Physics comes through at the ballot box:
Stunning many who considered the district west of Chicago reliably Republican territory, Bill Foster, a physicist and Democrat, won a special election on Saturday to fill the Congressional seat that J. Dennis Hastert, the former speaker of the House, held for two decades.
[...]Mr. Foster defeated James D. Oberweis, a dairy company owner, in a contest for the 14th Congressional district, a long swath that runs from the far western suburbs of Chicago nearly to the state's Iowa border. He will fill the remaining months of Mr. Hastert's term.
Mr. Foster won with 53 percent of the vote, while Mr. Oberweis had 47 percent, The Associated Press reported.
"Back in the laboratory, this is what we'd say was a pretty successful experiment," Mr. Foster, a soft-spoken man who makes regular references to his science background, told a crowd of supporters at a banquet hall in Aurora. "You sent a clear message to everyone in Washington. You demanded change, and you are demanding it now."
The "Democrat" part is really more important than the "physicist" part, but it's nice to see that for all the ranting you hear about how anti-science the general public is, Bill Foster can run and win while emphasizing his science credentials. Congratulations to Foster.
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It helps that Oberweis is a narcissicistic nutjob, who's run for every public office in Illinois (including the senate seat Obama now occupies) and lost every time.
His platform is "I hate immigrants." He's desperate for some kind of political power, and he just loves smear tactics and negative ads.
I couldn't vote in this election, but I got to watch all the TV ads, and man, it was almost a parody. Like, if Foster and Oberweis were fictional characters, you'd role your eyes because Foster is so smart and likable, and Oberweis is so creepy and unpleasant, it wouldn't be at all believable.
Can another Physicist Congressman help restore FermiLab funding? Can he help to allow actual scientists to teach in public schools without the expensive and insulting multi-year credentialing process demanded by Emperor Bush II's No Child Left Behind Act?
John Dennis "Denny" Hastert was not quite as stupid as he relentlessly appeared. His official web site mentions (selected and reformatted):
Originally elevated to the Speakership on January 6, 1999, he surpassed Joseph Gurney Cannon as the longest-serving Republican Speaker in history on June 1, 2006. Hastert was reelected to an eleventh term in Congress in the 2006 general election, defeating former United States Navy intelligence analyst John Laesch.
B.A., Wheaton College, Illinois, 1964;
M.Ed., from Northern Illinois University, 1967. Although Hastert was high school "football and wrestling star" and a wrestler at Wheaton College in the 1960s, he was later injured, and as a result never served in Vietnam. After a stint teaching English in Osaka, Japan, in the early 1970s, he moved to Yorkville, 55 miles (89 km) west of Chicago, and took a job as a government and history teacher at Yorkville High School. He also coached wrestling and football, leading the wrestling team to a state title in 1976. His family owns the locally famous fried chicken restaurant "The White Fence Farm" in Bolingbrook, Illinois.
Over at "Not Even Wrong" Peter Woit, who manages the computers for the Math or Physics department, I think, while writing a great blog and a best-selling book of the same title (Not Even Wrong), pretty much answers the question that I asked on this thread, Chad et al:
HEP and Politics News
March 9th, 2008
"In perhaps the most important development for the future of HEP in the US in quite a while, yesterday Bill Foster, an HEP experimentalist who worked on CDF and the Recycler at Fermilab, won a race to fill the congressional seat being vacated by Dennis Hastert. This is the congressional district that includes Fermilab, and one of the main reasons for the disastrous budget cuts affecting Fermilab this year seems to have been the fact that the congressional representative for its district not only was no longer Speaker of the House, but had retired."
"Foster managed to win as a Democrat in a district that has been a safe one for the Republicans, but he will be up for reelection in November, facing the same opponent. The House Democratic leadership will likely be doing whatever it can to support Foster, and this could very well involve changing its stance from cutting Fermilab's budget to restoring it for next year, FY2009. This should hold true at least through the first week of November, although chances of a budget being passed by then don't seem very high."
Hmm, the NYTimes doesn't refer to Ph.D.'s as "Dr." these days? Or only when it's in a political context?
Hmm, I guess they referred to Bill Frist as "Mr. Frist" as well. Odd.
Asad