Contrary to the experience of earlier years, when the N.R.A.'s supporters in Congress kept the firearms agency's budget small, Ms. Ginsburg came up with a way to diffuse Congressional opposition.
Few doubt their will to fight to the end.Syria's opposition is diffuse and still leaderless.
Whether they actually pulled the lever for him or not was less important than the fact that he was able to neutralize and diffuse their past knee jerk opposition to his candidacy.
Now, he laments, the opposition is becoming more diffuse, with liberal protesters trying to elbow the nationalists and communists out of the anti-Putin camp.
From the Israeli perspective, Turkey's equating Iran's nuclear ambitions with Israel's latent program, its seeming embrace of Hamas, its efforts to broker agreements that serve to diffuse pressure on Tehran, and its opposition to international sanctions all demonstrate that Ankara has made a strategic shift toward Israel's avowed enemy.
Furthermore, while the cost of subsidies is spread out among all taxpayers, the benefits are highly concentrated, so, naturally, opposition is generally diluted and diffuse while support is intense.
Both the teachers and workshop leaders worked to come up with solutions to common problems (e.g., students feeling that evolution was against their religious beliefs or parent opposition to teaching evolutionary science) that would work to diffuse students' unease with the subject material and help them to understand it better, while helping the instructor remain in control of the classroom.
That is why, as much as the diffuse dialogue of midterm elections will allow, Democrats will try to make Mr. Paul the face of the opposition.
His attention was diffuse.
The second half rather diffuse.
