Multiple Washington sources said Wednesday that former FCC Chairman Michael Powell has emerged as the likely successor to NCTA President Kyle McSlarrow, who is joining Comcast in Washington next month. McSlarrow will exit NCTA by the end of this month, with second-in-command James Assey holding the fort until a successor is named, though Assey would be an obvious choice if that choice was to go in-house.Powell is currently chairman of the MKPowell Group and a senior adviser to Providence Equity Partners.

One source called Powell’s succession of McSlarrow “likely,” while another said it could be down to deal points. NCTA would not comment on the search, and Powell was not reachable at press time.

Unlike Republican FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, who proved McSlarrow’s and cable’s nemesis on issues like a la carte and cable pricing and network management, Powell was a deregulatory chairman who focused on marketplace mechanisms to spread broadband via cable, telephone and even power lines.

Powell served as both commissioner and chairman, and before that was chief of staff of the antitrust division at the Justice Department.

He is a graduate of Georgetown Law, William & Mary undergrad, and is on the boards of AOL and Cisco, among others, as well as an adjunct professor at Catholic University.

The White House wants to create a universal identity credential you can carry around on your keychain or in your smartphone that will let you get into virtually any website without having to create new passwords for every transaction, social or fiscal. The great thing is that the information necessary to identify you online would be in one place. The frightening thing is that the information necessary to identify you online would be in one place.

Like the proposed bill from Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) to standardize chargers and cords so that your basement closet does not become the annex of the National Museum of Useless Cell Phone Equipment, there is something really attractive about the idea of not having to create a new login and password for each new transaction or social connection we make on the Web. Logins will only proliferate as the broadband wagon rolls inexorably toward every corner of the nation.

And, as a way to protect kids in their new online social interactions - which, like puberty, appear to be something parents cannot wish or legislate away, even if they want to - it has definite possibilities.

Take this example from the White House last week: “Age Appropriate Access-Antonio, age 13, visits online chat rooms to talk to other students his age. His parents give him permission to get an identity credential, stored on a keychain fob, from his school. The credential verifies his age so that he can visit chat rooms for adolescents, but it does not reveal his birthdate, name or other information. Nor does it inform the school about his online activities. Antonio can speak anonymously, but with confidence that the other participants are his age.”

As a parent, that sure sounds tempting. And it would help with smartphone transactions, and allow small businesses to use the regime instead of having to come up with their own verification systems, which saves them money but could draw fire from the National Association of Independent Verification Systems - if there is such a group - and if there isn’t, there probably will be by the time this ink hits the page.

It also has big online privacy implications, since the White House says it would be a way to control access to that information. But like a Social Security number on steroids, such a key, in the wrong hands, would seem to have frightening implications for all the reasons it would be so convenient and useful.

The Obama administration has just announced the initiative, so there will be plenty of time to Monday-morning quarterback it, but on Friday afternoon, it looked like a big idea that was casting an equally large shadow.

The FCC started adding baseball updates to its ongoing monitoring of the retransmission consent fight between Fox and Cablevision.Two tweets (http://twitter.com/FCC ) at press time Tuesday afternoon attempted to keep Cablevision viewers in the loop on the Phillies/San Frnacisco game while pointing them to a consumer advsory that briefly explained what retrans was, what the implications of the impasse were, and where to go for alternative viewing–over the air or another MVPD like satellite or telco video.

“Baseball fans disappointed about missing game three? (2-0 SF, top 5th) Cablevision-Fox dispute info at http://FCC.gov/consumer” the FCC teeted, followed soon after by “”We’re filling in the baseball void for those without Fox-Cablevision. Matt Cain pitching a beauty. SF up 3-0 http://fcc.gov/consumer.”

Senator John Kerry wants the commission to fill the void by stepping in to mediate the dispute and try to get the TV signals back on the air.

“Ruly Mob,” read one sign, which just about summed up the Jon Stewart/Steven Colbert Rally To Restore Sanity and/or Fear on The Mall Saturday.Yes, there were some pushy and angry people as folks tried to get closer to the stage. But, mostly, it was a lot of people dancing and clapping and displaying their signage on the day before Halloween at what was a three-hour Daily Showbert Report extravapalooza.

A high school teacher from New Jersey said the signs were the best he’d ever seen, and there were a lot of them to see.

Some of my favorites: “Death To Extremism,” “Paranoids for Fear,” and “We have nothing to fear but fear itself…and spiders.” Then there was the middle-aged man who had put his arm around an orange street sign reading “End Road Work” and chanted, what else: “End Road Work!” “End Road work!”

It was that kind of rally.

