Matching Backs To Burdens

Injection
Mitt Romney, who has denounced the nasty personal tone of the presidential campaign, seemed to make a joke about President Obama’s birth certificate while speaking to voters here on Friday, reinjecting the issue of the president’s birthplace into the campaign. (NYT, 8/24/2012)

After months of being accused of being a tax cheat, a felon, and a potential murderer by Harry Reid, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Stephanie Cutter and other assorted Obama surrogates Romney finally pokes back (gently). Well good for him. The Obama campaign will be outraged, but so what. They are the ones who have been running a gutter campaign. And as EVERYONE knows, Obama DID produce his birth certificate......more than ten years after he entered politics.

Unspecified
The documents, obtained and published by Gawker.com, do not specify the stakes held in the funds by the Romney family trusts or by other investors. But they highlight the range and complexity of Mr. Romney’s investments at a time when those very qualities have been the subject of the Obama campaign’s main attacks against him, including demands that Mr. Romney release his tax returns to clear up any suggestion that he might be benefiting financially from legal loopholes or tax shelters. (NYT, 8/23/2012)

God forbid! Romney might be following the law and benefiting from "legal loopholes." Well we certainly hope that he is. After all, such loopholes are...legal.

Exploitation
When thousands of delegates, elected officials and party leaders begin arriving in Tampa, Fla., for the Republican National Convention, hundreds of lobbyists, corporate executives, trade associations and donors will be waiting for them, exploiting legal loopholes — and the fun-house atmosphere — that make each party’s quadrennial conventions a gathering of money and influence unrivaled in politics. (NYT, 8/25/2012)

Here we go again with those Republicans and their "legal loopholes." Such loopholes which have been deemed to be...legal.

Privatize
More than a quarter of the 50 million beneficiaries receive coverage through private Medicare Advantage plans, mostly health maintenance organizations, and Medicare’s drug benefits are delivered exclusively by private insurers, subsidized by the government.

Obama administration officials, lawmakers from both parties and beneficiaries have generally been satisfied with the private plans.

“Medicare Advantage premiums down 7 percent on average, enrollment up 10 percent,” the administration announced in February, and it said the quality of care under Medicare Advantage was improving. (NYT, 8/25/2012)

Romney-Ryan now accepting apologies from Obama-Biden.

Bizarro
Confusing language in the health care reform law has raised the possibility that millions of Americans living on modest incomes may be unable to afford their employers’ family policies and yet fail to qualify for government subsidies to buy their own insurance. This is a bizarre development that undercuts the basic goal of health care reform — to expand the number of insured people and make their coverage affordable. (NYT editorial, 8/25/2012)

A hastily constructed albatross of a bill, not subject to review, passed in a controversial way by a minuscule partisan majority. "We have to pass the bill to find out what is in it." Well, now we know. The Times calls this "a glitch." What do you call it?