pickup" (The Wall Street Journal) – which one? F 150 or Tacoma? – the economy seems to be on its way up again. Or perhaps not since “Economists broadly agree that the recession probably ended last summer” (Yahoo News). So, the downtime is over – just as likely as not.
While the economy may be up or down, education remains stable with “teachers who neither drag their students down nor pull them ahead” (NYT). Teachers may neither drag students down nor pull them up, neither hold them back nor pull them ahead, but education is at least at an equilibrium, unlike some buildings which, during the April 4th earthquake, were “swaying from Los Angeles to Phoenix to Las Vegas” (Yahoo News), obviously swinging back and forth at an amplitude of more than 200 miles.
Similarly lopsided is Nancy Pelosi's rhetoric. After declaring that "We have to pass the bill, so you can find out what's in it," now that the bill is out, she compares health care reform to “the back of the refrigerator. You see all these wires and the rest. All you need to know is, you open the door. The light goes on. You open this door, you go through a whole different path, in terms of access to quality, affordable health care for all Americans" (KCBS radio, San Francisco). I, for once, open my fridge to take something out and so far did not have to go through whatever terms to access its contents. Although Aristotle called the metaphor “the greatest thing by far,” when the comparison is crooked, it looks more like “bad optics.”

like-minded

NPR’s Robert Smith interviewed “recent graduates,” who share an apartment, about the census. Here is what they had to say:


Mike: Did we get the forms?
Nate: Yeah.
Mike: We did. I didn't see any yet.
Nate: We still get mail from the past 30 people that have lived there [sic]. So it's like who knows if people are getting these.
Smith: Well, actually the census knows. These few blocks around Wythe Avenue and 6th Street have about a 36% return rate.
Nate: I guess it's laziness and like what's the point? When it comes down to it, nobody wants to fill out like another form that's just like getting sent to your house that really relatively has nothing to do with your life. I mean people would do it if they got like five bucks.
Smith: Five bucks?
Nate: Yeah. Or if there was like more than just like a piece of paper that's like you have to do this or you could get in trouble, which no one will get in trouble; that's why they don't do it.