I discuss examples of conceptual metaphors collected from both the news media and from policy statements by political figures such as U.S. Vice-president Gore. I discuss the conceptual metaphors and mappings, embodied image schemas, metaphorical inference diagrams, and conceptual blends used in these texts. Using the INTERNET IS A HIGHWAY (INFORMATION HIGHWAY) metaphor system as an example, I show that not every portion of the highway domain maps across to the information domain, and some of the parts that do map across may not map across well. I argue that the conceptual mapping is not purely arbitrary but is constrained by embodied image schemas and by internal coherence with other elements of the conceptual mapping. I examine metaphorical inferences in narratives using several long quotes from Gore's speech. In the United States for example, the Clinton-Gore administration has argued that the U.S. economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s was fueled by the federal commitment to plan and build the interstate highway system, and a similar economic boom would result from a federal commitment to plan and build the information highway. I diagram how each step of this inference is metaphorically mapped from the source domain (transportation highway policy) to the target domain (information infrastructure policy), presenting the metaphorical inferences as parallel knowledge structures. (Tim Rohrer)