John Dillon’s Pension Vocabulary for August 4th is A.L.E.C./ Rep. Patti Bellock. Illinois holds the distinction of having the ALEC State Representative of the year: Representative Patricia “Patti” Bellock of the 47th district (Westmont Office). A recent letter of congratulations from Republican House Leader Tom Cross – also a member of ALEC – glowed with the kind of Orwellian political doublespeak that sanitizes the actual undercutting of the medically needy or marginalized with positive parsing.
Wal-Mart is saluting teachers? Nah. It’s just propaganda for one of the latest anti-union reform schemes, the parent trigger law. A TV show featuring Josh Groban. Josh Groban?
Whatever happened to John Pike, the UC Davis cop who peppered sprayed the students who were peacefully protesting while sitting on the ground? Fired. Finally.
Rahm says, “Don’t confuse me with facts.” Many are wondering which for-profit buddies he’s going to hand his early childhood programs over to?
“Synthetic Feces Update” keeps appearing on meeting agendas at the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and it’s not a joke.
The “Overton Window” is not a new kind of low-glare, high-insulation windowpane. Nor is it the title of a paperback thriller like “The Eiger Sanction” or “The Bourne Supremacy.” Identified by Joseph P. Overton of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the Overton Window refers to the boundaries of the limited range of ideas and policies that are acceptable for consideration in politics at any one time. In other words, the Overton Window is the “box” that we are constantly exhorted to think outside of, only to be ignored or punished if we succeed.
The debate about K-12 educational reform in the U.S. is an example of the Overton Window at work. For a generation, almost all of the debate about improving American schools has been limited to minor variations on two themes. First, it is endlessly asserted, American public education is a miserable failure, compared to the educational systems of our major economic rivals in Asia and Europe. Second, the solution to this alleged failure is the privatization and marketization of public education.
Such is the power of the “framing” produced by Overton’s Window that these propositions command broad assent among thoughtful and well-informed Americans, even though the facts do not support them. Michael Lind
Fred Klonsky 
must…shift…overton…window!