The sort that National Lampoon or The Onion would not be able to lampoon or Onionize because it was itself a schizophrenic mix of parody and earnestness, and something of a breath mint/candy mint hybrid of political attacks–on Fox and the Tea Party and Glenn Beck–calls for legalizing pot and not eating animals, and poking fun for poking-fun’s sake.

One twentysomething dressed as a pilgrim and carrying an anchor was being earnestly probed by a  news crew. He said he was just having fun,” and when asked about the election, said: “What election?” A friend advised him that had not been the way to get himself on the news.

There was not exactly a sea of costumes, as might have been expected the day before Halloween and after Colbert called on rallygoers to dress as their greatest fear. But there were plenty of bears, penguins,

Muppets, Smurfs, and even a couple dressed in matching tea bag costumes. Interesting “fears” out there.

The rally was heavy on music and mocking and was not so much of a tight ship as a meandering pleasure cruise for its stars and audience. But as that New Jersey high school teacher said, the point was really only to be there and be counted.

Stewart acknowledged as much, asking a couple of time why he and they were all there. “They” being somewhere between the 10 million estimate of Stewart and the “sparse” estimate of one Daily Show correspondent, both being jokes, of course.

The crowd looked to be in the six figures, though. One volunteer volunteered that if the crowd reach 14th street it could be 300,000. It did and I’ll guess it was over 250,000.

In his “brief moment of sincerity” at the end of the show, Stewart said that their presence was all he had been looking for.

He also said said the country was going through hard times, not” end times,” and that there could be animus without being enemies. He said the perpetual “conflictinator” of news punditry and gloom and doom reporting did not create the divide in the country, but it did make it harder to solve.

Stewart called the press the country’s immune system, but said it if overreacts to everything, “we actually gt sicker,” he said.

Journalism got the business end of some more tough analogies.

He said it can be a magnifying glass that illuminates or sets a bunch of ants on fire. And as to

making a mountain out of an anthill, he suggested that “if we amplify everything, we hear nothing.”

Sadly, a teacher who had traveled all the way from Nevada said she couldn’t hear that part of the speech

over the crowd noise.

It was that kind of rally.

In a speech to the Family Online Safety Institute conference in Washington Wednesday, Josh Gottheimer, senior counselor to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski brought a message from his boss, one he said the chairman has repeatedly made: “We need to end the false debate about embracing new technology or protecting our children. We need to do both.”I’m all for hugging the closest iPad, but I also want to make sure we are embracing our kids and their welfare with as much zeal as the coolest new app, maybe even moreso.

According to a text of the speech, Gottheimer was accentuating the positives of life online. Not surprisingly since broadband deployment and adoption is job one for the FCC and you can catch more flies with honey.com. “Behind each click, there is so much that is good,” he said, but stopped short of saying there was also much that was bad, adding only that there was “much that we have to be cautious about.” I would be just as definitive about the downsidse. There is much that is bad, including cyber bullying, child porn, online predators, and invasion of privacy, to name a few. Gottheimer concedes there are “horror stories” about cyber bullying and stalking, but again turns quickly to the positive. “[T]he opportunities of new communications for our kids far exceeds the risks,” he said. I hope he is right.

This is not about picking on Josh, whose speech was even-handedm and even handed me a line I would have used if my daughters had not grown up on me while I was trying to make a living: “What’s scary is that she is probably only nine years away from getting her first cell phone,” he said of his infant daugher. “My only comfort is that she’s thirty years away from her first date.”

I am simly using his speech as yet another platform–OK, soap box–from which to register my concern that the speed of technological change may be outstripping our ability, and even more troublesome our willingness, to think critically about whether being able to do something instantly and easily necessarily makes it better.

Certainly the Web’s digitization of logistics has reduced the space–in distance and time–between need and help, which is surely a good thing. But what are the downsides to always-on, always-there (in digital perpetuity) communications among pre-teens without the governors on their online conduct that time–to mature–and circumspection–hopefully the product of that maturity–would allow for.

Living online via social networks that erase geography and unite common interests may prove to be a great alternative to the back fence and the school playground, or we may want to insure that it does not become a substitute for the real-life versions of avatars.

Now that I have sounded the clarion call of the curmudgeon: “What if, what it what if?, let me add that I essentially live on the computer and have for years. Without it I would probably not have a job, though thanks to it all of us in journalism have to figure out creative ways to keep those jobs.

I’m just saying, to quote the late great Michael Conrad: “Let’s be careful out there.” And let’s treat careful as a virtue, not the dismissible, tar pit-stained-foot-dragging of the old guard.