A Congressman Who Can Code Assembly

christo writes "In what appears to be a first, the US House of Representatives now has a Congressman with coding skills. Democratic Representative Bill Foster won a special election this past Saturday in the 14th Congressional District of Illinois. Foster is a physicist who worked at Fermilab for 22 years designing data analysis software for the lab's high energy particle collision detector. In an interview with CNET today, Foster's campaign manager confirmed that the Congressman can write assembly, Fortran and Visual Basic. Will having a tech-savvy congressman change the game at all? Can we expect more rational tech-policy? Already on his first day, Foster provided a tie-breaking vote to pass a major ethics reform bill."

Re:Now maybe...

[calebt3]

Everybody who recognizes it would read it as 'Delete'

Re:This guy is from my state

[initdeep]

His district is made up of large portions of the suburbs of Chicago, and also the area directly around a large government funded laboratory, Fermilab.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/62/IL14_109.gif [wikimedia.org]
How the HELL that equates to the more rural areas of Illinois is amazingly unclear.
Oh, just because he's also got the swath that covers only a few people in a rural area?

not likely.

He was voted in by fermilab employees and liberal democrats in the chicago suburbs.

it's more amazing that Hastert was ever elected in this area than this guy being elected.....

Re:all politics is local

[EricTheGreen]

The first term congressman does not make policy. He will be two years learning the job and lucky to get a committee assignment that is remotely relevant to anything more significant than the coastal defense of Wyoming.

What everyone is missing is that this election seats him only until the next election this fall (he's filling the seat vacated by Dennis Hastert.) He and Jim Oberweis (his Republican opposition) do it all over again for the November election.

Given that legislative activity pretty much drops off the map by summer of an election year, he'll probably be able to nominate a few deserving kids to West Point, march in a few parades, send a few letters out and not much more of consequence.

I do hope he gets elected to the full 2-year term this fall; Oberweis is a perpetual candidate with seemingly very little to offer his electorate beyond regular screeds bashing "tax and spend Democrats" and braying how immigration is slowly dissolving the moral fiber of the Republic...

Re:Assembly language and VB?

[Matrix14]

Fortran has an extremely wide user base in the scientific world, due to its very efficient vector processing abilities.

Re:thats great and all..

[Samah]

I think you mean LOLCODE [lolcode.com]

Re:Cook county uses sequoia voting systems

[Dan Schulz]

Except the 14th district is about 60 miles from Cook County. As someone who isn't in the district in question, but is close enough to have been bombarded with the BS from both sides, I'm not so sure Foster won this election so much as Jim Oberweis lost yet another political race (at last count he's 0 for 4).

That's precisely what happened (United States Senate, Illinois governor, and two House runs - all failed spectactularly - and I for one couldn't be happier for it). After defeating popular (and well respected) State Senator Chris Lauzen in the special primary election for the GOP nod, he changed his cow-pie slinging from attacking his Republican rival to smearing Foster's campaign, which was also taking heat from Foster's fellow Democratic rival John Laesch, who demanded a recount here in Aurora as well as other precients in the 14th District because not all the votes were counted (absentee ballots) and due to the election problems here in Aurora (incomplete ballots, ballots missing candidates and even entire political races, and so forth). (Laesch decided to withdraw his demand the other day.)

The simple fact of the matter is this: Oberweis knows he can't buy his way into office yet he keeps trying to every single time. He wants into office as bad as Microsoft wants to crush Linux and free software (note I mean free both as in "free as in freedom" as well as "free as in beer" here - I don't play favorites on the issue). He's going to be squaring off against Foster again in the November general election, and I for one won't be voting for him. Thankfully a lot of other Illinois voters (especially conservative independents such as myself) feel the exact same way as I do - that he should sell milk and ice cream, not buy his way into public office (the Illinois GOP is even thinking of asking him to step aside as well "for the good of the party" since they're claiming that he cost them the election and their traditional Congressional stronghold).

If I'm right though (and for the sake of the nation, I hope I am), the Illinois GOP is going to have three years to figure out how to get the district back into its hands. Though with the current problems plaguing the Illinois Republican party, I doubt that's going to happen in three years as long as Oberweis keeps wasting his milk money on failed campaign after failed campaign (not to mention the lack of a clear direction and leadership in the state party as well). If Foster ends up doing a good job though, puts his constituents first (like that'll ever happen) and serves to the best of his ability, then I'll consider voting for him (like I said, I'm an independent, not a lackey).

Re:This guy is from my state

[jbn-o]

...a baby killing, tax and spend, socialized medicine advocating, way out on the left wing commie liberal democrat

Don't worry, abortion is a nice wedge issue they can use to distract you from discussing the money issues that affect far more people far more profoundly (including distracting away from corporate crime). It's a good thing that the Republicans are so intent on keeping government small. Imagine how much egg they'd have on their face if they were responsible for creating the Department of Homeland Defense with almost $45B/year budget.

But two issues that really affect Americans in their everyday lives are war and health care. And when it comes to health care the Democrats are just as in favor of the corporatized health care delivery system the US has as the Republicans are. The Democrats of today are running as fast as they can from the universal health care Truman proposed 60 years ago, Americans just can't be allowed to have what Ralph Nader calls "a program with quality and cost controls and an emphasis on prevention [counterpunch.org]". HMOs give to candidates in both parties and that's the way those candidates like it despite that a majority of Americans in CBS and CNN polls say they'd prefer universal health care even if it means higher taxes to pay for it [counterpunch.org] (an oddly supportive notion given that the US spends "twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care, $7,129 per capita. [pnhp.org]"). Kucinich/Conyers' health care plan (HR676 [loc.gov]) hasn't garnered a lot of cosponsors. I guess it will take a few more million Americans doing without health insurance (and thus making health care significantly more costly as well as making chronic care virtually unavailable until disaster strikes) to change that; over 45 million so far and this figure is going up.

When it comes to the continued occupation of Iraq the Democrats won't stop funding it [digitalcitizen.info] out of a shared desire to "control [...] our major economic competitors in the world -- Europe and northeast Asia (China and Japan).". Sabre-rattling with Iran is also fodder for both major political parties. War crimes a plenty, according to AWARE [anti-war.net] (an Illinois-based anti-war group). All this for trillions Americans could have spent on domestic issues [democracynow.org], chiefly those of the poor.

Really, the Democrats and Republicans aren't very far apart on these two major issues of the day (both money issues).

Approval voting

[tepples]

"We didn't know that a Diebold machine could register 68% for one candidate and 100% for another," said their spokesman.

Sure it can. Replace the radio buttons on a ballot with checkboxes and you have approval voting [wikipedia.org]. For one candidate, 68 percent of voters gave thumbs up and 32 percent thumbs down. For another candidate, 100 percent gave thumbs up. If more people approve of another than one, another takes office. Do you need another example?

Not the first, Max Burns was a coder too

[Tangential]

Max Burns was the congresscritter from south georgia for a term or two. Before that he was a professor of information systems at Ga Southern University. He definitely was a coder too.