I'm not in GA, but I think I'll probably give him some money once this month's bills are paid and I know what I've got left.
If you really want to know a couple of reasons why, you can read the looong bit below (crossposted on my lame blog).
Synchronicity
If you know me, you know I've been doing a lot of reading lately. Well, if you know me, you know I do a lot of reading all the time. But the reading I've been doing lately has been of the non-fiction type, mostly economics. So I'm walking around the house, half-subconsciously juggling bits and pieces of information in my head, trying to fit Friedman and Galbraith and Keynes et al into a unified gestalt (which description itself I'm shamelessly borrowing from Rifkin, since his description of the "Knowledge Class" in The End of Work fits me almost perfectly)...
Anyway. I was walking around, thinking that government is a means by which we accomplish public goals that are either impossible or much more difficult to accomplish privately, and that the major difference between conservatives and liberals in a government-spending sense is often where we draw that line. And I was thinking about Rifkin's hypothesis that we are headed toward a world where there will be less and less 'productive' (ie, adding to GDP) work to be done. And I was thinking about what should be done about public education, and the knee-jerk reactions on both sides of the debate, and how they're both mostly wrong. And I was thinking about how the hell I'm going to pay for a graduate degree at a decent school without selling my soul to anyone from the 5th circle or below of Hell. Among other things.
What occurred to me then was that one thing we could really use in education and similar areas is something similar to the GI Bill, only in reverse. Something where we tell people, "OK, we'll put you through school, but then you have to be a teacher (or whatever) for X years after you're done getting educated. We'll pay you while you're teaching - it'll be chump change, but it'll be enough to live on - and then we'll cut you loose when your time is up, and you can either keep teaching (maybe with a raise) or go do whatever it is you wanted to do with your life." (A little more like the way the Air Force Academy works, actually). I would jump at that. Hell, I'd turn cartwheels. I've thought about teaching before, but when I'm already looking at who-the-hell-knows long getting whatever degree I decide to get, that 9-month certificate is just one more year of tuition to pay for. Now if only I could come up with a name for it that sounded kinda like 'GI Bill', but was easily recognizable as what it was.
Here's where synchronicity comes in. Through a strange chain of links (I believe a quicklink from plastic to Burnt Orange Report to read about a juicy rumor involving Texas Gov. Rick Perry and his Secretary of State (mental note: must follow up on finding more blogdish on that)...but I digress). On B.O.R. I saw a link to the campaign site of Doug Haines, who's running for the house in Georgia district 12. I've seen Haines' name bandied about quite a bit on dKos, so I moseyed over to check him (and his blog) out. He had a thread going where people could ask him questions about his campaign, and he answered...are you still reading this? wow, you've got staying power...anyway...he seems to be thinking along the same lines, and he has a name for it, too:
I'm working on a proposal that I call the CI (Community Involvement) Bill. Part of this bill will include grants to help pay tuition for people who are going into critical positions within the social infrastructure (public safety, health care, education, and childcare).
That made me like Haines instantly, and alng with his other answers, made me seriously consider giving him some
money, but it also kinda creeped me out, the way that it did the other day when it seemed like everyone, everywhere, was talking about William Jennings Bryan and his 1896 campaign for President on the 16-1 silver resumption platform. (seriously. I now know more about Bryan than I ever wanted, needed or hoped to know, because he came up in at least 3 conversations, 2 blogs and 2 different books by different authors that day. And sort of on a TV show (well, it was Wilson, but that made me say, hey, you know who Wilson's Sec of State was?)).
Sometimes I think that things like this mean the universe is trying to tell me something - but what could it possibly want me to know about a bimetallic monetary standard, the Scopes monkey trial, or investing in the education of people who will keep us alive, healthy, safe and learning?
(oh, and another cool thing about Haines: he wants you to add $0.69 to your donation if you think Rick Santorum, yes I mean Senator Rick Santorum, that's Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, is the greatest threat to democracy in this country. One more time, that's $0.69 for Santorum).