He has laid groundwork that will benefit our players and company into the future".
Unless you lay some prior groundwork, that gesture may seem almost as patronizing as an impatient tone of voice – and probably as likely to backfire.
Or must they also furnish the foundations of morality — the ethical groundwork that will allow students to make sense of the world?
Judge Walker laid the factual groundwork that might have allowed him to invoke the tough "strict scrutiny" test to Proposition 8 — a test that most laws flunk.
BUT as local watchdogs were cracking down on Metropolitan, lawmakers on Capitol Hill were laying the groundwork that would allow the firm to sidestep state regulators.
In 1968, he had handled much of the legal groundwork that enabled The Times to go public in January 1969 by selling shares on the American Stock Exchange.
By selling ads that will show up next to digital content, Amazon is laying further groundwork that could enable it to someday sell tablet computers that would compete with Apple and Google Android tablets.
He did much of the groundwork that set up the landmark visit of Hillary Rodham Clinton to Myanmar in December, the first such visit by a U.S. secretary of state since 1955.
"There's groundwork that needs to be done in Texas that simply hasn't been done," Julián Castro, a Democrat and the mayor of San Antonio, told me during an interview on CNN.
This was strikingly so in his involvement in East Timor, and also, of course, in the groundwork that led to the trial of the Libyans for the bombing of the Pan Am 747 over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988.
Nonetheless, many education experts say he will have a strong wind at his back in charting a course -- both because of the mayor's support, and because of the groundwork that is already in place.
